Riot Turkey is under fire after the League of Legends developer seemingly silenced their fans over the Mustafa “Dumbledoge” Kemal controversy.
Last week, one of Turkey’s most famous League of Legends veterans left SuperMassive after allegedly enduring homophobic insults and verbal abuse at the hands of his teammates and other Turkish pro players. The biggest offender was his former friend and teammate Burkay “Zeitnot” Aşıkuzun.
After Dumbledoge revealed screenshots and first-hand accounts of Zeitnot’s toxicity and homophobia, many fans called on Riot Turkey to ban him. Others feared that the conservative country wouldn’t respond to the situation at all. Now it seems that Riot Turkey is well aware of the abuse and has instead decided to purposefully ignore it.
When SuperMassive competed in the TCL this weekend, the crowd began to chant “Zeitnot ban” in support of Dumbledoge.
Later on, clips of SuperMassive on stage seemed edited. When SuperMassive greeted the audience, it’s eerily silent except for a few claps. It’s clear from the footage that the audience was muted.
Many League of Legends fans are now under the assumption that Riot Turkey is well aware of what happened between Dumbledoge and Zeitnot and are choosing to ignore the situation, at least for now.
But even a delay in action has led viewers to speculate if Riot Turkey truly cares about the abuse Dumbledoge endured. Fans have voiced their concerns, stating that Turkey isn’t the most progressive country and might not react strongly to the reported homophobia within the TCL. But the fan cheers say otherwise, as well as the #banZeitnot spam in the stream’s chat.
“I’m proud of the Turkish league fans taking a stand on this,” one fan said on Reddit.
Others pointed to Riot’s headquarters in America, wondering why they haven’t stepped up either. One fan even pointed out that Riot annually posts blogs about International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia, but they fear Riot only does that to fix their image rather than actually stand by the message.
Inserting rainbows into League of Legends and donating to various causes is one thing, but supporting their own players and employees sometimes seems to be another entirely.
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