Leaguepedia’s Dade Award is far from a prestigious accolade to win. The community award is usually given to a player who came into a League of Legends World Championship with huge expectations only to fail spectacularly.
This year, it’s sparked controversy. And as a result, the site has removed Søren “Bjergsen” Bjerg, Park “Ruler” Jae-hyuk, and Jang “Nuguri” Ha-gwon from the Dade Award page.
The award is named after Samsung Ozone’s Bae “dade” Eo-jin, who entered Worlds in season three with a huge amount of hype, only to drop out of the tournament in the group stage.
From 2013 to 2016, the Dade Award was given out by Duncan “Thorin” Shields and Christopher “MonteCristo” Mykles on their talk show, Summoning Insight. After 2016, however, the award was apparently given out by a contributor of the website who “wanted a page documenting the Dade Award,” and was given the green light by Rheingold River, the manager of the wiki.
After Nuguri was given the award this year, many people criticized Leaguepedia and said that the choices were ill-advised and no one even knew who was giving out the award in the first place. Additionally, many people thought that the award had lost its true meaning.
This year, for example, Nuguri was knocked out of Worlds along with DAMWON Gaming after losing to G2 Esports in the tournament’s quarterfinals. Before Worlds, he was hyped up quite a bit by casters and analysts, with some people calling him a top-three top laner at the tournament.
Although Nuguri ended up having a poor showing at Worlds, it wasn’t even close to the same level of disappointment as Dade in 2013. Similarly, the Dade Award was given to Ruler in 2018. His performance with Gen.G wasn’t that bad either and it became a point of contention with the community as well.
In response, River posted a statement, saying that the content was a mistake and that it wasn’t representative of the wiki as a whole.
“Not everyone wanted to have the page period, “River said. “And literally no one intended to have us ‘award’ it. The page’s author legitimately believed that he was writing up general community consensus on the matter, and I greenlit it because I believed the same thing. Clearly, this was a mistake, and we’ve taken action to correct it.”
As of now, the page will no longer be updated and the wiki won’t be giving out any awards to players. But the page will stay up because “the award has had a large presence in the scene over the years, and it would be disingenuous to pretend it never existed.”
Published: Oct 29, 2019 02:35 pm