Riot Employee Fired After League of Legends Blowup

A Riot Games employee has been shown the door after verbally abusing a League of Legends player and slapping him with an undeserved 30-day ban, all of which was streamed live on his Justin.tv channel.

Things got ugly a couple of nights ago when a League of Legends customer service rep who goes by the name of PsyonicHero got into a beef with another player during a game, calling him some rather nasty names and allegedly throwing a racial slur into the mix for good measure before finally slapping him with a 30-day ban for “feeding.” Right or wrong (clearly wrong, as it turns out), the whole thing might have ended there if not for the fact that PsyonicHero himself had broadcast the whole thing on his Justin.tv channel.

A League of Legends forum thread quickly sprung to life, pointing out that the video clearly demonstrated the rep’s bad behavior and that the banned player had not actually committed the act he was accused of. PsyonicHero deleted the video archive but not before users had taken screen shots of choice moments and posted them in the thread, which as last count had grown to nearly 200 pages.

Steve “Pendragon” Mescon, Riot’s director of community relations, initially responded to the situation by acknowledging that PsyonicHero was a Riot employee and saying that an internal investigation would be made. Shortly thereafter, he released a follow-up statement saying that the rep’s actions “were both inappropriate and outside the confines of Riot Games internal policy,” and that he had been fired as a result.

“As a result of this unfortunate situation the employee in question is no longer with Riot Games,” Mescon said in a statement. “Additionally, we will be reviewing internal policy and training procedures to take steps to prevent such incidents from happening in the future.”

It’s sad to see someone lose a job over what was most likely a heat-of-the-moment reaction to unpleasant behavior, but that’s job number one for any online admin: staying cool while dealing with other people’s nonsense. Given the events that transpired and the way it all went down, it’s hard to see where Riot had any choice but to show this guy the door.

Source: VE3D