Gorillajones123 made waves online when he publicly announced that he’d quit his job to go pro, with some big names in the LoL community like LS warning him that dropping everything to go pro is a risky proposition that may not pay off.
However, he’s been grinding regardless and is working toward his goal of making it to the big leagues as a top laner. But tragedy struck when he got autofilled jungle for a game, ending the game with 3 kills and 21 deaths.
Having 21 deaths in a 27 minute game would mean the player in question would have almost spent more time dead than alive in the match, with Riot’s ban system concluding that he was intentionally dying. But Gorillajones claimed his innocence, saying that he didn’t lose the match for his team on purpose.
It got to the point where Riot had their “apex skill analyst” team step in and prove, no, he really did just have that bad of a game, and now they’re internally reviewing their autoban system.
Riot apologizes for banning Gorillajones amid inting allegations
In the average League of Legends ranked match, a player getting autofilled out of their role can be bad news for your team. As a player, you’d typically want to be able to play at least two roles at the level of your current rank in order to consistently win games and climb.
But, when you get into the game’s highest ranks, finding players who can actually do well in an autofilled role gets rare. It’s at the point where Riot hid player names in the lobby to partially combat people dodging games because they noticed their teammates got autofilled.
Gorillajones got tossed into the jungle role when he typically plays top lane and got placed against Bel’Veth, a champion notorious for being able to run other junglers over in the early game, especially at level 1.
Perry, a former pro jungler who now streams and coaches, took a look at his match and pointed out Gorillajones’ mistakes. However, the ways in which he died didn’t seem intentional after thorough review.
The enemy Bel’Veth was permanently in his jungle, farming Gorillajones about as often as she was his camps. With no way to get farm and levels and her just sitting there and waiting for him over and over, he was effectively shut out of the game from minute one and died over and over again.
An experienced jungler would possibly how to deal with the issue, but he didn’t.
This match was such a rare case that Riot stepped in to analyze it after Gorillajones appealed his ban. Riot not only reversed their decision, but are using this match to do an internal review of how their automated ban system works.
“Our apex skill analyst team took a look today and believes our punishment was overly harsh. We’re unbanning effective immediately and are undertaking a deeper review of the automated systems that rely on KDA and excessive deaths to detect and punish negative behavior,” said Drew Levin, a Riot dev who’s very vocal on Twitter and is trying to improve the solo queue experience.
That said, the aspiring pro has been having a rough go of things in solo queue, with him trying to start a fresh account only to get stuck in Diamond for a while with some rough matches.
This comes after Gorillajones announced on May 6, 2025 that he’d saved up enough money to go pro and planned to quit his job until he got there. Despite these setbacks, he still believes in his dreams of going pro, saying “Nothing can stop me” after news of the unban came from Riot.
So, while there have certainly been some bumps in the road for Gorillajones, his commitment to achieving the dream of becoming a LoL pro is admirable.
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