About

RedBuffed is a performance analytics tool for women playing League of Legends. We cross-reference your match data (winrate, KDA, aggression, champion performance) with your menstrual cycle phases to reveal patterns that your normal statistics never show.

Why we exist

To move the needle on women in esports. Concretely.

In April 2026, Nic0le (former rank 1 Clash Royale, LoL Master, ex-Rioter who pushed Game Changers internally) posted a thread that spread across the esports sphere. The trigger: an article on periods and gaming performance that split the community into two camps — one calling it misogynistic, the other using it to argue women are inferior. In her thread, Nic0le rejects both.

Her starting point is personal. She writes: "Some women (not all women) do play worse when they are on their periods. It is an objective truth, by the very fact that I had to experience the most brutal versions of it possible before I realized it for myself." This is not a condemnation. She is clear that women are just as good as men in competitive gaming. What she takes issue with is the denial.

She draws a direct analogy with medicine: the same way doctors have brushed off women's health issues for decades because men don't have them, refusing to study the impact of periods on performance is refusing to help women who are trying to go pro — and actively harming them.

She describes the mechanism: "Say a girlie is trying to go pro. Them putting in 16 hours on every day of their period when it impacts them, not realizing — that is literally them going from Masters to Plat, or some other elo drop. That elo will quite literally take them the rest of the month to get back. Frustration at the drop will oftentimes convince them that they are not talented, and that they should give up. When in reality, they are simply not playing to their full potential at those times — and there is a perfectly normal, biological explanation for it."

Since leaving the competitive scene, she writes it herself: "Spreading awareness on this topic is the most I can do for the next generation of girls trying to go pro. Hopefully they don't have to suffer in solidarity and go through all the pains the last generation did."

RedBuffed is our answer to that call.

The science we follow

RedBuffed is grounded in two bodies of work we cite explicitly:

• Tony "Saskio" Chau's pilot study (LoL coach, 2026): 267 ranked games, 5 players, 5 months of tracking. A consistent winrate delta (~5.9 points) in favor of off-period phases, across 100% of players. Read the methodology.
• Riley Dunn's research, ESSA-accredited exercise physiologist and PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology. Her thesis: The Female Esports Athlete - Impact of the Menstrual Cycle on Esports Health and Performance. The first formal academic work on this subject, and Saskio is in discussions to contribute his dataset.

We're not inventing the science. We're making its tools accessible to every player who wants to understand her own rhythm.

What we're not

We're not a regular cycle tracker. No moods, no symptoms, no intimate logs stored. Only your phase dates.

We're not a tool to exclude players or to justify a so-called "biological handicap." The exact opposite. Ignoring the cycle to pretend "everyone's the same" is what holds women back in esports. Knowing your cycle means playing by your own rules, not hiding behind them.

We don't sell anything. We don't serve ads. Your cycle data is encrypted at rest with a per-user derived key. You can delete everything in one click.

The team

RedBuffed is an independent beta project. No financial ties to Riot Games. No ties to any cycle-tracking app publisher. Questions: [email protected].

None of the individuals mentioned on this site (Tony "Saskio" Chau, Nic0le, Riley Dunn) are in active collaboration with RedBuffed. Their work is referenced for informational purposes only.