Today’s matchup between G2 Esports and Excel will take place online, according to Maximilian Peter Schmidt, Riot’s European head of esports for League of Legends. Excel may have to play a tiebreaker against Astralis later in the day, and the LEC wants to “ensure an equal playing field for both teams.”
Due to the logistics of the LEC’s “partial return to the studio,” it was “not feasible to delay this decision” until the LEC knew if a tiebreaker between Excel and Astralis would be necessary, according to Schmidt. The LEC informed the affected teams earlier this week.
Players returned to the LEC studio in July for week five of the Summer Split, when the league adopted a model that would host the first, third, and fifth game of each week in the studio. The rest of the matches, however, would take place online.
The partial return aims to “bring back players in a safe way” that is in line with local regulations, according to an official post. The LEC Studio doesn’t have the capacity to accommodate all ten teams simultaneously and still uphold social distancing, so the league slotted in remote games between each matchup to “properly prepare the studio for arriving and departing teams.”
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