Recently, social media forums have been seeing a surge of unsettling screenshots about people impersonating Riot developers in Valorant while using obscene usernames and engaging in abusive text and voice communications. These incidents have left many players concerned about whether the accounts engaging in this behavior actually belong to Riot employees.
For the uninitiated, several screenshots circulating on platforms like X show players using extremely offensive usernames that begin with “Riot.” Typically, the “Riot” tag is reserved exclusively for employees of Riot Games, which led many players to believe the accounts belonged to official staff.
A video featuring one of these accounts bearing the “Riot” tag, hurling slurs at a streamer, has also recently gone viral on X. With many players initially believing the offensive remarks were coming from an actual Riot employee, the video quickly sparked outrage within the community.
Riot Games Fixes Dev Impersonation Bug
Fortunately, it didn’t take long for Riot to address this issue. According to a statement from Riot dev Stephen “Skram” Kraman, the bug that allowed players to impersonate the Valorant devs has already been patched. Kraman further confirmed that players who utilized this bug to commit voice or text comms abuse have been penalized.
“We caught a bug that allowed people to impersonate Riot names in-game,” the dev said in a statement. “This bug has been fixed, and all names have been changed. We are penalizing players who took advantage of this bug to commit voice or text comms abuse.”
Riot hasn’t revealed the exact penalties that the players who abused this bug have received.
