Teabagging is once again in gaming news, this time in Apex Legends. According to Dilly, an aspiring Apex competitive player, he and his team were banned from a Fate Legion tournament after winning a fight while losing one of their team members. Before respawning the team member at the beacon, Dilly had some fun at his teammate’s expense.
That’s where the trouble began.
The tournament admin saw Dilly teabagging the death box of his teammate and immediately decided to ban the entire team. The admin stated that the tournament was trying to create a “safe space” for all gamers and that players couldn’t expect to come into a professional tournament and teabag opponents.
Even after learning that the death box Dilly teabagged was his own teammate, and the team claiming that there was no toxicity present but rather a team just joking around with each other, the tourney admin stood by his ban, even going so far as to shut down the entire tournament server.
“Sportsmanship,” the admin said. “You cannot go into any organized sport and teabag your teammate, so why would you come into an organized tournament, and go and do something like that?”
The Fate Legion tournament is small, comprised entirely of free agent teams and little-known players. Teabagging in the Apex Legend Global Series, the game’s premier competition that attracts hundreds of thousands of viewers in its biggest tournaments, has often shown and made light of competitors BMing opponents on the main broadcast, including teabagging and shooting at death boxes.
According to Dilly, there were also no rules for the tournament about toxicity or teabagging that the competitors knew about before being banned. The player claimed that the admin made up the ruling on the spot. Despite the absence of any rule, the team was not only immediately banned without any warning, but they were also banned from all future Fate Legion tournaments.
While general toxicity is an issue in several video games, many forms of BM in esports tournaments have generally become accepted as mostly harmless, within reason. But this is undoubtedly one of the only cases where what appears to be teammates joking around with each other in a non-disparaging or derogatory way has become grounds for permanent bans.
