Cowsep banned by Riot Korea

LoL Esports
April 9, 2018
Kieran Lee

Cowsep is a popular League of Legends streamer and Youtuber. He streams full time on twitch.tv every day and currently resides in and streams in League of Legends Korea.

Since gaining popularity, he has stuck to being a high elo Master Yi main in Korea, no small achievement considering the region’s extremely competitive solo queue environment. Cowsep has since then achieved both Master and Challenger standings throughout Korea and North America (with 200 ping). Currently, he sits at high diamond.

cowsep-league-of-legends-streaming

Getting banned

Cowsep confirmed on Reddit he had been banned on all of his Korean League of Legends accounts. This news first broke out when Cowsep was streaming live on Twitch, only to find every single account he owns has been suspended for the duration of 30 days.

In Cowsep’s Reddit response, he explains that Riot Korea has banned at least six of his accounts (the ones he tried), not all being linked to the same social security number. It is important to note that in Korea, players have to link their social security number to their League of Legends account for them to play the game. As they are all different, it is apparent that while he may ‘own’ the account / levelled them from the start, they were created with someone else’s social security number. Overall, from this, he deduces that Riot Korea manually banned his accounts based on the IP address those have been played them on.

Cowsep then contacted Riot Korea asking the reason he got banned on all his accounts only to be stuck with an automated reply, requesting him to ‘read the rules’. This is certainly a poor and insufficient reply on Riot Korea’s end.

Context – Why Cowsep thinks he got banned

Only a week prior to this incident, Cowsep made a thread on Reddit which sky rocketed up in upvotes. This thread discussed the poor state of Korean solo queue which allows players who go AFK, troll in games and run it down mid, to get off free. Cowsep states that unless you type the full or even shortened Korean word for “f**k”, you will not get chat restricted or banned (excluding by the broken leaver buster system, where players can move their character every 20 seconds in the fountains to avoid the system).

Ironically enough, Cowsep believes this is the primary reason he got banned. He mentions in a video that Riot specifically targeted him following the thread and went through his accounts in order to find offences to ban him with.

Riot’s explanation for the ban

After community outrage, a Rioter quickly commented on the Reddit thread (in reply to Cowsep) explaining that he had been banned due to ‘account sharing’. This was likely due to Cowsep playing on accounts from different social security numbers, problem is, the response doesn’t add up, for a few reasons:

First, Riot Korea already knew Cowsep had been playing on accounts with different social security numbers, this issue had already been resolved.

Second, these accounts were ‘his’, he levelled them up from scratch and did not share the accounts with anyone.

Third, Cowsep has admitted to account sharing recently, where he played on another person’s silver accounts. Ironically, this account he admitted to actually account sharing on had NOT been banned.

Rioter’s reply on how Cowsep had gotten banned a week after the thread calling Riot Korea out? – “but wowza that timing”

Is Cowsep right? Did League of Legends Korea over do it? Whats the real reason behind Cowsep’s ban? Leave a comment below, and let us know what you think!