Controversial rule puts a damper on Legends of Runeterra Twitch Rivals tournament

The first-ever Legends of Runeterra Twitch Rivals tournament is in the books, but it didn’t exactly go off without a hitch. The drama surrounding the tournament involves the decision to include a match timer rule, which basically ensures that any given match doesn’t go much longer than 50 minutes. Matches used a best-of-three format, and if they didn’t conclude within 50 minutes, each player was able to take three more turns. If a winner still isn’t decided, the match ends in a draw and tiebreakers then decide who gets to advance to the next round.

The rule is meant to keep things moving, but after today, many are left wondering whether the changes will be made next time around.

In the second Swiss round, Miguel “MegaMogwai” Guerrero found himself up against fellow Runeterra streamer, Sean “swimstrim” Huguenard. Being well aware of the time limit, Mogwai started to grow frustrated with swim roping almost every turn as the match went on. As it would turn out, the match ended up in a draw due to the aforementioned 50 minute time limit. The problem, however, was that Mogwai had the last game in the bag, so he would’ve won and advanced to the top bracket if it wasn’t for the rule.

“At that point, I literally can’t lose the game,” Mogwai said. “I love my boy swim, I love em’. Great guy. But goddamn, dude, don’t take like 40 minutes every turn, dude. Jesus Christ,” the clearly heated Mogwai uttered.

As time moved on, Mogwai would cool off and put the blame on the rule itself.

“Nothing against swim, he’s not doing anything wrong. He’s playing within the rules. He takes his time, but I just really hope that they take into account the time limit.”

A big issue people have with the rule is that the timer is shared between both participants, which leads to unfair situations where one player can take up more time than the other. This dynamic led many to suggest that swim was purposely roping turns, but swim denied these claims.

In the end, Mogwai may have gotten over it, but the damage was already done. The hashtag “#JusticeForMogwai” littered the chat in the TwitchRivals channel, as viewers voiced their frustration with the outcome. Mogwai would eventually go on to win the bottom bracket, taking home $5,000 in the process, but he described the feeling as “bittersweet.”

https://twitter.com/RiotUmbrage/status/1261069646934884353

There’s some good news in light of all this, however. Andrew Yip, Game Director for Legends of Runeterra, says that they’re “already talkin about how to improve,” in a tweet responding to Mogwai.

It’s good to see that Riot has already responded to the issue, but it’s unfortunate that something like this has to happen in the first place. At the end of the day, this was only the first Twitch Rivals tournament for Legends of Runeterra, and hopefully, things will get ironed out in the future.