Well now I can say I’ve seen everything! It’s not everyday that you see a potentially game breaking glitch occur right in front of your eyes. Its even more rare for something like that to happen on a stage in front of thousands of people, be they live or watching from home, during a major competitive tournament. But that is exactly what happened as Fnatic took on EDG earlier during their second game at Worlds. Fnatic player, Reignover experienced a known, yet incredibly rare bug (a known issue with patch 5.18) in which his Champion, Gragas was unable to use his Q ability. Kotaku had this to say:
The Q key issue first began to show itself 20 minutes into Fnatic and EDG’s second match of the day. The game was just about to heat up after an extended farming phase during which EDG managed to get a single kill off Fnatic. Then Fnatic player Reignover, who was playing as the big fat barrel-chucking League champion Gragas, started having trouble with his “Q” ability. That’s the one that lets Gragas throw his barrels; it’s a central part of his character’s gameplay kit and identity.
The game was put on hold while technical support flooded around Reignover’s desk and tried to troubleshoot the problem and determine if it was a hardware problem (i.e. one with his keyboard) or a software problem (one with the game). After a few minutes, Riot switched its broadcast and back to the analyst desk that’s normally only shown pre and post-game. 20 minutes later, Riot determined it was an “extremely rare” bug that affects Gragas and messes up his barrel-throwing abilities.
Riot further when on to explain that there is in fact a way to fix this glitch. Gragas would regain the ability to use his Q upon death… In a tournament setting, this is obviously not an option and the game was reset. Riot also went on to say that because of this glitch’s extreme rarity, they were NOT going to go out of their way to ban Gragas from future tournament play, as this issue is so rare they don’t foresee it being a problem ever again. Below I have posted the video of this event so you can see it happen live. You can be sure you wont ever see anything like this happen again, so check it out!
