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Rumay “Hafu” Wang revealed on Twitter recently that a team called “Gonna r*pe Hafu at Regionals” had qualified for the Blizzcon 2008 Regionals.
Hafu is a former eSports professional for the games World of Warcraft and Hearthstone. She started her professional career as a World of Warcraft gamer after the PvP arena mode was released back in 2007.
Regardless, Hafu revealed that she participated in the 3x3 World of Warcraft tournament held at BlizzCon 2008. The streamer shed light on potential difficulties that women can face in the gaming industry and claimed that the team with the inappropriate name qualified for the Regionals as well.
Hafu, who is now 30 years old, said that she had to go through the ordeal as a 17-year old teenager. A host of content creators including Imane “Pokimane” Anys and Rachel “Valkyrae” Hofstetter reacted to the post and thanked Hafu for paving the way for other women to enter the industry.
Hafu reveals bizarre Blizzcon 2008 incident, notable content creators react
It is quite a bizarre phenomenon for a 17-year-old gamer to go to one of her first tournaments and be subjected to such an insult. Hafu has been active on YouTube since May 2015 and on Twitch since November 2016.
She has participated in various World of Warcraft and Hearthstone tournaments over the years and finished 4th in the first and the second edition of the “Lord of the Arena” Hearthstone tournament.
Although Hafu only became active on YouTube around 2015, she has been actively participating in eSports tournaments since 2008. She also had a short stint playing Bloodline Champions professionally and has represented Cloud9 and G2 esports organization in the past.
Hafu previously claimed during a live stream that she was discouraged from continuing as an esports professional because of the incident at Blizzcon 2008.
As can be seen, a range of content creators complimented Hafu and stated that she had helped pave the way for other women in the gaming industry. The specific Regionals took place around September/October of 2008.
Hafu claimed that she was told “it was just a joke” when she protested against the team’s name. Most content creators congratulated her for being able to recover from such an experience and thought that the incident was disgusting.
Regardless, this is not the first time that Hafu has spoken out against toxic behavior against women in the gaming industry. During previous streams, she has made the following comments about the overall toxicity that women have to deal with:
“When you have a tournament and there’s just one girl in a sea of guys, the Twitch chat is disgusting. When you have 70,000 people watching a stream, and all you see is terrible things being said about you, it's kind of like, why am I competing? [Viewers] know to press where it hurts, right? And when you kind of show where it hurts, people will just keep pressing.”
Most female content creators also agreed that the situation was a lot better nowadays, something more experienced streamers such as Hafu helped in achieving.
