Players can tend to be a bit fanatical about about the games they love. When a nerf, buff or overall change happens that members of the community disagree with, they tend to voice their opinions. Some go to reddit and share their displeasure with the game developer’s choice, while others sometimes go a bit overboard. The newest victim in the internet’s crusade against game design is League of Legends own Ghostcrawler.
On Wednesday, after posting on his own personal blog about the state of Marksmen in League of Legends , Riot Ghostcrawler got an insane amount of backlash from the community. Players felt that GC didn’t properly understand the problem of ADCs and why alternative choices, like bot lane Ziggs, are taking priority.
GC says tanks like Poppy aren’t really a problem for ADCs to handle, which many disagreed with. Users linked to this Draven / Poppy duel shown below, which shows how incredibly underpowered Marksman are against tanks. The spinning axes that normally shred everything they hit could barely make a dent to the Yordle’s health bar.
The abuse didn’t end there. In a post published on Friday morning, Ghostcrawler said: “had weird phone calls in the middle of the night. I’ve had death threats. I’ve had Blizzard security offer to monitor my house. I’ve had designers who had to work with the FBI on threats. I’m also an upper class, straight, white dude, and I know developers who aren’t who have gotten much, much worse from players.”
Ghostcrawler has worked on tons of games with passionate communities before, including Age of Empires and has never been threatened face-to-face, according to a post on the LoL subreddit:
No matter how much you love a game, you should never feel entitled to abuse its creators because of how it plays. The developers are the ones in charge and get to make the decisions. Sending death threats to someone just because they disagree with the community on how the game should be played is never okay.
