How VALORANT orgs trash talk each other on Twitter for engagement

With the official start of VCT 2023 just over a month away with the LOCK//IN tournament in São Paulo, several teams are brewing a great rivalry due to different statements on social networks. We are talking about two North American teams, NRG and Sentinels.

On the night of January 10, we witnessed a somewhat heated conversation between NRG Head Coach Chet “Chet” Singh and Sentinels Head Coach Don “SyykoNT” Muir. The debate started with which online platforms they prefer to use to coach and play scrims.

The debate slowly heated up

Chet shared a Tweet where he offered his team to practice somewhere other than the competitive gankster platform.

“If any VCT partner or challenger or upcomers want to go on pracc instead of gankster DM me or @MikesHD_”

To this, SyykoNT immediately jumped in to answer.

“Surely we are not arguing to go back to that horribly outdated website. Gankster is rough right now but at least the devs are involved and taking our input.”

The exchange of responses continued for a long while, but it all heated up after both coaches accused each other of being lazy. NRG’s IGL, Pujan “FNS” Mehta, immediately fueled the fire with a series of responses.

The entire exchange, cataloged in a single Twitter thread, heated up after the two coaches clashed over being lazy, resulting in NRG’s in-game leader, Pujan “FNS” Mehta, stoking the fire by saying he “would not accept this kind of slander.”

At one point, Chet, the NRG coach, asked the Sentinels coach if he needed to “bring a screenshot of our record against your team again.”

This refers to the four wins OpTic Gaming had against XSET in five meetings during VCT 2022. Recall that last season, Chet was OpTic’s Head Coach while SkyykoNT coached XSET.

To this, SyykoNT immediately responded that they are interested to see if that trend continues without the carries of Jaccob “yay” Whiteaker and Jimmy “Marved” Nguyen.

The Twitter thread was still on fire, and Chet posted a screenshot of one of his team’s wins against XSET.

As we can see, both yay and Marved did not stand out above their teammates.

This went on for a long while, during which we saw different professional players from these teams, including themselves, to the conversation, in most cases, just making fun of one or the other.

This keeps the fans hooked

There is no doubt that the popularity of VALORANT has grown to such an extent that now, exchanging insults and jokes serves to keep fans engaged.

But in addition to this, it can also serve as motivation for some players and coaches. As we already know, with the solid lineups of NRG and Sentinels and now with an additional reason of one coach defeating the other, the VCT Americas 2023 will be heart-pounding.

After this, we dream of seeing NRG and Sentinels face off in February in São Paulo.

Header: Colin Young-Wolff | Riot Games