Before reading this, I just want to clarify that this post is not an attack on the honor system of League of Legends; it is more of a personal statement...
My client crashed midway through a game two days ago, and I was feeling pretty tired, so I logged off and went to sleep. After relogging today, I noticed that I had received an honor from that game, the "honorable opponent" one, to be exact. I originally thought someone DDOS'd it, but the fact that I received honor from it was weird to me. I couldn't really remember what that game was about, since it was so short, but luckily, I had the recording of it on my LolReplay, despite it not showing up on my match history.
I played Nocturne jungle for that game, like I usually do, more recently now because of the new skin, and I had a pretty standard build for about 15 minutes, which was a madred's razor, some boots, a vamp scepter and a few health pots up until the point that my client crashed.
Upon re-watching it, I realized off the bat that something was...off about that game. The enemy jungler never connected. In the loading screen, his/her name never appeared. "Typical" I thought. "The name is probably in another language." But after the screen loaded, I saw that he simply had no name. Stranger yet, he was also a Nocturne player. From the beginning, he sat still in his base.
I might as well describe to you what happened during the game. We started out normally, and I jungled and ganked, but no one died for the first 15 minutes of so. Everyone was reasonably leveled and farmed, with every player being in the 6-10 level range, save for the enemy Nocturne. It was at 15:13 when I used my ultimate to get what seemed to be an assured kill on the enemy Soraka. This is when the game crashed...or when I thought it crashed. My recorder thought otherwise.
In the replay, the screen glitched for about 10 seconds after I ulted her, with everything freezing in place. When I was actually playing the game, it was during this glitch that my client froze and closed on me. But in the replay, after the glitch, it showed us all still playing...this REALLY freaked me out, but I kept watching. Apparently, my "character" secured the kill on the Soraka, recalled and continued to jungle. That's when I read the eerie message... "...has reconnected." The no name jungler on the other team got back into the game somehow and started to jungle. I felt uneasy watching him.
The other lanes kept at each other, and it didn't take me long to figure out the next oddity. The Soraka "I" had killed never respawned. When I pressed tab to see the death timer, there was none...she just stayed dead. "An ally has been slain." This time someone on my team died, the Ezreal, and it was the enemy Nocturne who killed him. He never respawned either. I froze in my chair, watching people die, one by one, each death leaving a lasting impression on me.
The Nocturne that I was "supposedly" playing did everything I would have done, which weirded me out even further. It was almost like I was still playing in that match. After each player died, none would respawn. I was always on edge whenever I saw my character getting low on health, to the point that I was gripping my desk. I can't really explain why, but it's a nerve-racking feeling knowing that if your character died, they wouldn't come back... I kept telling myself it was a glitch, but after what happened next, I found it hard to.
There were only 3 people left. Me, the no name Nocturne, and the enemy mid laner, a Diana. At this point, my eyes were glued to the screen, and I couldn't help but watch as my character pursued her. This was the death that disturbed me the most. My character ulted towards her, as I normally would have done, and met her at her wraith camp. Just as my character got there, I saw the enemy Nocturne standing still in the passage to their red buff...he just stood there and watched my Nocturne destroy the enemy Diana.
After her death, everything was still.
The minions didn't move, the projectiles were frozen in place, along with my character. Everything was frozen except the no name jungler. He moved towards me and paused for a second. The timer in the recording was still going. Curious as to why he just stood there, I checked my settings on the recording. The chat box was unchecked. I remember my fingers shaking a bit as I clicked to check it.
The no name jungler had been typing throughout the entire match after the apparent crash. All he said, over and over, every single minute was, "KILL THEM ALL. KILL THEM ALL." Up until I had killed Diana. I felt my heart sink when I read those words, decorated across my screen. What he said soon after was what sent chills throughout my entire body.
"Thank you for your assistance."
And that's when the game ended. No nexus was destroyed, no surrender vote was cast. It just ended. Horrified at what I just witnessed, I immediately took down the names of everyone in that game. After a bit of searching, I found that none of them played another game after that one. I'm still checking every few minutes, hoping that one of them will get in a game soon. I don't really know what happened to those people, and I don't think I want to know...
I have since deleted the recording from my computer. I don't want anything to do with that replay...
The image of seeing the "honorable opponent" message on my screen from logging in is still burned in my head...never have I felt so undeserving.
