Riot Games has been on the receiving end of some criticism today after people found out that it was handing off the subreddit of its newest game, VALORANT, to the mod team of the League of Legends subreddit.
In a discussion on social media, Fnatic’s League team manager Alexander Hugo brought the situation to light. Several other popular League personalities responded with a general disdain for Riot’s decision.
@RKRigney I've solved my issues with the /r/lol mod team in the past. I currently don't have an issue with them. But the fact that a small list of people can control the public discourse on the most important COMMUNITY-DRIVEN site on earth is unacceptable. Please do better.
— Darius (@DariusExMachina) March 2, 2020
Many people have an issue with how the League subreddit has been run so far, with several members citing a bias over what kind of content is featured on the website. Popular esports journalist Richard Lewis, for example, was permanently banned from the subreddit four years ago, leading to a subsequent ban of any of his content regardless of whether he was the one posting it.
VALORANT’s global communications lead Chris Tom explained that the League mods were chosen as a starter group for the community-driven forum with the agreement that they would find and teach new VALORANT community mods in the future.
… I’m not naive in knowing that everyone and anyone who benefits from creating content for VALORANT will want to have a stake in how that content gets to the front page. Moderating is a thankless task and not everyone’s perfect, but I did want some reliability out the gate.
— chris tom (@PWYFF) March 2, 2020
This was still seen as a big problem for the general League and VALORANT community since many people believe that those same mods will eventually choose other people who share the same set of ideologies.
As a result, many people are looking to support other subreddits, like /r/CompetitiveValorant and /r/ValorantCompetitive, as alternatives to r/VALORANT that will be guaranteed to be impartial and more toward the side of community discussion.
