The Girls Gank Squad: Meet the women creating an inclusive community for a game abandoned by its developer
How one woman sought to create a safe and competitive space for women in the Heroes of the Storm community.
Hello and welcome to the first newsletter from Sports Untold! I’m Benjamin Mock, thank you so much for stopping by! Before we get into today’s topic, please be sure to subscribe to receive future instalments of Sports Untold. And if you have friends who you think would like this too, why don’t you share it with them? Anyway, let’s get into why you’re here.
Today we’re talking about Heroes of the Storm, a video game largely abandoned by its developer in 2018, and the Girls Gank Squad - a group of women still playing the game and creating a safe, competitive space for female players.
So let’s look at what happened, how the Girls Gank Squad came about, and why it means so much to the women in the Heroes of the Storm community.
One last thing. for a brief explainer of the genre of game we’re going to be talking about today, MOBAs, here is a great two-minute video explaining the basics.
December 2018 - The End of Everything
Heroes of the Storm (also known as Heroes or HotS) is an online multiplayer game launched in mid-2015 by Blizzard, the company behind games like World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, and Overwatch.
Heroes was a new venture for the company, breaking into the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre. While the game strayed very little from the core mechanics of the genre, it had some well-received elements that differentiated it from its stalwart competition - games like DoTA 2 and League of Legends.
Firstly, the experience points needed to level up your character during a match were earned on a team basis rather than an individual one, meaning that there was a much bigger focus on teamwork and co-operative play. And second, the game drew its roster of playable characters from existing Blizzard properties, creating an All Star-esque environment that allowed fans to play as their favourite characters (sometimes for the first time, in cases of NPCs from other games).
While HotS was not Blizzard’s most popular title, the data available indicates there were around 6.5 million active players in late 2018.
And entering December 2018, the game was in a good place. The previous month had seen the third edition of the Heroes Global Championship Grand Final, the conclusion of the game’s premier esports competition, played in front of a sold-out crowd at BlizzCon in Anaheim. November had also seen the release of Orphea, the first playable character unique to the game.
According to Twitch streamer Kiye Berries, who has been playing HotS since it was in technical alpha and who spoke to me via email:
“Things had felt so good…the community was on fire, ready for news about the 2019 season”
Then December 13th happened.
Twitch streamer, long-time HotS player, and founder of HotS-centric gaming organization Girls Gank Squad, Jazzalene remembers exactly where she was on that fateful day:
“It was actually the day of my husband’s work Christmas party. So I had million things going on that day – getting ready for that; helping one of my friends get ready for that...And I just started getting pinged from Discord out of nowhere saying it had been cancelled and you need to go read this message.”
Blizzard had announced via blog post that Heroes of the Storm was to undergo a significant downsizing. Developers were being moved to other projects; updates for the game would be less frequent and focus more on long-term sustainability; and perhaps most damning of all, the game’s official esports competitions would be cancelled.
This came out of nowhere for seemingly everyone. Kiye Berries described it as a “complete shock”, while reporting from Polygon published the claims from multiple pro players and content creators that they had been told by reputable sources within Blizzard that there were plans for a 2019 esports season. But for Jazzalene, her immediate thoughts were for the community:
“I was having this whole crisis on the way to the Christmas party. Like, what’s going to happen to the game? Is the community just going to die off? At this point I felt like we’re gonna lose a lot of people from it”
Jazzalene’s worries would be soon proven correct. Pro players and content creators, suddenly left with nothing, moved on other avenues for their craft. More casual members of the community left before the game inevitably stagnated.
To the gaming community at large, the game was dead.
Grassroots and GGS
But there was still life in the HotS community. Jazzalene was still there.
Jazzalene began playing Heroes of the Storm soon after the game came out in 2015. Her husband was a long-time Blizzard fan, so she joined him and his friends in trying out this new game. She quickly fell in love with Heroes and the game was front and centre on her Twitch channel when she began regularly streaming in 2018.
It wasn’t long before she had found a group of other women to enjoy the game with. Eventually, that would become the Girls Team League, which organized matches between teams of women.
So when the downsizing happened, Jazzalene was over three years into building friendships, creating a community, and mastering the game. She wasn’t going to just let that all slip away.
She continued to play, and continued to provide a space for women to play competitive matches of Heroes without having to rely on the game’s match-making system, and thus putting themselves at the mercy of random strangers. Video games, especially online multiplayers, still remain incredibly hostile to women. As one woman told me anonymously:
“It’s not safe to be who you are when you game as a woman”
Grassroots organizing has always been vital for the growth and continuity of esports. Before big companies saw esports as profitable and started investing, the industry was largely fan-run and organized on the local level. This legacy remains today and is the backbone of the community.
It was one of these fan organizations that would provide a boost to Jazzalene’s plans. HeroesHype is a tournament organizer that had been responsible for running Open Division, the lowest level of official Heroes esports prior to the downsizing.
While they were still organizing tournaments, content creation became a much bigger part of their portfolio. Jazzalene joined the team in February 2019, bringing Girls Team League with her.
After a few months, HeroesHype officially launched a rebranded version of Girls Team League – the Girls Gank Squad, or GGS. Much like Girls Team League, GGS streams saw teams of women duke it out in best-of-5 series. However, now they came with snazzy new overlays as well as professional-level casting from Jazzalene and a rotating cast of guest casters and commentators. But the aim was still the same. In the words of Jazzalene herself:
“Girls Gank Squad provides a competitive environment for women to play against each other weekly, build friendships and start a community up in general.”
But for me, speaking with Jazzalene, GGS really came into its own after she left HeroesHype in February 2020. Once again, she made some tweaks to the streaming overlays to make it her own, but the content was the same.
Jazzalene is very active on Twitch, streaming multiple times a week. She casts for the amateur Heroes league, the Nexus Gaming Series, but Friday nights are reserved for GGS. Every week, two teams of women go head to head in a best-of-5 series, casted by Jazzalene and a guest. Sometimes the winning team returns the following week and sometimes it’s two new teams. But every week ends up being a must-watch event.
Aside from the desire to create a safe space for women to play in, inclusivity is a major motivator for GGS:
“We don’t want to say “oh you’re bronze [the lowest competitive rank in ranked play], you can’t play”…we want everyone to be able to play here”
Gatekeeping has always been a thing in gaming, but it’s especially heinous when it comes to women. Whether it’s the tired take of “hurburduh, girls no play video games!!”, or the argument that women just don’t have the skills to be taken seriously, there is always something that is used to keep women out.
As I explored in an article for Power Plays back in September, the esports industry is overwhelmingly inaccessible for female players. But what Jazzalene has done with GGS is create an environment where the matches feel like they matter and are treated the same way the ones in an esports competition would be. And with a focus on inclusivity, GGS allows women of any rank or skill level to gain this experience. As Jazzalene noted during our interview:
“I wanted to prove that girls could kick ass at video games”
It’s hard to overstate the impact of GGS on its community. Everyone I spoke who had some connection to GGS had only positive things to say about it:
Kiye Berries, who was personally invited by Jazzalene to take part in GGS said:
“GGS is really special to me because it highlights just how many women are out here playing the game…GGS is such a cool event to meet new people and make friends, play the game on a more coordinated level, and feel safe doing it”
While former HotS streamer ThistleDew, who has previously appeared on GGS, told me over Discord that:
“I think it’s really great to have a place where you can play the game without having to risk random queueing”
And beyond the HotS community itself, GGS is having an impact. Jazzalene is a big believer in using her platform for good and has helped organize two GGS charity drives. These events, one a coordinated stream-a-thon and the other a knockout HotS tournament, have raised just under $9500.
(If you’re reading this on December 11th, GGS will be hosting a holiday tournament to benefit Toys for Tots on December 12th at 12PM PT/3PM ET/8PM GMT on Twitch)
Jazzalene’s work, and Girls Gank Squad as an initiative, perfectly highlights the power of esports’ grassroots organizing, especially for a group as marginalized within esports as women. Blizzard may have abandoned their game, but Jazzalene has helped give it a second life.
The Future and the CCL
I asked Jazzalene where she wanted to take GGS:
“Ideally? Expand? Bring in more people, maybe start doing games other that Heroes, led by women who knows those games. But most of all, just keep providing a space for women to play games.”
And while I was writing this article, a potential first step towards that future became available. On October 31st, Jazzalene received notification that she had completed the criteria needed to apply for Twitch’s partner program, which gives creators greater control over the monetization of their streams. While Jazzalene’s visa status means she can’t apply right away, it is an amazing (and well-deserved) opportunity for her.
But it’s not just Jazzalene through whom HotS is making a resurgence. Earlier this year, Minneapolis-based media agency Wisdom Media announced the launch of the Community Clash League (CCL), a new HotS esports venture. The 8-team league was met with a largely positive reaction and sponsorship from popular tabletop roleplaying website Roll20 gave the league another boost of confidence.
And then came the bullshit.
A lot of ex-pro players resurfaced at the announcement of the league, eager to get back on a HotS team. Soon after, a Discord server appeared. While in no way connected to or affiliated with Wisdom Media or the CCL, the server became the place for prominent in-houses to take place. In other words, the server was putting on games in order for scouts and organizations to gauge the talent that would be available for the October 17th entry draft.
There’s just one problem. Admission to the server required someone already on the server to vouch for your membership. This meant that the majority of people admitted were well-known former pros - excluding basically all women, new players, and anyone else who wasn’t particularly status quo. This didn’t particularly gel with the ethos of the CCL, which was advertised as a place where anyone or any organization was welcome.
After speaking out about this, Jazzalene took matters into her own hands. She dedicated one of her GGS timeslots to hosting her own in-house for the people were going to lose out:
“There are absolutely women good enough to play in this league. I know women who have the skill to play in this league…but obviously, they are just being denied the chance to even be considered.”
According to Jazzalene, the stream was attended by a number of orgs that would be members of the CCL. The stream was also open to more than just women in order to help anyone who was being overlooked in favour of old pros and the perennial boys’ club.
And come draft night, a woman would be picked. In the final round of the six-round draft, 30K Esports took DPS player Breakwood, meaning that a woman would feature in the CCL.
However, things were bittersweet. Jazzalene had told me during our interview that:
“I know that if a woman is drafted, we’re [GGS] all going to be supporting that team. The whole community is going to be behind her”
But when I reached out to her about a week after the draft, her reaction was mixed,
“I’m glad that Breakwood was picked up…[but] Breakwood literally had to do 10x as much work to just get noticed than any other player, drafted or not. She was constantly DMing orgs, sending them clips and highlights of her plays, tagging them on socials. So it has the appearance that a women has to do all of that, just to get drafted.”
The viewer chat of the draft’s livestream was also…pretty shitty:
“There was some really sexist stuff being said when she got drafted. The tame side of it basically was people calling it a marketing decision for the org that picked her up. Not that she has the skill to be there, they just wanted to look progressive.”
This was something she had alluded to in our original interview – prior to the draft, there had been plenty of chatter from the community that if a woman were to go in the draft, it would only be because the organization wanted to look good (because when you have six draft picks for your five-player team, wasting one of your picks on a player you’re only picking for ‘woke points’ makes soooooo much sense, right?)
Jazzalene also remarked on where Breakwood had been picked:
“She was picked up as a 6th, and so far it appears she will be subbing. So I really hope she’s at least given the opportunity to play. It would kind of suck for the women looking up to her to only see her stay on the bench the entire time.”
This in itself is very indicative of Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon, the sole woman in the Overwatch League. While she saw decent playing time in the league’s first season, Geguri now spends her time as a barely-used sub.
During the writing of this piece, 30k released Breakwood and signed her to their newly formed academy squad, ‘30k Black’. Since that November 18th announcement, 30k has not said anything else concerning their academy team.
While the move was made to acquire Fury, the first overall pick from the CCL draft and a successful long-time HoTS pro, and Breakwood assured fans on Twitter that she was okay with the move, it’s still disappointing to see that there are no women playing in the CCL and the only woman drafted was removed so quickly.
TLDR
Video games come and go. Some last decades, others are dead almost as soon as they arrive. Heroes of the Storm seemed to going strong before it being unexpectedly gutted by its developer. And while many fans understandably left the community, a group of women worked tirelessly to ensure an active community remained, while also providing a safe space for people like themselves to play the game. The work of Jazzalene, and the rest of the woman involved in GGS, is an invaluable part of keeping the game they love alive.
If you want to watch GGS for yourself, it airs every Friday at 6PM PT on Jazzalene’s Twitch.
If you identify as a woman and are interested in getting involved with GGS, you can contact Jazzalene on Twitter.
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