A Riot Games employee has found himself in hot water after receiving backlash for comments he made about one of League of Legends’ most infamous personalities.
While names of professional players like Faker carry weight within the League community, Tyler1 is another figure that’s significant for a different reason. A muscular League player who’s known for his history of on-stream outbursts, flaming teammates, and running it down mid with Draven, Tyler1 had at least 20 accounts banned before he was permabanned from League, a decision that he’s been attempting to appeal.
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Despite the issues that surround Tyler1 and League, members of the community have stuck with him with chants of “free Tyler1” in Twitch chat and in-game. But regardless of those on or against Team Tyler1, Riot Sanjuro has drawn heavy criticism for his comments against the banned streamer.
Riot Sanjuro’s Comments
The conversation with Riot Sanjuro’s inflammatory comments didn’t happen in-game, but instead took place within a League of Legends Discord channel.
Sanjuro joked about Tyler1’s appearance to start with, saying that he looked like a “damn humunculous,” but took it way further by joking about the probability of the streamer dying via a drug overdose or as a result of testicular cancer from an unfounded claim that Tyler1 abuses steroids.
The image above is a snippet of his Sanjuro’s comments, the full album of the conversation found here. After the interaction was posted to Reddit within the League subreddit and quickly broke out onto the front page to receive plenty more attention, Sanjuro backtracked and defended his comments by saying he was speaking on his own behalf, not as a Riot employee.
“Dude cmon. That’s my personal take on the situation,” Sanjuro wrote in a comment that received 18.7K downvotes. “I don’t speak for the company on live chat.. I’m my own person.”
He then apologized and said that he displayed a “gross error in judgement” and “whole-heartedly apologized,” but the display of remorse wasn’t received much better by the community.
Riot Cactopus Responds
Comment
Riot Cactopus, a Riot employee who’s quite active within the community and especially in the League subreddit, also responded to the comments made by Sanjuro and issued an apology to Tyler1 from Riot.
The apology, shown above, explained that they were taking the situation quite seriously and that it would be dealt with internally. Cactopus’ response was received much better than Sanjuro’s, and he correctly added that it wouldn’t be appropriate to go into specifics about what would happen to Sanjuro. However, the tone of the community was evident in countless comments criticizing Sanjuro’s comments and calling for his termination.
Tyler1 Responds
It really sucks that some people still hold a massive grudge vs old T1 and refuse to acknowledge I’ve changed.
— loltyler1 (@lol_tyler1) October 1, 2017
Thanks to his prominence within the League community and his devoted fans, it didn’t take long for the news of Sanjuro’s comments to reach the streamer, comments that he replied to in a way that starkly contrasts to his previous behavior.
After the above tweet, Tyler1 went on to say that “Shit happens,” and that he didn’t harbor any hard feelings towards Sanjuro for his comments. As opposed to the reception of Sanjuro’s comments, the community was quite receptive of Tyler1’s response and said that it spoke to his claims that he’s been reformed and is now toxic-free.
Prior to this incident, Tyler1 recently contacted Riot and requested that he be unbanned while stating that he’d truly changed his flaming ways. While he’s not yet allowed to jump back into League, many joked that this situation might prompt Riot to unban the player.
