Update: I'm done, but I appreciate all your support. I'm requesting a refund and never touching this game again. I don't care how fun it is, it's not worth dealing with constant harassment and abuse. I'm not here for that. Thank you all for being so rad. I was definitely expecting to be downvoted to hell for this post. Turns out the subreddit is way more tame than the deplorable in-game atmosphere.

Take care, good luck out there ya'll.

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I really got into this game and started practicing in unrated over the last couple weeks. On Friday I started competitive matches which proved to be a huge mistake. I've played maybe 6 competitive matches (forever stuck in Iron) and 4 of them I immediately was singled out, people asking if I was a girl, calling me gamergirl, but that's only how it starts. In the few mathes I've played people have resorted to saying I don't have rights, chasing me around making kissy sounds, talking in gross detail about their cocks, and just treating me like shit- after they find out I'm a woman, of course. I know not to egg people on, so I try to ignore them. I know being treated like this in the gaming community is unavoidable. Garbage people are everywhere and it happens- but the frequency and the rate is raising red flags big time. It happens, as I mentioned ~ around every 4 out of 6 games I play. I went in thinking maybe this would only happen every 1 in 10 games.

I'm not going to play a game where I have to constantly mute or report or do all that, when there's a chance that 2 out of every 6 games, I won't be harassed for being a girl. It's annoying. I put a bit of cash into this game too, which is a bummer since I can't enjoy it unless I play exclusively unrated or with my dude friends who have my back. That's not very fun.

So after the first couple times of this happening I try to avoid the abusive assholery by doing my best not to use voice chat. That way, people can't tell, and I can just play the game like everyone else. But in the middle of a match when it's heated- you have to make call outs quick- I use it and typically end up regretting it. Games have been thrown along with the insults. Let me clarify that I can hold my own for being new, so the degradation I'm referring to isn't about how I play, it's 100% about me being a girl. There's a difference between standard trash talk and being singled out because people identify you as "other".

Now I know this won't be news to any of you, and you can hate my guts or whatever, but it just gets old. I've been playing games since I was a little girl, surviving the L4D2 days, so I should be used to it but I'm really not. It's exhausting. I was looking forward to maybe something different in this game. Since the agents are diverse, I assumed the people who played it were too.

The tricky thing is that I acknowledge it's not Riot's responsibility to have to babysit and police their lobbies. They didn't create this problem, it's not their job to solve it. That's not what I'm advocating either. It just sucks all around, feels like an unsolvable, deep-rooted issue that goes beyond just a game.