The saga of slaze: on the bus out

Polaris team captain Zoe “Zoessie” Servais and her then-teammate Sophia “slaze” Ramirez received a short email the day after their qualification for VALORANT Champions Tour Game Changers Series 3 that left them devastated.

“I’m reaching out because our anti-cheat team found conclusive evidence of your main account (Slaze#444) being associated with boosting,” the email said. “This falls under a violation of TOS so we will be issuing a three month ban from all Riot affiliated events.”

Boosting is a form of cheating in which a high-ranked player uses a low-ranked player’s account, or plays on a separate account with the low-ranked player, to increase their rank, normally in exchange for money.

Later messages stipulated that the Polaris squad could still compete in Game Changers 3 as long as they found a suitable substitute by Sept. 29. However, getting such news a day after the squad had fought through a gauntlet of signed teams to qualify hit hard.

The entire Polaris team hopped into a Discord call together to discuss what was going on and to get slaze’s side of the story. They sent frantic messages and even called the Florida native as she was sleeping in a different state across the country.

“Our mood literally shifted all the way down from being completely ecstatic, to just stomped into the ground,” Zoessie said.

Initially, the team didn’t know what to think. The email, to them, almost looked like a scam outside of the Riot email attached to it. The message was only two paragraphs long and did not feature any Riot paraphernalia, such as a signature or anything else implying officiality.

The tournament officials, and the Riot Games administrators that the team contacted, did not provide any answers to Polaris’ inquiries into the ban. All Zoessie and her team had to go off of was slaze’s word and their own intuition.

“We thought either she was boosted or she was boosting,” Polaris manager Sakura, who declined to be identified by her full name, said. “And we were just like, no, she performed though.”

Later on, Riot specified the ban was for bussing, a cousin to boosting, where players queue with someone using cheats to achieve inflated ranks.

When slaze did join the call, she said someone at Riot was targeting her and that she was in no way boosted or boosting in VALORANT. Zoessie, who personally recruited slaze as her first teammate for Polaris, said she had every reason to believe slaze. According to Sakura, when Riot did get back to them about their questions, they couldn’t share any specifics other than the ruling.

“In our minds, at the time, it all added up to kind of how what slaze is saying: She’s being set up, she’s being targeted by someone else outside of Riot or someone’s influencing someone at Riot to get her suspended or banned or whatnot,” Zoessie said. “That was our mindset at the time. We really had nothing to go off of, and again, why we were inclined to kind of believe what she was saying?”

Slaze is going no where mind you. Regardless of the outcome this weekend, we are still standing by our teammate and will continue to support her.

— zoessie (@caydia_) September 27, 2021

Months after her ban, slaze is still pleading her innocence. She said she’s still working to get Riot to release the full video of what got her banned and the alleged “multiple red screens” that warned her she was playing with a cheater and continued doing so.

The former Polaris player isn’t sure what’s next, but she insists on one thing: She does not deserve to be banned, and if anything, she was a victim.

Slaze’s story

Slaze claims she did not know the person she was playing with was a cheater and that the Riot Anti-Cheat team has been trying to ban her and the cheater for months. She declined to elaborate on how she knew this.

“I have no way of knowing this person I’m playing with is cheating because he’s not blatantly cheating,” slaze said. “I’ve watched him whiff multiple times. I watched him be s***ty when he’s tired playing at night. I have clips of it, too, have him whiffing [shots] that I would roast him for.”

She claims to have met the cheater, called “forever” on Discord, during a live stream on her Twitch channel about two months before her ban. He asked to queue with her and from there slaze would duo ranked with forever after scrims or at the end of her day following their first encounter. Slaze said she never learned the cheater’s real name.

“He was a good player,” slaze said. “And also, usually I always solo queue, so having someone to queue with is the reason why I kept playing with him.”

After her ban came through, she said she confronted forever about the cheating allegations and said he copped to the crime.

Slaze added that she eventually blocked forever and has not spoken to him since. She said he is still playing with small streamers like herself and laments the fact that he remains active and unbanned.

Forever also allegedly sells high-ranked VALORANT accounts for money, and slaze said the Riot Anti-Cheat team has been trying to ban him for months. She declined to name the streamers she claims forever is queuing with because she does not want them to get banned as well.