Last month, SolaryTV, a team composed by popular French streamers, headed to South Korea for a 2-week long bootcamp, where they played exhibition matches against Korean streamers and pros, including names such as former H2K-Gaming ADC Sin "Nuclear" Jeong-hyeon and former KT Rolster and Team Vitality support Ha "Hachani" Seung-chan.

However, during a solo queue game on the Korean server, one of its members, Julian “Jbzz” Dupré, was caught making aggressive and racist comments towards Koreans, which included calling his teammates “monkeys” and using expressions such as “mom die pig”, infuriating the Korean community, according to a thread on Inven Korea dated from March 23.

Riot Korea’s reaction however was quick, with a Rioter commenting just a few hours later that Jbzz’s account has been banning, while sharing details such as that SolaryTV has been provided with accounts – normally destined to professional teams only – to play on the Korean ladder, and that a representative of Riot Games’ French office accompanied the team to their bootcamp.

Check out the full translation:

The account in question has been deactivated.
To explain the situation in detail,

Solary, a French streamer group, is currently in a Korean bootcamp session with a representative from the Riot Games French office. And for the bootcamp, the streamers were given temporary rental accounts to play in the KR server.

In advance, we warned the players that acting without manners is strictly prohibited; the French Rioters had also warned them several times... Us, Rioters, were very surprised that this kind of conflict arose despite our early warnings.

The Solary broadcasts are usually done with the 1st streaming group. The player in question is in group 2, and I presume that's the reason why we couldn't catch this sooner.

We will take strong actions on the streamer and ban him from playing in the KR server. As said above, his account is currently deactivated.

We apologize to the players that were offended/surprised by this.
Thank you.

With the community reacting extremely negatively, SolaryTV’s CEO Sakor Ros went on Inven 2 days later to apologize in name of both the organization and the player, saying - in a post written both in Korean and in French - that “We are sincerely touched by this story, and truly ashamed. Jbzz's attitude was unacceptable and that's why we decided to suspend him from any stream at Solary for an indefinite period. This punishment is in addition to those taken by Riot and Twitch against him.”

“We came to Korea because we have been playing League of Legends for years, and Korea is the best country on this game. We are fans of Faker, Madlife, Peanut and LCK in general, so we wanted to try to understand what makes (Korea) so strong on LoL. We have been so well received here, therefore this story saddens us very much,” added Ros.

Jbzz himself issued an apology on Twitter, without however, entering in details about the nature of his actions nor punishment: “I behaved negatively on the Korean server. We decided with Twitch that it will be better if I do not appear in stream for a while. Living this trip with my friends has been incredible, by far the best of my life, I will take the time to tell you all about that as soon as I get home. This will serve as a lesson to me.”

SolaryTV returned to Europe on March 26, with Jbzz since then focusing mainly on streaming and creating content for Fortnite rather than League of Legends, but the organization has since then been involved in another polemical situation involving another player, Alexis “Chap” Barret, who allegedly mentioned live on stream a method to acquire Twitch Prime unlimited, which is obviously illegal, leading to the player’s indefinite ban from the platform as well as leading to SolaryTV’s official channel suspension for one week.

Cases of racism have unfortunately been frequent across the esports scene lately: yesterday, for instance, Overwatch League pro Josue "Eqo" Corona was issued a fine and a 3-match suspension by his team, the Philadelphia Fusion, for making a racist gesture while streaming.


Disclaimer: The following article was written freely based on the author's opinion, and it may not necessarily represent Inven Global's editorial stance.