Riot Games postpones cvMax ban after community backlash

Riot Games has decided to postpone the competitive ruling on Griffin’s former League of Legends coach Kim “cvMax” Dae-ho, Inven Global has reported.

After having decided to indefinitely ban cvMax from the League of Legends Champions Korea due to accusations of player abuse, Riot is pressing pause on the ban while a new investigation is conducted. The information came just a short time after DragonX signed cVmax as the head coach going into the new season.

Riot transfers the cvMax investigation to a third party

cvMax’s comeback to the LCK scene was initially stopped by Riot. The developer’s Korean branch decided to ban him from the competitive league, claiming he has opted for verbal and physically violent measures towards players, such as pinching them. But the community was quick to complain about the ruling, calling it unfair and having even set up an online government petition against it that reached 200,000 signatures, meaning it would be addressed by governing powers in Korea.

Riot has thus decided to postpone the indefinite ban. At the moment, this means cvMax will be able to coach DragonX come 2020. In the meantime, a third party agency will conduct an additional investigation regarding the accusations of cvMax’s behavior. Riot promises to be transparent towards the community about the entire process before bringing the final conduct.

“The committee accepts the fact that we did not earn the users’ trust, so we’ve decided to postpone our ruling on cvMax until further notice,” Riot shared in the statement translated by Inven. “Not only will the investigation process be transparent, we will be issuing a final competitive ruling by taking both sides of the story into much consideration.“

cvMax was let from Griffin due to internal issues

cvMax parted ways with Griffin just a few weeks before the 2019 World Championship despite the large success he had with the team, seeing it through from the 2018 LCK Summer qualification to being first-place in the region’s regular season table just a year after. This was a result of internal conflicts between him and Griffin’s manager Cho Kyu-Nam, and an illicit transfer of JD Gaming’s jungler Seo “Kanavi” Jin-hyeok.

Due to their contracts being ruled unfair and vulnerable to abuse, Griffin’s entire roster announced free agency this offseason following further investigation.