Due to COVID-19 related constrains and deadlines for LPL Summer, the representative will have to participate in the event from their team facilities or in LPL’s Shanghai.
The 2022 Mid-Season Invitational begins on May 10 in Busan, with teams from all around the world, including the LPL, competing in the first international League of Legends tournament of 2022.
However, not every team will be allowed to participate from the BEXCO exhibition venue in Busan. Due to ongoing travel restrictions and the summer split deadline, the region’s representative would have been unable to compete at the international event and return to China in time for the start of the LPL Summer on June 9. This is due to the three-week quarantine period mandated upon arrival into China.
Riot said on April 21 that the representative will not be attending MSI in person in order to allow them to compete. They will instead play from their team’s facilities or the LPL’s Shanghai venue, with remote access to the MSI competition servers.
The issue of ping is one of the most important aspects of remote play. When playing on a localized tournament server, as is the case for the majority of international League events, latency is essentially non-existent, with the average tournament ping hovering around 9-10.
Connecting remotely to a Korean server from Shanghai, on the other hand, would result in significantly greater latency for the LPL’s representative. And in a game like League, where decisions are made in milliseconds, providing equal latency is critical to maintaining competitive integrity.
Riot has revealed that, in order to match the ping of the Chinese representative playing remotely, they would artificially inflate the ping of all teams playing on LAN during the competition.
This implies that the ping for these matches will be roughly 35, which, while not ideal, is a bearable degree of delay that most players will be familiar to from playing in their region’s solo queue.
Riot is not the first company to utilize artificial ping inflation to safeguard the integrity of remote gaming. LPL teams competed in the 2020 Mid-Season Cup on servers in Korea, since the competition was pushed online due to the worldwide health crisis. Ping was also intentionally raised to even the playing field during that tournament, with only minor concerns observed.
The LPL’s representative at MSI 2022 is still unknown. Top Esports and Royal Never Give Up will compete for the opportunity to represent their area worldwide in the LPL Spring finals on April 23.
This season’s MSI will be the third straight edition of the event that has been directly influenced in some way by the epidemic. Teams from Vietnam’s VCS were unable to compete in the event last season, and MSI was canceled entirely the year before.
The Mid-Season Invitational in 2022 is set to begin on May 10. Aside from the LPL, three other leagues have yet to choose a representative: the VCS, Brazil’s CBLOL, and North America’s LCS.