Yesterday, a post popped up on the subreddit for League of Legends complaining about a somewhat unfun and toxic strategy that a team of 5 used for the off and on game mode known as Ascension.
The game mode is similar to the game mode in many FPS titles such as Call of Duty’s Capture the Flag about capturing objectives which give your team points except that it has MOBA elements in it such as a boss that gives a buff. The more points your team has the closer you are to victory.
The points in Ascension are only earned throughout kills and shrines which you have to collect like the flags you collect in FPS’s. If the player collecting the points from the shrine gets damaged, the collecting is immediately canceled along with the points. Also, in this game mode, you can only get back to the shop once you die.
So what the banned team did was take tanks and buy Bami’s Cinder which has a passive that deals a tiny amount of magic damage to the people close to the player. They all ran through the map locating all three shrines and canceled anyone that tried to collect points which resulted in them dying and getting more tank items while the enemy team was getting gold from the kills they couldn’t use due to them not dying.
Once they gathered enough items, the team became unkillable and just roamed around the map canceling which ended up in frustrating the enemy team that surrendered after almost an entire hour of the match. Just to remind you, the average Ascension game is approximately 15-20 minutes.
Riot Games mistakenly decided to ban these players as intentional dying isn’t allowed in their policy. But, soon they realized that these players were winning these games and that it isn’t their fault as the game mode shouldn’t allow this kind of gameplay. This isn’t the first time League of Legends had an intentional dying strategy that was helping people win games(Support Smite Singed/Roaming Support Nunu).
Now that they realized their mistake, the players are getting a justified unban. Riot Games have stated that they are trying to figure out how to dismantle this strategy so people don’t get forced into 1 hour Ascension games. If you have an idea or concept that might help Riot Games figure this out be sure to join the discussion on the Reddit post.
