Game Changers drama and the effects on the community

The 2022 Valorant Game Changers Championship is still a month away, but we have enough drama in a day to make a soap opera.

With the 2022 Valorant Game Changers Championship scheduled to start on November 15, the regional qualifiers are already underway. Despite the tournament lasting for just five days, in the last 24 hours of the qualifiers alone, there’s been a lot of controversy around the league’s teams and players. 

The controversy surrounding NA Game Changers scene

Well before the main event starts on October 12, the Game Changers series in North America had to complete the opening qualifications. But until we got the final eight teams fighting to represent North America internationally, we had much more to go through. 

It all started when one of the players on the EQ Cerise roster got suspended by their organization for making racist remarks through a meme post. While trying to find a replacement for EQ Caroline, one of the players on the EclectiQ roster, came up with a rather problematic solution. She arranged a trial for one of her male friends, who would go on to identify as falsely non-binary. The organization took him on as a substitute heading into their match against CLG Red. Despite winning the match with a score of 2-1, Riot would later publicly come out to overturn it, and disqualify EQ from the tournament.

The reasoning behind this was that they flagged usage of third-party software used to create an advantage or cheating. The player in question would be the substitute, who denied cheating accusations but confirmed he was misgendered on purpose to be able to play in the event.

He claims that he was playing on a smurf account with a friend that he didn’t know was cheating, and that somehow caused the detection. This would, later on, be debunked as a screenshot of him surfaced, indicating he’s a member and a customer in a discord channel used for selling cheats. It seems the substitute used his smurf and cheats to boost a player but forgot to turn them off as he was logging into the tournament client and pretending to be a girl.

Problematic Rising Hope coach

As crazy as this sounds, this wasn’t the only controversy that surfaced in the Game Changers scene in a span of 24 hours. Apart from other instances, this latest development gave other teams the courage to speak up about what happened. For instance, Jehiel “Pizzafps” Ardiente, the former head coach of EMEA Game Changers team Rising Hope, came out with a post explaining why their team left the organization. 

She accused one of the coaches, Simons, who is also a part owner, of verbally harassing the female players, being sexist, showing his genitalia to them despite some of them being underaged, and much more. This same person has also made inappropriate statements about the war in Ukraine and has yet to be expelled from the Riot ecosystem.

DRX announce Dori to Game Changers roster

Apart from the overwhelming drama in the West, it seems Eastern teams are also committed to developing a Game Changers scene, however, here it went without controversy. As announced on the RAGE Japan live stream, DRX will be moving forward with a Game Changers roster competing in Japan, pivoting away from Korea. They also announced their first signing to the roster, DRX Dori. 

Header: Twitter/ DRX