In Defense Of Dunkey
Let’s start off by bringing you up to speed on who Dunkey is. Dunkey is a League of Legends player who records a number of his games and adds commentary to them specifically for the sake of comedy. His comedic style focuses heavily on shock humor, being obnoxious, and speaking his mind on issues without any hesitation or censorship. Over the years, Dunkey has risen in fame and even had one of his videos shown at a League of Legends world championship in Season 2! He has since been known to be the largest content creator for League of Legends over the past few years providing one of, if not, the best League of Legends comedy.
Unfortunately, Dunkey has recently released this video:
In a nutshell, he explains that during a recording session he encountered a ranked match with a teammate who was going above and beyond to die, hindering the team’s chance at success. Frustrated by this, Dunkey responds with a good chunk of text roasting the player to the point of telling him that he should be “gunned down”. Riot, the company behind League of Legends, banned Dunkey for his behavior. Although he was upset by the ban, he understood and reached out to the customer support and request to have the ban lifted until Dunkey finished his video. The request was denied with an insulting “nope, you’re toxic.”. Â Furious by this, he announced that he is halting production on all future League of Legends content due to no longer feeling the game is entertaining anymore.
In response to this a good friend and fellow league of legends content creator of Dunkey, Sky Williams, heard about this and rushed to Twitter to his defense and even took his thoughts to Reddit. There was an overwhelming amount of backlash from the users who attacked Dunkey and his work. Sky is very close to Dunkey and decided to make a video to explain his thoughts:
Now there are a lot of parts to this story and if you are viewing this from the outside without any knowledge of who these content creators are or how the League of Legends culture is, this might be black and white to you. Here is where the issue is, in a Ranked Match players are expected to give the game their all in order to attempt to climb the rankings and the further up the ranking you are, the more important every player is. In Dunkey’s match, he had a player who went out of their way to sabotage his match. Admittedly, I would be pissed as well and I know every single one of my friends who would do the same thing.
I will acknowledge that what Dunkey said was intense and should have been banned. However, almost every League of Legend fiend knows of Dunkey, knows how his comedic style is, and can half expect him to say something like that during matches where someone is doing poorly. Even Riot knows of him and is well aware of how many views his videos receive and how many fans Dunkey has created since he started his videos, hell I crossed the bridge from casual to hardcore after watching his videos way back when because it made the game more enjoyable. To have a staff member at Riot act so unprofessional to deny Dunkey his request with a simple three-word sentence is outrageous.
I feel as they Riot may have a misconception about their game and just how enjoyable it really is. Game Grumps and Markipiler have both mentioned in their videos that League of Legends just is not their thing due to the high learning curve and the community. Everyone can agree that out of all the MOBAs, League of Legends is absolutely the most toxic since day 1, DOTA 2 is for the hardcore scene, and Heroes of the Storm is for the casual crowd who want to have a good time. Hell, All Chat serves no other purpose than to talk trash to the enemy team. When Riot pulled gimmicks by trying out Team Siren, the first all-female team not because of their skill but because they are female. The team burned out within a matter of months and who called them out on it before they disbanded? Dunkey.
So it is so odd to me that Riot would take the high ground on this issue and slam Dunkey, deny his requests, and feel as though they are just in their actions. I am not saying allow Dunkey to roast other players without punishment or to give special treatment to content creators but at the same time, Dunkey has gone above and beyond for League of Legends and at one point, Riot also supported him by featuring his video at Season 2 finals but somewhere along the road Riot tossed Dunkey to the side. I have to admit that League of Legends is not too fun of a game anymore and I have also stopped playing for some time now due to their community being filled of both toxic players and players who choose to not give their all in games, which feeds the former.
I digress! These are my thoughts on what happened, what are your thoughts?
Bonus: My all-time favorite Sky and Dunkey video!Â
Chicano | Fighting/Writing for Diversity | DM since 08 | Anime Lover | Site: https://www.thegeeklyfe.com | info@thegeeklyfe.com | http://twitch.tv/that_deangelo | https://linktr.ee/deangelomurillo
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