After a horrible weekend of harassment during the Teamfight Tactics Zaun Cup, Riot Games made an official statement in support of the LGBQTIA+ community on Tuesday after two non-binary casters, Riley “Jirachy” Matties and Skylar “Casanova” Mulder, received hateful transphobic and homophobic comments on the official TFT Zaun Cup broadcast. Many social media posts were made about the terrible comments. One post, in particular, condemning the hateful comments made against Casanova and Jirachy throughout the weekend caught the official TFT account’s eye. It replied in agreement.
We're disappointed too. We want TFT to be a welcoming and positive community, and some of the chat messages seen during the Zaun Cup were unacceptable.
We will be stepping up moderation efforts with our partners to prevent this from happening again.— Teamfight Tactics (@TFT) January 25, 2022
“We’re disappointed too. We want TFT to be a welcoming and positive community, and some of the chat messages seen during the Zaun Cup were unacceptable,” Riot Games said in the reply. “We will be stepping up moderation efforts with our partners to prevent this from happening again.”
About Jirachy and Casanova
Jirachy responded in their own tweet thanking Riot Games for stepping up and reiterating that transphobia and homophobia have no place in the TFT community. Casanova replied saying that they are “glad that Riot is trying to step up here.”
The TFT Zaun Cup was the latest official North American TFT tournament. The event qualified players into the big Mid-Set Finale tournament in early February. The Zaun Cup had an official broadcast on the TeamfightTactics twitch channel. The official broadcast featured a team of casters and analysts bringing fans insight and play-by-play throughout the weekend. Jirachy was one of the casters a part of the broadcast.
Jirachy is a former professional TFT player who retired late last year to shift into a caster role. They are a big part of the TFT community and one of the hosts of the Triforce Tactics Podcast. Jirachy’s first major casting event was the TFT Zaun Cup.
Casanova has been a caster for multiple esports titles and is also a Producer at Wisdom Media, the company behind TFT esports in North America.
The chatting culture on Twitch has been toxic for a long time. Unfortunately, it showed its ugly and not-wanted face in the TFT community last weekend. Hate raids and hate speech has been in a big problem at Twitch. Last year Twitch announced they would be making changes to suppress the hate. They introduced tools for channels and moderators in order to help combat these issues. Riot Games will have a chance to show off their own efforts to suppress hateful speech at the next TFT event, the Mid-Set Finale in February.
