Dom Sacco offers his opinion on tonight’s UK League of Legends Twitter arguments.
We haven’t had much public drama in UK League of Legends for a while now, but GLB’s jungler Trilipe clearly feels now would be a good time for some.
Yesterday, Nick “Crane” Turberville wrote an open and frank opinion piece about his experiences in the competitive UK LoL scene as a relative newcomer, how he feels that reputation is everything – and how some players need to do some growing up.
If Trilipe had read that article, I might not be writing this now.
I’ll try to keep this one short, I don’t want to cover drama for the sake of drama, but I feel this was worth highlighting as there’s a few lessons to be learnt – not just for Trilipe but others who are experienced in the scene too.
TL;DR Dom, I ain’t got time to read too many words!
Okay, in a nutshell GLB top-laner Delitto apparently trolled Teimpo (aka Rifty) and Hadow from MnM Gaming in a solo queue match this evening, ‘running it down mid style and flaming everyone’.
Halfway through the game it got a bit heated between Teimpo and Delitto, so Teimpo said he can’t wait to play against him next week.
Delitto then apparently threatened Teimpo along the lines of ‘you better hope I don’t make it to LAN’. This resulted in the following tweet:
Imagine being an import in the UK Scene, and in all seriousness threatening to beat up other players at LAN ???
— Teimpo (@PureRifty) February 10, 2017
Afterwards, GLB jungler Trilipe sprung to Delitto’s defence and weighed in with several tweets, which annoyed MnM player Hadow and former player Smiley.
Trilipe has since deleted many of his tweets but we screenshotted them below.
There is more to the story, as Teimpo admitted he made things bad for Delitto in the next game, by taking top away from him. This was before his tweet.
The tweets in full
Here’s most of the now-Delittoed (see what we did there?) Twitter exchange in full.
And when Smiley weighed in:
Teimpo & Trilipe’s post-drama comments
This is what they told us after the drama. We wanted to reach out to both of them to be fair.
“I made mistakes too, and I’ve got no issue in admitting them,” Teimpo told Esports News UK.
“It’s the first time I’ve gone out of my way to piss someone off in a long time and not something I’m proud of if I’m honest.
“Not gonna lie – I’m not perfect, I made sure I annoyed Delitto when we got him in the next game. I also stopped playing with Hadow for a bit cos I felt bad that I actually trolled.”
Trilipe added: “First of all, before people decide they wanna make shit up for good news, I only shit talked Hadow and Rifty – nothing against the rest they are fine.
“Secondly, since Rifty decided to start it by tweeting about my toplaner, I wouldn’t call it an ‘attack’ [from me], I’d call it defending.
“Thirdly, most of the shit I said was just generalisations, Rifty knows the retarded shit he’s done, hence I pointed it out to make him realise he was hypocritical and blah blah.”
6 things we want to point out from all this
There’s some obvious ones in here.
- Don’t burn your bridges. This scene is small, and there’s always a chance that your now rivals could become your teammates at some point.
- Don’t be a dick. Pretty standard that one.
- Reputation is important. If you go on a Twitter rant, be prepared for the worst. All it takes is someone to get a bad impression of you and it could burn your bridges.
- Remember you’re representing your orgs. Surely they won’t take too kindly to things like this. When people see your tweets, they don’t just see you, they see a GLB player, or an MnM player, or whoever you are.
- Experienced scene players, lead by example – getting revenge might not be the answer
- Perhaps most importantly, learn for yourself – don’t listen to me, I’m a bloody silver player, so what the hell do I know anyway?
You might think I’m being unfair on Trilipe here, but my point is if he hadn’t reacted to Teimpo’s tweets in that way, this whole thing wouldn’t have been made public.
Teimpo has since admitted he made a mistake, and I respect that, but while his tweet wasn’t mentioning anyone in particular, it was still a subtweet that caught people’s attention (including ours)!
Finally, can’t we just all bloody get along?
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
