What's going on with the increasing homophobia in Valorant and this sub? I see so many negative, stupid, sarcastic, homophobic comments about the pride cards and titles.

Ever since I equipped them, in at least every other game there are team mates who start being homophobic towards me as soon as they see the rainbow player card. I've had to mute and report a lot of people and it just makes the game unplayable for me.

I was very happy that Riot decided to celebrate pride and give away free pride player cards and titles. After struggling with the redeem website for a while I finally got them and of course directly equipped the rainbow player card and the title.

I queued up with a friend and asked the team who wanted to play which agent. They didn't answer or communicate at this point. After picking agents we sat on the loading screen and they saw my pride player card and title. Soon one of them said: "Scheiss Schwuchtel". That's German for "fucking faggot". I told them that I would report and mute them, and they made fun of me for saying that before I could even mute. Now I know that there are a lot of players who use racist slurs, treat female players poorly and use homophobic slurs. But it was just very sad to see and experience this kind of homophobia right after I equipped the pride title and player card. And this was just one of many incidents!

I am queer. I am proud and I'm not ashamed. But I also don't want to unequip the pride player card or constantly mute team mates, because in the end, this is a team game and communication is key.

It's just so twisted, because these cards are meant to be about celebrating pride month and the queer community, but in the end actually equipping them causes queer people to experience even more homophobia than usual!How have your experiences with the pride cards and titles been? Have you encountered similar things?

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Edit: The region where you play is impacting the experience of homophobia not just because of cultural differences but because of how the event was promoted in different regions. For example Riot's Turkish Pride Event announcement doesn't mention pride, instead calls event "Color Festival". I believe this is true for some other regions like Asia. I play in the Europe (West) region and the servers I'm mostly playing are Frankfurt 1, Frankfurt 2, Paris 2, London, Paris 1, Warsaw, Stockholm 1 and Madrid.