League of Legends' fiercest pro purge yet: two players issued with lifetime bans
Over the last few months Riot have been cleaning house of the more odious members of the League of Legends' esports scene. Pro players IWillDominate , enVision and Linak have all been squashed beneath Riot's banhammer for "persistent toxic behaviour" while playing the game.
Those bans were for specific accounts, and disqualified each player from league play for a year. Today, Riot have gone further, issuing unprecedented lifetime bans to two members of Team Solo Mebdi. A third member of the team has also received the now standard one year suspension, meaning Solo Mebdi are disqualified from the upcoming LCS EU Qualifiers, due to be held this weekend. Naturally, given the severity of the punishment, the affected players' behaviour was extreme to say the least.
Khaled Abusagr (“StunnedandSlayed”) was reported in 18% of his total matches, with 54% of those reports being for "Offensive Language, Verbal Abuse, and Negative Attitude." However, the LoL Tribunal also looked at his previous accounts, including the "notorious" DarkwinJax. According to the tribunal, "The DarkwinJax account established the highest harassment score ever recorded on the EU West server. No player, before or since, has matched this degree of negative behavior."
In game, Abusagr has been recorded threatening physical harassment, including towards a Riot employee, and his previous accounts have a history of racist and anti-semitic behaviour. "DarkwinJax was reported more than 1,000 times during a 375-game period (Feb-Apr 2012)."
Nicolaj Jensen (“Veigodx”) has three previous tribunal judgements against him, including as recently as January 9th. Once again, however, it seems that its Jensen's past accounts that have damned him. "On multiple occasions, he has publicly and unapologetically admitted to engaging in a series of DDOS attacks against high-Elo players."
Both have been issued with lifetime bans, meaning that any future accounts created by either player will be permabanned on sight.
Also banned was Simon Näslund ("Rayt3ch"). The tribunal's judgement states that, "Rayt3ch's current harassment score is among the worst 0.01% of all European accounts. Only one player in 10,000 sinks to this level of harassment." He is barred from entering any LCS event for one year.
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Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.