At the start off 2023 Riot Korea added some drastic new rules to their server, causing a multitude of players to get banned. This was done to protect the servers in-game integrity, but will it help?
The unthinkable happened on stream not too long ago. One of the most well-known top laners in the world, Kang "TheShy" Seung-lok, was streaming when he got kicked off his account and wasn't able to log in anymore. He scrambled on-camera to figure out what had happened, but to no avail and he ended up stopping the stream early.
As it turned out, TheShy did not read up on the newest rules that Riot Korea had implemented on the Korean solo queue server and was therefore banned, even as a Korean native.
Riot Korea Released New Rules For Korean Server
Last year, a multitude of high elo players and pro players let out their frustration on the state of solo queue. According to them, foreign players (a lot of whom were given accounts by Riot themselves) did nothing but int and grief, making solo queue even more unbearable.
This got so bad that even Faker, who is probably the most griefed player in the world, spoke out, saying that it's impossible to play. The Korean server is counted as one of the best in the world, with some of the best gameplay, which is why Chinese and Japanese pro players often choose to play on the Korean server instead of their own.
But now, foreign players with accounts rented out by Riot will be banned on the Korean server, unless the players are in the country specifically for a bootcamp, during which they will be given an account from Riot Korea.
This new rule went into effect early in January 2023, and seems to be getting enforced, with players getting banned. Looking at the account of TheShy on OP.GG we can see that it's been removed and has no games played on it.
Whether this will improve the state of solo queue on the Korean Server is yet to be seen, but this seems to be the reason why Chinese players might be getting their own form of Champions Queue soon as revealed by EDG jungler JieJie in a stream a few weeks back.
