Riot has issued suspensions to two Game Changers players after an argument broke out in the community over teabagging in games.
“Dawn” and “Risorah” were banned from Riot from competing with a team in a Riot-sanctioned event for a period of three months and nine months, respectively. Dawn was banned for using “vulgar and targeted” comments toward another player via her social media, and Risorah was banned for harassment and making vulgar comments that targeted and isolated another player.
This comes a few weeks after the Galorants Discord shut down as a result of the issue, which started when a player commented their opinion on whether teabagging in a video game constituted sexual harassment. The mods in the channel where the argument occurred were slow to step in, which caused the issue to escalate and spread to social media. Galorants shut down the Discord server for a week to rectify a plethora of issues.
The initial argument began on June 24. Riot released its official ruling on the two players involved today, just over a month later. This ruling also comes just a day after there was an accusation of account sharing during the Astral Clash tournament, which is an unrelated tournament hosted by Gen.G that will see the finalists compete on LAN in California.
In a Twitlonger, Dawn denied that she used vulgar speech, linking the evidence Riot says it used to determine their findings. People in the VCT Game Changers community are becoming frustrated with the amount of discourse happening within the scene. There have been frequent controversies in many of the VCT Game Changers tournaments and other women and marginalized gender tournaments for VALORANT.
Although there have been some controversies throughout the VCT tier-one tournament circuit, Game Changers seems to be disproportionately plagued with issues. Riot has been particularly picky about which rules they enforce with Game Changers, including letting male participants sub in for a women-only tournament, and picking and choosing when to enforce its lateness rule.
No competitive ruling has been made for the Astral Clash accusations at the time of writing.
