Update, October 9: The Riot employee fired for his public comments about streamer Tyler1 says he respects the company’s decision to terminate his employment.
Riot Sanjuro, who was fired last week following his comments about controversial League of Legends streamer Tyler1, says he “fully respects” Riot’s decision to let him go. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he says he made the comments after a night of drinking.
Here’s the latest changes to the world’s biggest MOBA: our League of Legends patch 7.20 notes.
Riot Sanjuro, whose real name is Aaron Rutledge, says he made the comments after he “had a couple too many whiskeys.” He says he is now checking into rehab to get help for his drinking, and that he “fully respects” Riot Games’ decision to terminate him.
He goes on to say that “drinking was no excuse for my actions,” and that “I violated the trust of Riot, the best employer I’ve ever had, out of sheer stupidity. There’s no excuse for that kind of toxicity from players or devs.”
Update, October 3:The Riot Games employee who implied he hoped a popular streamer would contract cancer seems to no longer work for the company.
Aaron Rutledge, also known as Riot Sanjuro, appears to no longer work for Riot Games following his comments about popular streamer Tyler1.
According to a screenshot of Rutledge’s personal Facebook account he has recently posted saying”heads up to friends and family. I no longer work at Riot Games.” On top of that, Rutledge’s LinkedIn profile says that his time at Riot ended in October 2017.
Other information is hard to come by, and Riot seem to be covering their tracks on the issue. We’ve reached out to them for comment, but multiple Reddit and forum threads on the subject have been removed. The RiotSanjuro summoner name no longer exists on North American servers, and Rutledge has deleted his Twitter and Reddit accounts.
Original Story, October 2:Over the weekend, Aaron ‘Sanjuro’ Rutledge, lead experience designer on League of Legends, said of a streamer that “its fine he’ll die from a coke overdose or testicular cancer from all the steroids… then we’ll be gucci.”
Sanjuro was talking about loltyler1, a League streamer who once proudly called himself the most toxic player in North America. He now considers himself reformed, but at one point he more than lived up to his ghastly boast, earning a permanent ban. Since his supposed reformation, Riot have let him start making alts again, but it seems Sanjuro still holds a grudge. Some more of his comments:
“You know how much bullshit he’s caused me? Personally?… I’ve spent many many hours of my work day dealing with [it].”
“He looks like a damn humunculous.”
Sanjuro was speaking on the Discord channel for the League of Legends subreddit. Redditor FuschiaT took some screens of his comments and posted them to Imgur – you can check out the album for yourself here.
The drama is top of the League subreddit, and has since snowballed. As you can see on his Reddit profile, Sanjuroinitially claimed he was speaking in a personal capacity and pleaded with the forum not to take a live chat out of context. He then acknowledged “this isn’t something I should have said with a Riot tag on” andapologised, saying:
“I displayed a gross error in judgement last night and whole-heartedly apologize for my comments. They were out of line, and not what any of you deserve to hear, especially from a Rioter. I’ll be taking time away from Reddit, discord and in game chat to reflect on how I communicate with players.”
Riot then condemned the commentsas “NOT okay,” apologised to Tyler1 and the community, and promised “we will be taking action internally to address this.”
For his part, Tyler then tweeted the following:
It really sucks that some people still hold a massive grudge vs old T1 and refuse to acknowledge I've changed.
— loltyler1 (@lol_tyler1) October 1, 2017
Taking the high road, Tyler follows up with “no hard feelings.” It remains to be seen what action Riot will take.