LoL team can’t pay player and gets banned, finds Riot “hypocritical”

A team from Thailand have been banned from League of Legends for allegedly not paying their players for over a year. Now the team has made its statement and is putting the whole thing in a different light.

What kind of team is that? It’s about the Thai team MEGA Esports, which also took part in this year’s LoL Worlds. There it was the only team to use Pantheon in the preliminary round before it was banned 100%.

MEGA Esports previously won the 2019 Spring Split of the League SEA Tour (LST) with prize money of $30,000.

No payment for players

What’s going on? However, Riot has now taken action against the team. CEO Arnold Tandra will not be allowed to participate in any Riot tournaments until 2022. Riot’s official statement says:

Mr Tandra will not be allowed to compete with any team in any region, position or role. He will be eligible again after a formal review in 2022.

Why the ban? The reason for this is that according to Riot, the payment of the team members is supposed to have failed – for the whole year 2019. Mega Esports said it was true that the players had not been paid. However, it was not an entire year. Also, there are other factors to consider.

Elsewhere someone had more luck: 200,000 players stood up for a coach in League of Legends.

Riot probably doesn’t pay either

That’s what MEGA Esports says: The team has posted an explanation on Facebook. It says that the players were only paid for a few months, not a whole year. There have also been bonus payments for players making it into the Worlds.

But the team is also accusing Riot of not being able to make the payments himself. In the Mid-Season Invitationals (MSI), MEGA Esports finished tenth and earned $12,500 in prize money.

However, the team is still waiting for the money – and that’s “twice as long” as the delay in paying the players.

Problems in the whole region

Is Riot retiring from Southeast Asia? MEGA Esports also criticises Riot for not taking enough care of teams and tournaments in Southeast Asia (SEA):

-Price pools would shrink
-Domestic League Seasons would be shortened or disappear completely
-Tournaments developed back to pure online events

All this would lead to teams in Southeast Asia no longer being able to finance themselves in the “traditional” way. They depend on content creation, sponsors and donations from the community to pay players.

MEGA Esports has also tried to offset the decline in revenues by including streams and content creation in contracts. Unfortunately, none of their players meets the requirements.

No payment possible: With all these criteria, it is financially impossible for MEGA Esports to keep the team at all. Riot’s behaviour strongly condemns the team:

Riot’s answer was not to try to work with our organisation or find ways to help our players, but to throw us out of the league without further ado.

It’s no wonder that the larger teams from Southeast Asia don’t have a League of Legends squad and we find it hypocritical that this decision [the penalty] comes while our team hasn’t even received the prize money for the MSI.