Win Trading Allegations Cast Shadow Over Epic TFT Worlds Final

The Teamfight Tactics Set 13 Competitive season has come to a close as North American player Joseph “Dishsoap” Goldsmith made history by becoming only the second player to win more than one world championship after winning the Into the Arcane Tactictians Crown. 

But despite Dishsoap cementing themselves into the conversation of greatest TFT player of all time, Dishsoap’s win unfortunately isn’t the story of the event. Controversy has tainted the weekend after an alleged win trading incident occurred and the outcome of the investigation has split the scene apart. 

Here is an in-depth breakdown of the alleged “wintrading” incident that happened over the weekend at the TFT Into the Arcane Tacticians Crown.

It’s game five of the Top 16 semi-finals where everything is on the line for the remaining players. After this game, the top eight point earners will qualify for the Top 8 Grand Finals and will compete for a $150,000 first-place prize and the title of World’s best TFT player. Every single placement counts for these players as the Top 8 cut-off is brutal.

Cao “Shitouren” Liang is playing the Pit Fighter reroll composition that relies on the dual three-star one-cost carries of Draven and mainly Violet. The player was specifically all in on this composition due to the augment they had selected “No Scout No Pivot” which states that Units can no longer be benched or sold after fighting in a player combat. After each player’s combat, units that fought gain permanent bonus stats. This means that the Violet the player had on their board was locked to the board but is also very powerful as the unit has been scaling the entire game. The average player could acknowledge that Violet is the player’s strongest carry option.

Unfortunately, Shitouren’s writing is on the wall. Even though this game is down to the final four players, Shitourenn’s tournament is essentially over, as they do not and cannot gain enough points to qualify for the final top 8 lobby. However, with three players in the lobby, all on their last lives, including Shiterouen, there is one player whose tournament is directly on the line heading into stage 6-3. Li “LiLuo” Guangcan needs at least a third-place finish to get themselves into the Top 8

While Shitouren didn’t queue in LiLuo in Stage 6-3, he decided to remove all the items from their scaling three-star Violet and instead put them on a Vi two-star, creating a significantly weaker board. The result of the ensuing fight was that Senderien lost the round decisively. LiLuo also lost their round, but since Shitouren’s was worse, Liluo was able to eke out one higher placement. This barely qualified them into Top 8. If Shitouren had won that round or just had a closer loss, LiLuo would not have been able to qualify. 

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After the game, viewers started to flood social media with the clip of the controversial play and soon came a tsunami of comments calling for Riot Games to review the situation and “do the right thing” by punishing Shitouren and pushing North American representative Prestivent into the Top 8 over Liluo. Prestivent finished 9th in the standings due to losing the points tiebreaker to Liluo. After a few hours, Riot Games did make an official statement. 

Riot made an official statement hours after the evidence was presented to them. In the official statement, Riot Games stated they did extensive research into the situation, including interviewing Shitouren. After what they claim to be a careful consideration, they concluded that while the play was sub-par, there wasn’t any substantial evidence claiming malicious intent. 

They listed a couple of considerations they used in their decision. The first being “Platform Familiarty” as one of the complaints against Shitouren was that they qualified and primarily play in Fight for the Golden Spatula, the Chinese mobile platform for TFT and that their play on the desktop version for the World Championship explains their lackluster gameplay execution.

The second consideration they talk about is Strategic Adjustments in a Losing Position. In this section, Riot outlines that going into the pivotal round against LiLuo that Shitouren was on a six-round losing streak and that its not uncommon to make a desperate change in strategy at that point in the game in order to try to win a round. 

The third consideration was Game Mechanics and External Factors. This section reiterates the unfamiliarity on playing on a Desktop computer and playing on high ping which explains the slow movement of items. This section also talks about a graphical error that falsely displayed a completed item on Shitouren item bench, a point people made explaining the malicious intent of win trading. 

The fourth consideration was Consistent and Corroborated Testimony. This section talks about the interview Riot had with Shitouren, and after the interview, the team concluded that Shiterouren provided “clear and internally consistent explanations for his decisions.” And that not once were contradictions or irregularities in his story suggested malicious intent. 

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After Riot’s official statement, social media has been ablaze with many calling for Riot to reconsider. Many prominent players have called out Riot’s decision for being a “joke” or citing that its due to favoritism of China as they believe Tencent owning Riot Games influenced the decision of no wrongdoing. 

One of the scene’s most prominent voices Dan “Frodan” Chou posted a short video that he believes Riot made a huge mistake and that a decision like this breaks “trust” between the developer and the player base. He goes on to say that this decision will have a lasting effect as he believes that the trust between the player base and Riot may never be reconciled. 

Despite not being a part of the Esports team at Riot, the Lead Designer of TFT, Stephen “Mortdog” Mortimer commented on the situation Sunday morning by saying that while he thinks the plays made by Sunderian are suspect, he stands by the decision made by the team as he cited two principles he lives by which one of them is known as Hanlons Razor which states that things should not be attributed to Malice that can be explained by stupidity. Essentially, the player who made the mistakes was honest in his attempts to turn an unwinnable game around even though the play in retrospect was incorrect. 

The other principle Mortdog talks about is Ocam’s Razor which states that in any situation the simplest explanation is the correct one. In this particular case instead of believing that this was an elaborate win-trading scheme, the plays made were made by a player whose nerves got to them on the world stage. 

Mortdog noted that he doesn’t intend to change people’s minds on the matter and that many people have made up what they believe already . Some people disagreed with Mortdog’s analysis including Michael “k3soju” Zhang who in Mortdog’s live stream early Sunday morning said that the player made it to Worlds and making these kinds of mistakes would be expected from an Emerald level player but not someone playing for a spot in the world championship finals. 

Other figures from top players to commentators have also weighed in largely expressing their disagreement with Riot’s ruling.

There has been no further update from Riot as the time of the publication of this article.