Akshan, the latest champion to grace the Rift, will be disabled for Worlds 2021, Riot’s European head of esports Maximilian Peter Schmidt revealed today. This decision comes a couple of days after Schmidt confirmed the champion would be disabled for the upcoming 2021 LEC Summer Split playoffs.
Teams had the chance to vote on whether Akshan would be disabled in the playoffs, but the majority voted against his inclusion, even though the champion would supposedly be available for Worlds 2021. In today’s update, however, Schmidt said that Akshan will also sit out of Worlds.
The reasoning for this change was that the limited competitive exposure made balancing the champion difficult for the Gameplay team. Riot had an old rule disabling new champions in competitive play to avoid those situations, where a champion could be unbalanced in pro play despite having a bad solo queue performance, for instance. This would create a bad scenario for professional teams, when they’d have to use a ban or first pick the champion if they overperformed compared to their counterparts.
Akshan made his debut on July 22 and has already gone through two hotfixes since due to his abysmal solo queue performance. The first patch launched just one day after his release, while the second one landed earlier this week. Though these hotfixes show that the champion could use some more tuning before he becomes a threat in solo queue, competitive players could still find nearly unimaginable ways to use the champion and create a situation where he becomes a pick or ban, forcing teams to waste one ban by default if they can’t play with it due to limited competitive exposure.
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