UK-based streamer Vapora Dark is under fire on the League of Legends subreddit for his ‘nuzlocke challenge’, but is it warranted or overblown? Esports News UK editor Dom Sacco shares his opinion.
I was surprised to see a post about UK-based streamer Vapora Dark at the top of the League of Legends subreddit yesterday (where it still sits today).
The post has around 7,500 upvotes and 800 comments at the time of writing this – and has got the LoL redditors’ pitchforks out.
The post is titled: ‘League Partner Vapora Dark has been going 0/11/0 and been on 20-game loss streaks on a new account in iron/bronze to get his account to stay in this MMR for his nuzlock[e] challenge.”
The title is misleading, because while the LoL account (eixpau) in question has looked like it has intentionally lost games, you can see the point where Vapora Dark acquired it, because the summoner spells – including flash – changed keys. This is the point where Vapora Dark begun playing his challenge, and at no point in his challenge is he intentionally losing games. On the contrary.
Vapora Dark is undertaking a nuzlocke challenge, where a loss or a death means he cannot use the champion he is playing as again. The idea is to climb as high as possible before running out of suitable champions to play in his ADC role.
It’s a challenge that’s more popularly embarked in Pokemon games, and others have done it in League of Legends, like Scottish streamer RossBoomsocks (see his nuzlocke playlist here), so why all the hate for Vapora Dark now?
From what I’ve learnt over the years, using logic is not the best way to try and understand the League of Legends subreddit.
Now, granted, Vapora Dark is a peak Master tier player, and is smurfing in the pits of iron and bronze using a de-ranked account. Those games will not be fun for his opposing ADC to play, and I’m sure the games played by the de-ranking player who previously ran the account weren’t either. But if we’re going to call out Vapora Dark, we should call out all the other streamers that embark on ‘unranked to diamond’ challenges. And there are a lot of them.
I’ve seen coaches, streamers, casters and others using multiple smurf accounts over the years. Riot must know this goes on. Tyler1 has done his unranked to challenger series in all roles now. Elo boosting and de-ranking is still very much a thing. Do you think all these streamers create new accounts and bother to level them all to 30 themselves? Perhaps some do, but definitely not all.
Yes, using a de-ranked account is different to using a fresh level 30 account. But I feel the hate thrown at Vapora Dark is a little unfair and hypocritical of the community, to be honest.
What Vapora Dark said: ‘Me running it down every game is not what happened’
Vapora Dark explained in a now-deleted Reddit comment: “Guys, it’s a purchased account. I didn’t sit there running it down for 100 games, and I’m not going on large win streaks then running it down for large streaks to keep my MMR low. I just bought a deranked account to dodge smurf queue since I knew the challenge I wanted to do wouldn’t be possible in smurf queue. It’s still not a great thing to do I know since it endorses the botting and running it down industry, but me running it down every game is just not what happened.
“My purchasing an Iron account is endorsing the deranking industry so maybe I deserve it. I’ll just end saying that if it brings you any satisfaction, this YouTube series is performing far worse than any of my guides or high Elo content, so I’m not even profiting from this situation ironically. I’ve kept it up only because of very good feedback from viewers who are loving the series, despite no tangible benefit to that feedback.
“I just bought a deranked account to dodge smurf queue since I knew the challenge I wanted to do wouldn’t be possible in smurf queue. It’s still not a great thing to do I know since it endorses the botting and running it down industry.”
Vapora Dark
On accusations that Vapora Dark cheats view counts by linking website views to his stream, he responded: “I haven’t done that in close to a year. These days I don’t even stream that much anymore, my YouTube has been strongly out-earning my Twitch stream for a while and it leaves not much reason to stream besides for fun. But even before that I’d already given up the vast majority of my MobaFire guides and their viewers because I didn’t like people IRL assuming I was a bigger streamer than I am. I still don’t think embedding is unethical, the only problem in it lies in how people perceive viewcount, and the fact that Twitch refused to implement any system to distinguish embedded viewers from native viewers. In the end I preferred to give it up since it wasn’t a huge benefit anyway.”
RossBoomsocks added: “Just want to add that regarding normals – from my first PvP game I made sure every single teammate was in the levels of 200+ so ensure that any five-stack we went against was likely to just be normal players and not new players.
“Regardless, i’m also not good at the game, i’m getting my ass beat left and right by smurfs in this queue and I’m honestly, at best, a gold level player these days and that’s okay with me. The challenge is still ongoing but i’ve been a little apprehensive of doing more the last week or so cause i’ve been just trying to improve myself on a health/mental standpoint and uh, I dunno if ranked is the play for that hahaha.”
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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.
