What do you do when all the news seems bad?
In the spirit of my continuing "Sports Gone Insane" series about football, I report on an e-sports incident -- a high-level professional computer-gamer incident which has clouded the beginning of one of the highest-profile events in computer gaming: The Season 4 (Fourth Annual) League of Legends World Championships.
Dennis Johnsen of Denmark is a member of European qualifiers SK Gaming for the sixteen-team tournament. His team and seven others have group play this weekend in Taiwan.
Earlier this week (Monday), Johnsen was witnessed playing the game on a Taiwanese server in which he used a racist nickname, not to be repeated here.
This was the last of several such incidents Johnsen has been observed as having, and League of Legends creator/sanctioning body Riot Games had officially warned Johnsen of his conduct as late as the summer season in Europe in July.
After the incident this week, Johnsen was banned from the first half of the group phase (3 matches -- for which the team had to use it's substitute, who was clearly not ready and the team got routed in it's first match) and Johnsen fined $2,500.
To wit I say... WHAT A JOKE.
If this were anybody but a world-professional player, Johnsen would've been banned by the in-game administrators from continuing to play on any level.
Additionally, my understanding of the situation is that these professional players are actually considered employees of Riot Games.
So why was Johnsen not sent home, with perhaps his entire team behind him?
If this had been a normal-level player, he would've been instantaneously banned by the lower-level game administrators on the given servers.
The Show Must Go On...
No comments:
Post a Comment