Last week, it was announced that a group of women would be creating an organization whose purpose was to hunt down trolls and harassers in CS:GO and to punish them. The group, calling themselves the Bully Hunters, was set to premier with a livestream on Thursday alongside the IRL stream ZombiUnicorn, but on just the first day of their premier stream, it became abundantly clear that it was all a shame. The ‘bullies’ were previously recorded, ZombiUnicorn had a history of bullying (a long history), the specialist they had on about statistics on bullying and harassment was fake, and after the community lambasted and defrauded the movement, all their sponsors high-tailed it.

For most of the gaming community, this was an obvious outcome, not least of which because it was completely stupid, but also because it was completely cringey and failed to understand the gaming community whatsoever. From the start, the group’s announcement sounded like teenagers talking on Live Journal (which we now know was the fault of the marketing companies behind it). They may as well have said, “We don’t understand gamers, but we’ll be damned if that is going to stop us from protecting and harassing them.” Maybe that isn’t quite what they said, but this is an actual announcement from the Bully Hunters group (and let’s not get started on that name).

There’s a lot of stuff wrong with this. To start with, most gamers understand who and what they are. They are normal people with normal lives who like games. Or, in some cases, they are unhealthy, lazy, and maybe a little out of touch with reality. Nowhere in either of those worlds are they elite anything, and the moment the Bully Hunters told the rest of the community ‘we are better than you’, they lost them. It doesn’t matter how altruistic they thought they were being. No one wants to feel like a child being protected, least of all by a group of comically naïve ‘elite, vigilante, female gamers.’ And let’s be honest, if this had been male gamers, it would have been just as laughable. However, it certainly doesn’t help that their big streamer is a beauty and makeup vlogger who was defrauded by internet sleuths for being a bully herself. It doesn’t really scream ‘street cred’.

Aside from the fact that everyone knows harassment comes with the territory of online gaming, there’s also the fact that the CS:GO community kind of seems like the worst community on the planet to try and do this with. League of Legends and Overwatch both have hugely diverse and often young audiences, but the CS:GO crowd is a bit… rougher.

Last year, on Reddit and Steam, different users took to the soapbox to lament to their community about the harassment they received in CS:GO. The community’s response was less than supportive and much more in the veins of the Dark Souls community when someone asks for help.

The Reddit post made on the topic was mocked even worse. The first response chanted, “SAFE SPACE!!” with following comments like, “Here’s how things work in CS: when someone is rude and hurts your feefees, you open the scoreboard and mute him. Done.” The vast majority of comments all agreed – mute the person harassing you and move on. Stop making a big deal out of it. There’s a good chance that some of this is just part and parcel for the CS:GO community, but it also makes sense with gaming as a whole. Think about it.

Every game has a singular purpose – present a challenge, force the player to overcome the challenge. Whether you are playing a puzzle game, a sports game, or an RPG, it is about the player overcoming challenges. Hell, the entire Dark Souls franchise is based around two words, “Git Gud.” That’s sort of the rallying cry of gamers. So what Bully Hunters failed fundamentally to understand was that gamers are designed to overcome challenges. What self-respecting gamer – male or female – is going to go crying to some group to save them from the mean people online? From the very start, it was ridiculous, and it made it abundantly clear how this organization was a sham, which it definitely was.

While there were initial talks that the whole thing was the fault of SteelSeries – as the primary supporter of the movement – the marketing firms behind it later came forward to claim credit. As reported by Polygon, the two groups were FCB Chicago and New Honor Society – two marketing agencies. Nothing says “we know gamers” like marketing agencies that look like this.

Maybe we can blame the fact that Bully Hunters made zero sense on the fact that it was marketing agencies, not gamers, who designed it, but it is pretty inexcusable that so many companies in the gaming vertical somehow fell for this. It seems that even one of these companies should have had an actual gamer among them that could have told them in giant letters this was a shit idea.

Aside from the fact that gamers hated everything about Bully Hunters, the logistics of it are complete gibberish. Just how did these Bully Hunters propose to get into a game – which might be full – and get onto the opposing team all before the Bully simply logs off? And what would happen if a Bully Hunter killed the target – do they obnoxiously self-advertise next? Do they trash talk the victim? How exactly does this spread awareness? It seems an awful lot like bullying people but through an entire organization – which hundreds of gamers online were quick to point out.

Instead of teaching people to be grown-ups who are responsible for who they listen to, Bully Hunters was promoting extreme reactions and countermeasures, and by no means could that POSSIBLY have backfired. Unless, of course, any person with two brain cells realized how much more abusable the Bully Hunters would be than swatting. There was absolutely nothing to stop someone from calling in the Hunters on innocent targets, or against each other for fun, or for the sole purpose of getting attention because they like it. Or, in the most likely scenario, the entire community would have constantly called on them as the joke that they were just so they could mock and torment them.

How about in the future, no marketing agencies and detached-from-reality gamers decide to try and teach the gaming community a ‘lesson,’ even if they think it is one the community needs to learn. The only thing that happened here was some people were discredited and humiliated, and a bunch of other people were woefully embarrassed, especially the sponsors that were hoodwinked into this Scooby Doo disaster.