Pictured: Team Liquid’s support Yong-in “CoreJJ” Jo nearly got baited into saying something actually worth hearing by Ovilee May after the team recorded another 2.0 weekend in the LCS. Image via Riot Games.
After nearly a decade of competitive League of Legends post-match interviews, and thirteen splits since 2013, LCS players have locked in a script that will allegedly “offend as few people as possible”.
The confirmation comes just weeks after Matthew “Akaadian” Higginbotham went to media sources to express his despair that a joke with his Twitch chat had gone viral across social media.
“Don’t get me wrong, I definitely still think we’re going to smurf soon, but all these peasants who have taken it out of context really bugs me,” the Team SoloMid jungler revealed to Fireball Esports.
“I thought we only had to stick to the script when speaking to Ovilee after our wins, but now I can’t even say things to my dozen viewers? I revealed what I did to Grig’s hand earlier that same stream and no one batted an eye.”
Emailed to all players as a sensitive information dossier, the Perfect Post-Match Script details what phrases to use in victory and defeat, and outlines how to squirm out of the harder questions like “how do you guys feel about the win today?”.
One of Fireball Esports’ volunteer full-time investigative reporters acquired the 207 page document soon after release, and can also reveal phrases like “I played better”, “giga-inted into us” and “It’s just Sneaky, he always loses lane” have all been banned for LCS players.
As well as the above phrases, which can be applied to every regular season match, comments like “Froggen is about five years past his prime”, “We stomped them because Arrow tucks his shirt into his slacks” and even “I preferred Svenskeren when he was fat” were also added.
Although plans for the script had been in the pipeline for sometime, LCS Players Association president Darshan “Darshan” Upadhyaya revealed they had to ramp up implementation after the now-titled “peasants fiasco”.
“We knew something had to be done after they got Rivington up on the cast with some huge battle-axe miming out Matt’s Twitch joke,” Darshan said. “There’s apparently a lot of people that watch Riot’s official cast, and if there’s one thing the Players Association can’t tolerate it’s our fans thinking we have major personalities.”
Darshan also confirmed this is the only thing the association has been working on since its foundation in mid-2018.
“We don’t really have anything else to worry about in regards to players in the league, so we just buried our heads in this,” he added.
Soon after the release of the Player Association’s Perfect Post-Match Script, Europe’s league operations lead Maximilian Peter Schmidt released a statement condemning the document.
“We made a whole video based around Atilla and Upset yelling at each other after we found them on the sound stage already ten minutes into the trash talk,” Schmidt said. “Bad manners in pre-game build up is as much apart of Europe as tiebreakers or loving best of twos.”
Fireball Esports has confirmed since that released statement that Riot Games is pressuring LEC to implement the same rules.
This stance from the game developer follows similar incidents like filtering out Indiana “Froskurinn” Black swearing on LEC’s weekly podcast EUphoria, despite the fact using the phrase ‘Fiddlesticks’ clearly reveals what word she actually used.
The Perfect Post-Match Script is currently pending Riot Games approval.
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