They built a complex system to tweak tens of ms (at most) of ping to equalize. And they had a bug and it disadvantaged on team. Thus, they have to replay due to unfairness introduced by Riot itself.
They could've gone Option 1 - all teams at their natural ping. While it wouldn't be as perfect in theory, it wouldn't have resulted in replaying matches. Plenty of other esports and fighting games play at natural ping and have real results. There is unfairness due to location, but only scrubs blame 5-15ms ping advantage for a loss in a game as strategic as LoL.
People play Melee with ping differences bigger than that and it works fine lol. Waaay more technical game shows that there's tolerance.
Not to mention that the server option could've had some system to distribute across advantageous servers over the course of a series.
They built a complex system to tweak tens of ms (at most) of ping to equalize. And they had a bug and it disadvantaged on team. Thus, they have to replay due to unfairness introduced by Riot itself.
They could've gone Option 1 - all teams at their natural ping. While it wouldn't be as perfect in theory, it wouldn't have resulted in replaying matches. Plenty of other esports and fighting games play at natural ping and have real results. There is unfairness due to location, but only scrubs blame 5-15ms ping advantage for a loss in a game as strategic as LoL.
People play Melee with ping differences bigger than that and it works fine lol. Waaay more technical game shows that there's tolerance.
Not to mention that the server option could've had some system to distribute across advantageous servers over the course of a series.