Last night, it was announced by Riot Games that two North American League Championship Series teams, Renegades and Team Impulse, along with a North American Challenger squad, Team Dragon Knights, would all be kicked from playing in the upcoming summer split due to serious violations. While Impulse was reprimanded for failing to pay its players on time, Renegades and TDK were punished for their alleged relationship with former owner Chris Badawi and a one-sided trade between the two teams at the close of the roster movement deadline. Editor's Picks In Retrospect: Post-Groups MSI Power Rankings

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All three teams were given a death penalty, creating one of the most interesting stories in recent esports memory. A trio of teams who were playing in the North American promotional tournament only a few weeks ago -- Renegades and Impulse advancing to the summer LCS -- are now forbidden from entering Riot-sanctioned tournaments. It's a decision from Riot that won't only affect the teams themselves, but the players as well, as they now have to wait and see if the new owner that buys the LCS spot will even want to use the same players.

While this is a major story that will only grow larger as the days move along and more news reveals itself from all sides, today I want to discuss something that needs to be addressed. With all eyes on the NA LCS, the death penalties, and the subsequent new organizations who'll be moving into the league, the glaring issue to me is the level below the LCS -- the minor league, the Challenger circuit.

Over the past few years we've seen the Challenger scene evolve (or some would say, devolve). Once a place for amateur teams and talent to fight their way to the world of professionals, we've now reached an awkward point where it's essentially a breeding ground for organizations to farm money from qualifying for the LCS and then selling the spot -- or teams using it to essentially have a sister team while also looking towards making money on the side if the team advances to the LCS.

Currently, we have the rumored 10-man Cloud9 lineup that will be split into two squads, with one playing in the NA LCS and the other playing in the minor leagues. The 'minor' team is rumored to include the likes of the former MVP from two seasons ago, Lee "Rush" Yoon-jae, and one of the best in-game leaders in the game's history, Hai "Hai" Lam.

For C9, it's a genius gambit. It'll have two strong lineups practicing together, both playing in separate leagues, and biding time until Rush and expected top laner Jung "Impact" Eon-yeong are considered North American residents at the start of 2017. Due to how stacked the proposed C9 Challenger team is, it'll also have the added benefit of most likely gaining a spot in the LCS for the spring split of 2017, allowing the organization to make some money from a deal for a place at the table.

Honestly, I applaud Cloud9 for this move. Organizations aren't allowed to have "sister teams," so why not exploit the system it has in place and abuse it to the fullest extent? The roster lock for the teams also wasn't until the final two weeks of the split, so you know what that means? C9 can switch back players, tinkering with the starting lineups and making sure it has the best five players on the Rift for the LCS team come playoff and Worlds qualification time. The ability to trade out players from the main league to the minor league so late into the season makes deciding which players go on which side easy. If Player A you chose for the main team doesn't work out, you have until -- if Riot keeps the same roster lock timeline -- the final few games to make an ultimate choice before everything freezes. The evaluation process of the combination of teams will be even better this split with the NA LCS moving to a best-of-three format.

Cloud9 heads to the main stage during the NA LCS Spring 2016 Playoffs. Provided by Riot Games

The switching of players constantly between the major and minor leagues is exactly one of the reasons why Renegades and TDK got the death penalty. Team Dragon Knights traded two of its best players, the Korean duo of Shin "Seraph" Wu-Yeong and Noh "Ninja" Geon-woo, to the last place Renegades for struggling mid laner Alexey "Alex Ich" Ichetovkin and top laners Cuong "Flaresz" Ta and Oleksii "RF Legendary" Kuziuta, along with support Lawrence "Trance" Amador. It was a trade that made little sense for TDK talent-wise on paper. It turned TDK from a Korean-communicating team to a mixed language roster. It also put star Korean import Oh "Ohq" Gyu-min into an awkward position of going from a team he could be comfortable in to a hybrid speaking starting five.

A main staple of the LCS the past couple of seasons has been the constant substitutions of Challenger players on major league teams. When Echo Fox had visa issues early in the season, the team was primarily made up of Ember members for a few weeks. Worst of all, these Challenger players weren't even locked into playing with a single team. For almost the entire season until the incredibly late roster movement deadline, Challenger players in the NA CS could hop to whichever LCS team wanted them that weekend. We saw Seraph play extensively on Impulse, Team Dragon Knights, and finally Renegades during the spring seasons.

This isn't like loaning a player during a professional soccer season, where a player plays on another team to get playing experience for a year or more while still being under contract with his former team. The last season of NA LCS was chaos with all the minor league players jumping around from squad to squad, muddying the lines between the premier league and the semi-pro.

The main issue with Challenger is that there needs to be a hard line in the sand. Either you let there be actual sister teams again and allow the likes of Samsung White and Blue to rise again, or you disallow teams to have minor league squads and force teams to simply have 10-man rosters.

If that sounds unfair to the substitute players on the large 10-man roster teams, you can move to the system China currently uses and Korea attempted in 2015. You can have three different leagues running at the same time:

The NA LCS (premier league)

The NA CS (minor league for teams striving to be promoted)

The NA Reserve League

"If the minor league wants to be interesting and cater to an audience, there needs to be actual excitement when watching the games. You want to feel a connection to the teams in Challenger, and separating the rosters between the top league and minor league would go a long way in doing that."

If you make it so LCS teams have to have designated substitutes before the season and stop them from plucking players from the NA CS, teams will have dedicated bench players that can play in the reserve league. If a team wants to try out a new roster and doesn't feel like showing it in the LCS, it can attempt it in the Reserve League. It'll make it so the main teams can tinker as much as they want without messing up the minor league.

My idea would be that when the LCS starts, the rosters between LCS and CS are locked. A member from a Challenger team can't fill-in for a LCS team -- that player is in Challenger, and his main focus is winning in that league and getting promoted. For the LCS teams, it can move players freely from its own roster in the LCS and Reserve league, and there is always the option of attempting to make a trade with another LCS team before a trade deadline.

Instead of week eight being the cutoff date for trades, I'd probably move it back to the sixth week. Up until the sixth week of the LCS, teams can trade players and contracts in the main league from everyone on the roster. Have someone from Riot act as commissioner when it comes to trades, and make sure while trades don't need to be even, there is no unfair play between the two squads swapping players.

Right now, the Challenger Series doesn't feel like its own league. It comes off as the place where LCS teams randomly take players from every other team. If the minor league wants to be interesting and cater to an audience, there needs to be actual excitement when watching the games. You want to feel a connection to the teams in Challenger, and separating the rosters between the top league and minor league would go a long way in doing that.

Personally, I loved the sister team format. The "B-teams" of NA LCS teams have given us the likes of Trevor "Stixxay" Hayes and Joshua "Dardoch" Hartnett, who've gone from minor league players to stars on their organization's main LCS roster. But if we're going to have these types of teams, then let's not have any half measures. If LCS teams can have, for all intents and purposes, sister teams, then let Korean teams have them as well. Let China have them. Let everyone, if they want, have a sister team to practice with and work hard against.

I don't want to see 10-man LCS rosters get halved into LCS/CS teams, traded around a bunch, and then see a CS team sell its spot to a new owner when it eventually qualifies for the main league. If we're going to have these type of situations with uber Challenger teams working alongside LCS teams, then just allow Cloud9 to have two teams in the NA LCS. It's better than having two to three new owners and teams entering the league every split.

Riot, it's time to make the Challenger scene relevant again. If you're really against sister teams, then after 2016, don't allow LCS teams to play in the minor league. Create a reserve league like China and Korea did, and let the Challenger scene be a place for upcoming organizations to break into the scene without just walking in and throwing down a ton of cash. It might be fun now to watch all these big names come into the space and create super teams off the bat, but after a while, it's just going to become tired and stale.

Ironically enough, out of all the new teams that entered the NA LCS this past spring, the only one to make it through the Challenger scene and not buy its spot in the competition was the Renegades. Now, five months later, it's gone.

And if Riot doesn't fix the Challenger circuit quickly, any interest of the NACS will be gone as well.