It wasn’t 1 ping. It was 1 AVERAGE ping between all 10 players. The actual situation was that the week prior, the TO forced Steel to play at 65-70 ping. 100T argued it was unplayable for him, and that instead they should play Texas servers.
The TO forced them to play Chicago, so Steel had to play with 65-70 ping. Then, in this tournament (1 week later), the opposing team had a player with 7 ping, and the rest of 100T had like 30-40.
That ping difference may not seem like a lot, but when the average reaction time of these guys is ~200ms, a 30 ping advantage on top of peeker’s advantage ends up being a solid advantage. 100T’s argument was that if they instead played on the Texas server, not only would the average ping of all 10 players be 1 ping better, but that guy wouldn’t have 7 ping AND everyone on both team’s ping would be in 40-50 ping, with 1 player on IMT having ~65 ping (when you look at how latency works, a 25 ping difference from 40-65 is not as impactful as a 25 ping difference from 7 to 32).
The TO then says “65 ping is unplayable in a tournament setting”… even though they quite literally JUST FORCED 100T to play with a man at 65-70 ping the week prior. How 100T handled it is bad, how the TO handled it was bad, and then Riot had to set a precedent. Overall, this situation as garbage for all parties (including fans). We know Riot penalized 100T already, but if I was Riot, I was have a serious discussion with the TO about consistency in rulings, and why you cannot make calls like this. Regardless of how you feel about 100T, they got shafted in this situation hard.
