League of Legends developer Riot Games has always cited “competitive integrity” when making official statements about the game’s competitive scene. Yet its most recent move seems to fly in the face of that concept.
Recently reworked champion Gangplank had been disabled in-game after another champion, Miss Fortune, killed him as part of a lore event. Gangplank is currently unavailable for use in ranked, normal, and even custom games on the live client.
Time of death seems to be July 29, 23:17 according to a post on the Riot support forums.
The champion isn’t really dead and gone, of course. Eventually he’ll be re-enabled for use in the game, though it’s not clear when. The problem is that Gangplank is still available in competitive matches—at least according to Denial Esports top laner Mike “Wickd” Petersen, who claims to have spoken to Challenger Series officials.
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The decision to allow for his use after temporarily removing him from the game raises a lot of questions, the main one perhaps being how this fits into the theme of competitive integrity, as Petersen notes at the end of his post. The move would be similar to Valve disabling a map in Counter-Strike only to allow for it’s use in competitive play, or making a Dota hero unavailable outside of tournaments.
Petersen and his teammates will face off against Dignitas.EU, while Mousesports and Gamers2 will also go head-to-head in the European Challenger Series playoffs starting Aug 4. Whether Gangplank will be resurrected by then is unclear. But either way, disabling the champion for the being certainly throws a curveball for the teams involved, as none of them will be able to practice with, or against, a champion that recently underwent an extensive rework.
The lore event is part of a new initiative on Riot’s part to reinvigorate the game’s in-game history and flesh out some of its characters. The current event, Battle of the Bilgewater, is similar to a previous events, “The battle of the Freljord,” in which three champions—Ashe, Lissandra, and Sejuani—battled it out to become “Queen of the Freljord.” In-game, this meant that if both teams contained one of the three champions, a quest would be activated to kill the opposite champion.
So far—in addition to killing off Gangplank—Battle of the Bilgewater has introduced a new game mode, Black Market Brawlers, alongside various new champion and ward skins.
Image via Riot Games
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