Disclaimer: I had initially intended to keep this under wraps, but having talked to reporting "mentors", I was notified it was still worth publishing, especially since my DMs were blowing up requesting for me to release this info.  As this event is 4 years old, I don't intend for it to demonize any of the involved parties, but rather to take a retrospective glance at communicative issues and how they've plagued this game and the community with Riot since the beginning. While I had initially planned to release this as a video, I lacked the means, and have instead posted it in a more informal format in attempts to maintain the tone of the original vision I had for this piece. ___ Riot have always had a hard time communicating with their fanbase, even self-admittedly.   At the very least, we can appreciate the fact that Marc “Tryndamere” Merrill and the rest of Riot try to openly communicate with their fans at all, but usually on the wrong platforms and usually with a strange demeanor. What I mean by this is while players can definitely appreciate responses to critical issues, it often comes across as faux-transparency and typically with an attitude that tries too hard to "fit in" with the average player, when sometimes, you just need to come clean as an authorative figure. While we heavily criticize that aspect now, it wasn't much better even predating the LCS. In October of 2012, after the Season 2 World Championship, I had acquired clear evidence of Tryndamere not only elo boosting, but actually sharing his account.  Unlike when his Twitter was hacked, this was entirely voluntary. The recipent of his account info was Phillip “Only Jaximus” Carter, former sub for Team Curse. At the time, I did not want to publish it as I had friendly relations with both parties and was a novice in the esports industry; I didn’t want to burn any bridges, and I feel there’s little damage to come out of it now.  To be perfectly honest, while it’s abhorrent behavior for the president of a game company to take part in, I find much more amusement in exactly how this incident was tackled and addressed. We’re going to break down the communication between Riot and another individual and examine the logical loopholes that take place. First and foremost, it needs to be mentioned that there’s literally no justifiable reason for him to have done it.  As shown below, Tryndamere is capable of fully unlocking his account and settling his elo at whatever he wishes.  

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  Questionable decision making, indeed.  Why would you even remotely take this risk as the face of Riot Games at a time where your esports has just begun to blow up to an incredible degree? Luckily for him, prominent reporters weren’t all over the scene back then, -- and I didn’t have the balls for it -- or this would have been a PR disaster. Let’s back up a bit and take a look at the initial email my friend sent to Riot after witnessing this taking place:  

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Afterwards, Lyte claims that he will look into it, stating that Tryndamere will be spoken to independently between himself and Yegg, claiming they noticed it from their "Elo Boosting analysis".

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  Almost immediately contradicting the data from their "Elo boosting analysis", Lyte responded with an update that it didn't appear to be for elo boosting. Justification? "For many reasons."

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A personal phone call? That's weird, but whatever. If two people can look into a case and determine that the purpose wasn't elo boosting, what is the point of "elo boosting analysis?" I looked around and saw no evidence that this was some kind of software Riot had.  Regardless, by definition, intention or not, what happened was elo boosting as well as account sharing.

Taken from the competitive ruling case in March of 2013, which retroactively punished players for boosting back to Season 2.

Also, why was this issue minimalized as "just wanting to play some games together" when teams have received massive fines for basically equivalent amounts of harm? Even if this was the case, as dictated by the first email, they were already duo queueing previously on an unbanned account of Only Jaximus'. Lyte even stated that the accounts were mostly banned, so there were other avenues for them to play together.   Here's screenshots of them already having played on these accounts. Even if all of his accounts were banned, Tryndamere gifted Jaximus a fully unlocked one to use for the duration of the ban as they played together quite frequently and had a mutually solid relationship. An awkward addition to this situation was Marc Merrill tweeting about his climb:

After the incident, Only Jaximus claimed that he would discontinue elo boosting.

Behavior level: President approved!

In a broader sense, the sins commited were hardly the worst things in the world.  How issues like this are addressed, however, have been and still are questionable.  The context of this situation was unfortunate, as it was a time when elo boosting was problematic and Riot had been retroactively punishing players, even if they had already quit boosting at the start of LCS.  Certainly, while it's not the greatest crime, it would have set a horrible example for players at one of League's peak growing periods, and I often wonder if things would be different had I reported this then. Everyone makes mistakes, but even to this day, Riot has a long way to go in terms of communication with its consumers. In any case, we'll end our reminiscing of this old event with a bang.  Some things never change; one of them is trying to perform mental gymnastics in an attempt to look good at the end of any conflict.

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Wow, that sure is a really cool company. ... Jesus. Special thanks to @GGBeren for helping make this article possible.