League of Legends’ very own bug hunter, Vandril, has been busy this year discovering bugs during competition at Worlds 2022. Now, he’s discovered that Top Esports likely lost against GAM due to a bug.
Top Esports was a heavily favored going into their group. They took JDG to five games during the Summer Playoffs and showed just how strong they can be when they’re playing at their best.
However, they went 1-2 in their first three games. And a loss to GAM locked them out of contention for Worlds 2022 despite the fact that they beat Rogue and DRX, the two teams that made it out of the group.
Now, after some investigation from Vandril, it’s been discovered that a bug with the item Maw of Malmortius likely caused Top Esports to lose their match to GAM Esports.
Top Esports were possibly eliminated because of an in-game bug
Worlds 2022 has been riddled with bugs. Orianna was disabled for a short period due to a visual bug with her ultimate, something that Vandril also publicized before she was disabled pending a patch to fix the issue.
Now, Maw of Malmortius not working properly looks to have cost Top Esports their Worlds 2022 run. This team had an incredible resurgence, but it wasn’t enough to keep them in competition due to their loss at the hand of GAM Esports.
The ending of this game was an absolute nail-biter, with GAM’s Nexus surviving with a sliver of HP. Kiaya made the hero play to stall Top Esports by himself, and Levi’s damage from the Karthus ult gave GAM just enough strength to turn around the fight.
However, Lucian had an item that shields from magic damage called Maw of Malmortius. The item’s passive had its cooldown popped but didn’t shield him from any damage.
While there’s no guarantee that Top Esports would have won this game if Lucian, Vandril said it was “very likely” that Top Esports would have had just enough damage to win.
He went on to show what Maw’s passive shield working properly against Karthus should have looked like, and how much damage Lucian should have taken. That combined with the Omnivamp granted when Maw of Malmortius’ passive shield pops would have done a lot to keep JackeyLove alive.
Top Esports’ players were incredibly saddened by the fact that they dropped out of the tournament, with their support player, Mark, saying that he was probably “going to retire” after their loss.
While there’s no guarantee that Top Esports would have won the tiebreaker to make it into the Quarterfinals, they never had the chance to prove it. There’s no guarantee that they would have won if the item worked properly, either, but we’ll likely never know.
Riot have yet to comment on the matter.