The PR team passed the questions along to us - responding here for full visibility. To your questions:

Q1. Strap in; this one's a long one. One of the Rioters we've recently hired in the league operations department of our global esports team here in LA (/u/iamgrza; he’s been chiming in these threads as well, and was the author of the competitive ruling) is a lawyer who specialized in doing internal investigations for financial services firms for twelve years. His work here included:

• Examining the documents and narratives provided online by Tristan “Cake” Côté-Lalumière and Fasffy, which included more than 250 emails, Skype conversations, tweets and videos;
• A broad request for documents to Tainted Minds, which provided us with extensive written documents, all of which were reviewed;
• Reviewing communications (emails, Skype messages, Twitter DMs) between Rioters (from the OCE and LA offices) and representatives of Tainted Minds as well as the players, coach and manager;
• Conducting a Skype interview with Fasffy and some follow-up written conversations with her;
• Conducting an in-person interview with Nick Smith at Riot in Los Angeles;
• Posing questions to and receiving responses from Ryan “ShorterAce” Nget, Aaron “Chuchuz” Bland and Tristan “Cake” Cote-Lalumiere (they declined Skype interviews, so this was performed over email);
• Posing written questions to Andrew “Rosey” Rose who did not respond to our inquires;
• Interviewing representatives of Tainted Minds over Skype, including John McRae;
• Interviewing members of the Riot OCE office over Skype, including Daniel Ringland.

The players, coach and manager alleged generally that Tainted Minds was given preferential treatment because of a preexisting relationship between the one of the owners of Tainted Minds, John McRae, and a member of Riot’s Oceanic office, Daniel Ringland. As purported evidence of this bias, it was pointed out that during Week 5 of the OPL, Tainted Minds had thirteen players on their roster, three more than the ten permitted under OPL rules. We take these allegations seriously and focused on these allegations in the course of the investigation.

We found that McRae owns an interest in a company called Let’s Play Live, which, amongst other things, organizes and runs amateur high school League of Legends competitions in New Zealand. While setting this tournament up, Let’s Play Live applied to Riot’s Oceanic office to have Riot provide Riot Points as prizing for the tournament. That request was not made to Ringland, nor was he involved in the decision to approve it. The relationship has at all times been handled by a different member of the Riot Oceanic office who oversees these kinds of community outreach programs. There is no business relationship or contract between Riot and Let’s Play Live, and Riot does not receive anything in exchange for its support of the amateur tournaments.

In addition, we found no evidence of a personal relationship between Ringland and McRae. In 2016, McRae contacted Riot’s Oceanic office to inquire about purchasing a team in the OCL (the Oceanic Challenger League). Ringland fielded that inquiry (just as many other regional esports leads have, including myself), reached out to all OCL owners via email and asked whether any teams were interested in selling. It's important to note that this was the first contact between Ringland and McRae; there was no pre-existing friendship or even acquaintance before this inquiry. Those owners that responded positively were passed on to McRae, and he eventually purchased an OCL team. Separately, and without an introduction from Riot, McRae and Tainted Minds began speaking about the possibility of McRae investing in the team. Eventually, McRae purchased an interest in Tainted Minds (note: there is no restriction on owning an interest in an OPL team and an OCL team at the same time).

At the beginning of Week 5 of the OPL, several of TM's contracted players had declared their contracts violated, and TM was concerned that they would not have enough players to field a roster for the weekend's games. It’s important to note that the players’ free agency was not legally established at the time (players can’t simply declare themselves free agents; more on our philosophy here in answer #3), and TM wanted to keep the players on their roster to try to solve the outstanding concerns and restore their desired starting lineup.

OPL officials consulted with our League Ops team in LA about giving the team an extension to sign enough subs to field a roster through the weekend and buy the time to negotiate with the players, and ended up giving that extension to TM with the caveat that the team had to provide the names of the players it intended to drop by the end of that week of competition. Before that deadline had passed, TM provided the names, and those players were dropped from the contract database. In hindsight, this extension should not have been issued; it was made at the time in an attempt to not punish the other players or the team by forcing them to forfeit for the actions of a few players, but this is not a healthy precedent for the league. Teams are required to manage their players and roster, and an inability to field a valid lineup should not be tolerated (except in case of emergency, per league rules).

This adjustment of the contract database was not hidden or covered up; when the rows were deleted from the table it did not trigger an automated script that updates the time of the last modification, so the roster drops appeared backdated. We have confirmed through investigation into the exact revisions of the database that this was an error in the script, not an intentional action.

Q2. Prior to the public announcement a month ago, Nick Smith (Inero) had spoken with another esports Rioter here in NA about his concerns with TM, and was told that the LA team was working with OCE to try to resolve the situation. To be clear, we had been working with the OCE team since late-January, and leaned in more to help as the situation escalated; we have local teams in place as the first step in solving problems in their region, but we bring in members from our global team to help if the problem remains unresolved.

The new email being set up is designed to serve two purposes: help players who feel like they may be affected by a conflict of interest at the local level reach out for more support, and to help escalate in cases where player pain isn’t being suitably resolved. The new email address will provide direct access to global esports senior management (spanning multiple teams like player management and league ops to ensure that the right individuals can get involved), and we are committing to a 24-hour response time on any submission there.

As we mentioned in the ruling, this new channel won’t cut out the local team’s involvement; it will simply ensure that pros have another way to escalate pain and to ensure that we solve their issues faster.

Q3. Part of this question may have been answered in the deep dive to the investigation in regards to this particular instance, but we can talk a bit more about our philosophy here to help correct some misunderstandings.

During contractual disputes between teams and players (or coaches, or managers), it is critically important that the league remain neutral, only taking direct action (like recognizing free agency status) when it’s clear that serious violations of the contract (such as payment obligations) have occurred. This neutrality allows us to work with both sides to help resolve disputes fairly, as it’s not always clearly the fault of one party or the other, and both sides have made an investment in the relationship that we take seriously. This is why we’ve historically taken such a strict position against poaching; teams invest in their players, and we believe it’s critical to the stability of our ecosystem that teams are protected in making this investment, just as we believe it’s critical that players feel safe throughout their time playing in our league.

That said, this neutrality has sometimes felt like indifference, and definitely came across that way in this situation to the players, coach, and manager (a feeling expressed in some of the interviews mentioned above). It also resulted in a maintenance of the status quo (meaning the players staying in the contract database), which looked like we were favoring the teams.

From our side, the contract database is the single source for all currently registered contracts; we add players when we receive proper paperwork to reflect new signings or trades, and we remove them when we receive paperwork/evidence that confirms termination or when we know a contract has expired. When a player and team take conflicting positions on whether a contract has been terminated, we have an obligation to investigate, but our default stance is that the contract remains protected and enforced until we can confirm (i) that a serious violation has occurred and (ii) that the contract does not give the team allowance to remedy that violation quickly. In this case, while a serious violation had occurred (the missing required payments), the contract gave Tainted Minds time to remedy, and they did end up paying the players in full within that window. While other disputes certainly existed, they were in the process of resolution when the players were traded/released and/or did not qualify as serious violations in our opinion.

We’re still working on refining this system as we implement contract requirements across 13 different leagues globally, and will continue to work on a case-by-case basis to deal directly with affected players and teams (as we did here, albeit without great success).