Both Taliyah and Karthus were not permitted to run Smite during today’s LCK games, thanks to enormous, game-breaking bugs that Riot believes stem from these two champions and Smite.
This is significant because it shuts down two extremely popular strategies in the current meta-game of competitive play–Taliyah jungle and Karthus gold funneling.
There were two major disruptions to blame for this rule, and they occurred in different regions. First, in the NA LCS on Saturday, the League of Legends game server crashed in the middle of a showdown between Clutch Gaming and Echo Fox, causing all 10 players to be kicked from the game simultaneously.
Riot was unable to use Chronobreak, a tool used to rewind games to the moments before big issues occur, to fix this issue. Rather than issue a rematch between the two teams, Echo Fox was awarded an automatic victory due to Clutch not having a “reasonable chance” to come back and win.
Then, in today’s LCK match between KT Rolster and KINGZONE DragonX, another bug caused an extremely long 50-minute pause, but Riot was able to use Chronobreak to resolve the problem. Taliyah was cited as the culprit, and although she was enabled for the remainder of that game, she was no longer allowed to run Smite for today’s games.
Smite being run on these two champions was extremely rare prior to this split, so it’s reasonable that even massive bugs slipped through the cracks on both of them. Riot hasn’t stated whether or not Taliyah and Karthus’ Smite will come back for week two of the LCS, but it’s safe to say that it won’t as long as the bug persists.
Published: Jun 19, 2018 11:28 am