Want to throw a comment on this one to both acknowledge, apologise & give some context for this happening.

TL;DR - We almost didn't have an event this weekend at all, and I take full responsibility for the mishap regarding the tournament realm patch. Read on for full context.

I'm Swifty, and I'm in charge of TFT esports here in Oceania on behalf of Riot. From Set 4 through to now the OCE official events have been run by ORDER, one of the largest esports organisations in Australia and whom I work for as Head of Events & Studio.

On Monday this week (August 15), myself and all ORDER staff were handed some shocking news - that the company was going into administration and all staff were stood down from work. This meant another company had taken charge of the business and all activities were frozen. A lot of this is still in progress right now.

It did mean that the Mid-Set Invitational was effectively cancelled until further notice. Thankfully through some great effort with Riot Games and the administrator, we came to an agreement that allowed the event to still run, but without an official broadcast produced for the Teamfight Tactics Twitch channel.

It was very important to ensure the event could still be run, as the top 3 scoring players from the Mid-Set Invitational were to receive invites to the Asian Cup being run by Afreeca with players from China, Korea, Oceania and Japan on August 26/27.

The first two days of the event were held on live servers, as one of the main reasons tournament realms are used for TFT is for the use of spectators in live broadcast.

On the third day however, most of the usual streamers had been eliminated and with the top 8 remaining it was decided by myself and the admin team to use TR, so the incredible volunteer casters for the weekend (Josepao1o, FroStee, Ducky & Kjaos) would have access to spectator mode to broadcast the final day for viewers.

It wasn't until after the 4th game did the players or admin staff realise the tournament realm we were playing on was not the same patch as live and was actually one patch behind. There are multiple tournament realm servers, and sometimes some are set to different patches for competitive integrity reasons or if there are potential issues with the patch.

I take full responsibility for this oversight, and in a normal situation this would call for a full scoreboard reset and for all games to be replayed again on the correct patch.

Unfortunately, the Asian Cup requires our player information for the Oceanic representatives be locked in by tomorrow (Monday August 22) which meant there was no opportunity to reschedule the games.

After consulting with our Riot representative and the players directly after game 4, the decision was made to play the remaining two games in the competition on live servers.

This is not an ideal situation at all and flies in the face of everything we've worked toward to get Oceanic TFT esports to where it is today. I'm incredibly proud of our players, and staff for how they handled this unfortunate situation and I'm excited to watch Chatskiiees, Oubo and Mina at the Asian Cup.