League Of Legends YouTube Jokester Gets Banned

The acclaimed YouTuber Dunkey has a special place in the League of Legends universe for consistently producing some of the best, and definitely the funniest, material in the game’s massive community. But he might stop making League videos, because he was recently banned from the game for “toxic behaviour.”

Dunkey first made his ban public on September 3rd, when he tweeted a screencap of a message he received from Riot Games informing him that his account had been “suspended for 14 days” because of “toxic behaviour” he’d allegedly exhibited in his recent matches:

ranked pic.twitter.com/7jnwvSZfwU

— Dunkey (@vgdunkey) September 3, 2015

It was easy to miss his tweet, however, since he doesn’t really maintain that active a Twitter account. News of Dunkey’s ban only truly started to gain traction in the League of Legends community when someone caught wind of it and posted his messages on the game’s massive subreddit yesterday.

What Dunkey did, exactly, to earn a ban — even a temporary one — remains an open question. Riot is notorious for not giving League of Legends players satisfactory information about their supposed “toxic behaviour” when penalising them, but Dunkey didn’t go into detail about his recent behaviour either. All he’s had to say since the initial ban is that Riot wouldn’t “unban” him — a decision that lead him to suggest he’s going to stop making League videos, maybe for good:

Shitty Riot won’t unban me so no league videos for awhile, if ever again.

— Dunkey (@vgdunkey) September 7, 2015

It’s impossible to tell whether or not Dunkey’s being serious when he says he’s done making League videos. Repeated attempts to reach him for comment on this story were unsuccessful.

Regardless of where Dunkey goes from here, his case is an interesting one for the League of Legends community, and for game-centric YouTubers more generally. A big part of Dunkey’s appeal in his League videos is that he rambles (often nonsensically) and plays the game in deliberately jokey ways — often to set up funny situations for his videos.

While Dunkey’s behaviour makes sense in the heavily edited, narrated context of his YouTube videos, I can easily picture the random League of Legends players who he gets grouped with in games not having any patience for his shenanigans. Things intended as jokes could easily come across as toxic behaviour to someone who doesn’t understand what Dunkey is doing. They might not even know who he is. His ban is a reminder that League of Legends content creators, even if they’re bonafide internet celebrities, aren’t exempt from the same rules everyone else has to play under in League.

I really hope Dunkey doesn’t actually stop making videos once he’s allowed to return to League of Legends, however, because his work is absolutely fantastic. Just watch this video he made for URF mode and try telling me otherwise: