Riot Bans Teabagging at Valorant Champions Shanghai

Score one for decorum and zero for fun: Riot Games just told its own pro players to knock it off. According to Insider Gaming, the updated conduct rules for Valorant Champions Shanghai now ban teabagging a downed opponent and unloading extra bullets into a body that already stopped moving.

I will give Riot this much, and it pains me a little to say it: a tournament broadcast beamed to a global audience probably does not need a highlight reel of corpses getting used as target practice. That is the one point I am handing over without an argument.

Everything past that is Riot legislating the fun out of its own product. Teabagging is not misconduct, it is folklore. It is the part of competitive shooters players actually talk about the next morning, and now it is a rules violation at the biggest stage the game has. Somewhere a marketing deck is calling this a professionalism initiative, and somewhere a pro player just lost the cheapest, funniest way to make a crowd roar.

Riot did not have to explain why bodies get shot at all in a tactical shooter, and it did not have to justify banning a gesture that costs nothing and means everything to the people doing it. Championship trophies will still get lifted in Shanghai. They will just get lifted a little more politely, and I am allowed to miss the chaos.