Another day, another PR nightmare for Riot Games.<\/p>
This year hasn’t been kind to the League of Legends<\/em> developers, starting with the outright failure<\/a> of the new Clash game mode, and then the unprecedented lambasting<\/a> from players and pros over the design team’s changes to the game this season. More recently, Kotaku ran an expos\u00e9 detailing rampant sexism<\/a> at the company, an issue that easily dwarfs the others in seriousness and potential for long-term harm. Following the Kotaku story, even more stories<\/a> and recollections from former employees have been brought to light to confirm the report, too. And apparently\u2014when it rains, it pours.<\/p>
That’s right, another issue has surfaced, and this one started as a simple, seemingly casual comment dropped by EU LCS on-air personality Andrew “Vedius” Day on his Twitch stream<\/a> earlier this week.<\/p>
So, it turns out, the English crew won’t be onsite until finals, which means they’ll be in LA for most of Worlds. As you can imagine, the community has some opinions, including former LCK caster Christopher “MonteCristo”\u00a0Mykles<\/a> (now a part of Blizzard’s OWL broadcast team), famous League<\/em> personality Travis Gafford<\/a>, Dota 2<\/em> commentator Owen Davies<\/a>, and many, many more.<\/p>
Our opinion? Yeah, it’s bad, but we’re not entirely convinced that it’s that devastating.<\/p>
When Vedius mentioned that it was really expensive to send the entire team to Korea, the automatic gut reaction from the community was that Riot was making budget cuts, and therefore couldn’t send people to Korea. You can see it in tweets<\/a>, on Reddit<\/a>, , by pretty much anyone talking about the situation. Oddly, though, no one actually<\/em> mentioned budget cuts, and it turns out that’s not really what’s happening.<\/p>
Riot’s global head of esports Derrick “FearGorm” Asiedu braved the trenches of Reddit to explain<\/a> what was actually going after the original posts made the rounds. In a very lengthy statement, he essentially said that no, Riot isn’t actually cutting the budget for Worlds this year. Riot might cut the budget in the future, but that’s not what’s happening yet.<\/p>
