SkRossi: "There were paid groups whose job was to create negative PR. People literally paid to go online and trash players"

In an interview with our colleagues from VALO2ASIA, Ganesh "SkRossi" Gangadhar looked back on his time in VCT Pacific with the Indian organization Global Esports. In it, he notably talks about a group of people who were allegedly paid to attack both him and the club online. Having joined the organization at the end of 2020, the Indian player took advantage of GE securing a slot in the Asian league to continue his journey with the team and compete in the VALORANT Champions Tour.

While revisiting that 2023 season, SkRossi explained that, in hindsight, he does not understand the criticism he received at the time regarding his level of play. He then opened up about how he felt during that period and shared a rather surprising episode. He explained that he was depressed at the time because of what were perceived as “his performances,” even saying, “Of course I’m SkRossi and I get blamed.”

Andi "Sleepy" Bangsawan, one of the four interviewers on the podcast, followed up by stating that “the entire online conversation sphere affects players.” A sentence to which the Indian player immediately responded with a firm “Definitely.”

He went on to say that people “often speak online without thinking about the consequences,” before emphasizing that those words do have a real impact: “and it does have an impact, even if they don’t realize it.” In his remarks, he still made a distinction between fans offering constructive criticism, noting that he now has more perspective: “I’ve been dealing with fans for three, four, five years now.”

However, he explained that what he mostly saw, and what affected him the most, was not “regular fan behavior.” He even concluded by saying, “There were certain people, certain groups, who didn’t want to criticize; they wanted you to suffer.”

He then went on to talk about those specific people, explaining that he was shocked to learn that some of the criticism had been organized: “There were paid groups whose job was to create negative PR… People literally paid to go online and trash players.” According to him and screenshots he was able to see, these groups were gathered on Discord servers and decided how they would act and “what topic they were going to hate on that day.” This is also how he realized that receiving such violent and recurring criticism was not normal: “That’s when I realized this wasn’t random,” he said.

As for who was behind it and why, SkRossi admitted it was hard to know for sure, but he believes that “it was the first time an Indian organization, or an Indian player, was playing at that level internationally.” He continued: “Maybe some people didn’t like that, or didn’t want it to happen smoothly.” He added that learning about this deeply disappointed him, and that he did not know “this kind of negative PR existed back then.” He even went as far as saying: “Realizing that there are professional trolls, with entire crews dedicated to this, was shocking.”

He concluded this story by stating that all of this happened during an already “tough period,” and that the attacks came at a time when he was not doing well mentally: “What hurt the most is that they didn’t know what I was dealing with internally at the time.” Despite everything, SkRossi now seems less affected by this chapter of his career, explaining that “I wish things had gone better, but it was just an unlucky situation,” and that “I still don’t know who was behind it, or why, but it happened.”