Akshan, the latest champion to grace the Rift will be disabled for Worlds 2021, Riot’s European & MENA head of esports Maximilian Peter Schmidt announced today.
This decision comes a couple of days after the champion was confirmed to be disabled for the upcoming 2021 LEC Summer Split playoffs. Even though the teams were able to vote to overcome the rule disabling the champion, they voted against it even though they were told that the champion would be available for Worlds 2021. However, today in an update Riot’s Maximilian Peter Schmidt said that Akshan will also be disabled at Worlds.
The motivation for this change was that the limited competitive exposure makes balancing the champion difficult for the Gameplay team. The old rule disabling new champions in competitive play if they were recently released was in place to avoid such situations, where a team could turn to be unbalanced in professional play even while they suffer in the solo queue environment, creating a bad environment for professional teams where they’d have to use a ban or first pick the champion if he overperforms compared to their peers.
Akshan was released on July 22 and since then was hotfixed twice due to his abysmal solo queue performance. The first one was applied just one day after his release while the second one was applied a couple of days ago. These hotfixes clearly show that the champion could use some more tuning before he becomes a threat in solo queue, while competitive players could find a way to use the champion in unimaginable ways and create a situation where the champion becomes a pick or ban, forcing teams to waste one ban by default if they can’t play with it due to limited competitive exposure.
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