In my high school, there was a law called the Becca Bill. This law was in place to prevent kids from skipping school. While generally, I think this law is necessary to prevent kids from going down a path that would most likely do irreversible damage to a student’s career and life, I had two primary qualms with this law as I stood in the courtroom, defending my own case and shooing away my public defender; the first being that I had a GPA of around 3.7. If I had lower grades, I could see the reasoning, that my studies were slipping because I was missing out on a number of school days and logically, to bring my grades up all I would need to do is attend school more, but that wasn’t quite the case for me. Secondly, and the most crucial part, was that I felt singled-out. I knew plenty of other kids which dodged this bill with far more skipped days of class and with lower grades, but I was on the chopping block, thought to be made an example of. There was a consistency problem in determining which kids would be punished and those who would be let free.

There are rules in place that must be followed, with certain criteria that must be met in order for these rules to be put in action. Rules are there so that we as a society can establish a consistency factor when making judgement about particular subjects and also for the populace to understand what is acceptable and unacceptable. The match between NA LCS teams Clutch Gaming and Echo Fox during Summer Split 2018 disregarded such criteria surrounding their rules.

In Riot’s rulebook, rule set 13.1 states that there are multiple criteria in the determination that one team cannot avoid defeat to a degree of reasonable certainty. Now, I know there are multiple people stating that the situation is about the lesser of two evils, that one team is going to feel as though they got the short end of the stick, but my problem is with the semantics of the rulebook.

If a referee is allowed to disregard criteria put in place, then why is it there in the first place? Imagine if that’s how the law worked, that you meet all criteria for making a U-turn, but the police can still fine you $200 because it’s up to their discretion, regardless of the criteria and circumstances in making that U-turn. Would you feel cheated? I think many would answer yes to that.

Clutch Gaming were not at a 33% gold deficit, the turret difference wasn’t more than 7 (it was 7 exactly), the difference in inhibitors wasn’t more than 2; Clutch Gaming failed to meet a single piece of criteria in order to forfeit the match, but it all boils down to the clause, “League officials may, but are not required to, use any or all of the following criteria in the determination that one team cannot avoid defeat to a degree of reasonable certainty”.

With Clutch Gaming losing out on 1 games of 18, with albeit a very slim chance of winning, this game might come back to haunt them later on in the season, with chances of getting into playoffs getting slimmer by the game as they close out the season. Meanwhile, the Giants Gaming vs Vitality in the EU LCS Spring Split was a remake, with similar conditions, yet none of them being met through the criteria stated within the rulebook. Where is the consistency in ruling?

The point of the argument is not that Clutch Gaming had a good chance of winning the game, nor is it that Echo Fox should be forced to remake the game, but the diction used within the ruleset is poor and abandons all sensibility with investing power into a legal document. Clarity and having a logical criteria path is important, but we can’t simply throw that out the window and supplement that through the eye test, because that results in situations such as this, where EU and NA get different rulings to very similar circumstances.