While these people’s actions are absolutely unacceptable and they should be reprimanded for them, I can’t help but feel like Phreak brought this on himself to a degree with his own attitude towards the playerbase.

Everytime he makes a change, he sticks to it like superglue. He never changes his opinion, never gives people the benefit of the doubt if they disagree, and never treats those with differing opinions as equals, he always treats them as lower than him. The karthus ult meme is exactly that, “you can type karthus ult, it’s not hard, just type it” like making fun of people for calling out an overall negative change for the game by being a smartass is not going to bode well for you in the long run. If he said “I can understand your frustrations with the ping systems, and we’ll keep an eye on how the overall perception of them changes as time goes on to make better changes to it. And if people say it’s bad, we’ll revert it.” and left it at that, he would’ve not gotten NEARLY the same amount of backlash. Because that stands his ground on his decision, acknowledges that doubters have a valid stance, and gives them the benefit of the doubt that they may be right.

Does this excuse any of these basement dwelling keyboard warriors saying the most hurtful things they can imagine to him? Not in the slightest, they are a huge problem and deserve to be reprimanded and brought to justice. However, Phreak can’t play the 100% innocent card here because his own behavior is a contributing factor to this happening.