Why are the LCK’s LoL matches being prerecorded? Reported issues explained

After a tough set of games that ended up being postponed, the LCK has opted to privately host its League of Legends matches for the remainder of its sixth week in 2024.

This outcome was decided on after a recent match during the 2024 LCK Spring Split. But now, many different questions are being posed by the league’s supporters, including what happened and what the next steps are.

Here are all of the details we know about the LCK’s recent move to prerecorded matches.

What caused the LCK to prerecord its LoL matches?

On Feb. 28, T1 and FearX were scheduled to play in a best-of-three series during the sixth week of the 2024 LCK Spring Split. During the match, however, players began to experience heavy latency issues that made it nearly impossible to play the game at a high level.

Despite several pauses to restore stability to the LAN network, officials were forced to postpone the game while they investigated. They discovered that the league’s network was compromised due to a DDoS attack, which is an issue that has been running rampant in the Korean League community and the general gaming scene.

These DDoS attacks also affected matches on Feb. 25, causing players to play and sit on stage for hours due to several pauses. To avoid such issues, the league has decided to record the rest of the competition offline and stream the recorded footage for the rest of the week while it bolsters its security and methods against such attacks.

What is a DDoS attack?

A distributed denial-of-service attack is a malicious attempt to flood a server with traffic so its services are rendered unusable for real users in the process. The attacker sends multiple bots to a website or online service, launches multiple requests, and causes the website’s server or network to become overwhelmed.

Think of it like a highway that is suddenly flooded with AI-powered vehicles. Since the highway is filled up with vehicles, a traffic jam ensues, preventing any of the real users from driving through the highway to their necessary destination. It’s also difficult to ascertain which traffic is legitimate and which traffic is being caused by the bots.

When will the LCK return to live games?

The LCK simply announced on Feb. 28 that it will use prerecorded matches for “the remainder of this week.” Based on the current LCK schedule, this week of games will end on Sunday, March 3 and the action will resume on Wednesday, March 6. Thus, March 6 could be a target date for the LCK’s return to live gameplay, but that’s unconfirmed at this time.