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LCK's Sunday broadcast was seemingly cursed from the start. What should've been a normal day at LoL Park, lasting no more than six hours, ended up turning into a marathon for both the talent and the players.  

LCK's Pauses Galore

  It all started to go South 9 minutes into the first game of the DRX vs DK series. The pause, which was reported as a "ping issue", and lasted around 10 minutes. Although this isn't too out of the ordinary, things started to get weird quickly. Less than 10 minutes later, another pause happened, this time lasting nearly 20 minutes. The game returned for a grand total of 3 minutes, before heading straight back into another pause. This was the first big one, lasting nearly 40 minutes. Emphasis on first. Game one of the series, which theoretically lasted 25:50 mins, took nearly two hours of broadcast to get through. Still, the nightmare was merely beginning. 2:21 mins into game two of the series, the pause to rule all pauses happened. The network and ping issues that were affecting players in game 1 seemingly remained, and the game had to be interrupted for 2:30 hours.  

Image via LCK

The issue was severe enough for Riot Korea to be considering postponing the entire day of matches. Although the series technically resumed before the cut-off point of 19:30 KST, the BO3 between DRX and DK, which went to a third game, only came to an end at 21:45 KST. As caster Atlus jokingly put it:

[DK] are celebrating because they just played the longest series in LoLPark history to date. We've never started at series at 3PM and finished at 9:45PM!

 

The Never-Ending Day

  Players were looking visibly tired, and understandably relieved when they were finally done with the series. Dplus Kia left the rift victorious in this grueling 2-1 affair. In this unforeseen marathon, both the players and cast showed their professionalism  despite the tough circumstances. Atlus and Chronicler held the english cast together, while Valdes, Aux and Huni held down the fort over at the analyst desk.  

Image Via LCK

In their announcement, the LCK described the issue as "chronic ping", which was returning repeatedly despite being supposedly fixed. Journalist Ashley Kang confirmed with the LCK PR team that the game was being played on an internal network, so it isn't clear why these issues were happening.  

Image via @AshleyKang on X

The broadcast isn't over yet, though. After this insane turn of events, BRO vs KDF was postponed. At the time of writing this, the LCK hasn't confirmed when that series will be played.

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