Unfortunately, we’ve discovered that in the process of managing the OCE qualifiers, our team made a mistake when communicating and enforcing residency requirements to one of the qualifying players, KirinSupreme. KirinSupreme had proactively reached out to confirm their eligibility to participate, and even though they did not meet the eligibility requirements, we mistakenly confirmed they were eligible to participate. After further review, we’ve made the tough decision to remove KirinSupreme from the Finals, and will be moving up the next eligible player from OCE, Escha.
Without commenting on KirinSupreme’s specific situation, residency requirements need to be strictly adhered to in order to ensure fairness across all regions that are qualifying competitors to the TFT Set Championship. There are likely a number of people in many regions that read the rules and either did not compete because they weren't eligible in the region in which they are living or attempted to qualify in their region of residency (which may have had more competitors). We need to enforce our rules consistently to make sure we're following through on the expectations we set in our rules.
We want to apologize to Kirin and the TFT community. For this to happen so far into the competitive season is really hard to excuse on our end, and doesn’t live up to the standards that Riot has stood for in the development of League of Legends esports. We’ll be looking for ways to help make it up to KirinSupreme as we know that they have put a lot of effort into their qualification. We’ll also be looking at our internal processes to ensure that a mistake like this does not happen again.
