It’s not often I’ll directly go out of my way to tell someone how to do their job. In truth I do try and avoid it for the most part if for no other reason than I despise it when people presume to do it to me. However there are the moments of inexplicable incompetence and protracted sagas of stupidity that can only but elicit one response. Like the amount of money spent on the Millennium Dome or the chairmanship of Mike Ashley there’s just some things that are so incredibly stupid and unjust they shake you from any apathy you might have been settled in.
Every week, it seems, I’m always writing about all the fuck-ups that make the e-sports industry the joke it’s become. Financially corrupt managers, compulsive liars, deluded players and everything in between that seems to constitute behaviour that lies on the darker side of the autistic spectrum. It’d be nice to write something positive, something that maybe might make those who read it believe that finally people were getting it, that e-sports (Starcraft 2 not withstanding) wasn’t just a jerk-off.
Sadly, we can’t even rely on the leagues to behave sensibly and point to the light. We’ve seen it before time and time again with ESL, giving out penalty points for reasons that are stretching the rules thinner than Christian Bale in the machinist. Didn’t put a capital letter in one of the words in your demo? Penalty points. Daring to discuss anything that’s unjust with the press… Penalty points. To the wrong team. Fuck it, penalty points for all. Then we sort of have to pretend we’re doing you a favour by having an amnesty when in reality it’s because we’ve gone so mad impersonating members of the Gestapo we’ve basically brought the league to the point of potential collapse. Ah yes. Those were the days.
It seems that ESEA is keen to get in on the act now. Not that it hasn’t before of course. When the league ventured into European territory it was nothing short of a mess. An arrogant refusal to listen about technical issues, such as Zblock not being correctly incorporated into their client, and inexperienced admins who had a track record for little more than stupidity, saw the league missed about as much as Gary Glitter’s sideline as a kids party entertainer when it slinked back across the Atlantic, vowing to return.
Americans spoke in defence of the league that has kept their scene afloat for so long, said that the Europeans didn’t know how good they had it and were being too picky. They may have had a point at the time but recent events are hardly an advert for the ESEA way of doing things. I of course refer to the decision to ban Team Forbidden for 150 days from the league, a decision that not only takes the side that finishes 4th in the league and consigns them to a period of enforced activity but also one that effectively relegates them as well, meaning they may never play in the Invite league again.
What sort of behaviour could cause such heinous punishment? It would have to be something serious. Perhaps they shat in another team’s shoes before a big game. Perhaps they blu-tacked pubes to the bottom of all the admin’s cups before making them a “nice cup of tea”. Even worse than that, perhaps they cheated in their games…
Incredibly they did none of these things. The team was banned for uploading a video of them drinking at the ESEA LAN. ESEA said they don’t want to be associated with “under age drinking”, which is fair enough. The only problem with this logic is the video shows Forbidden players who are 21 or over having a drink, the only under age player on their roster not being shown drinking in the footage. Further problems arise when you consider that the people who were under age, and indeed supplied the alcohol, were from another team that wasn’t punished at all despite the ESEA’s draconian stance. Confused? Then you’re a fucking idiot. It’s quite simple really and it’s simple to see the injustice of it all.
The mastermind behind this bewildering decision is Eric “lpkane” Thunberg, the co-founder of the league. He’s adamant that, despite all evidence to the contrary, this is the right thing to do. Others seem to think this is not the case but, of course, there are those who are happy to support it both privately and publicly for fairly obvious reasons. Is it any surprise that Team ForbiddeN, who performed poorly at LAN when compared to their online performances, have few friends in the Invite division. Even if you overlook the fact that they are going to have to do a lot more to shake their “onliner” tag (not that they are likely to get the chance now) it’s just common sense to want them out if you play in that league. They finished fourth, so you reduce the field of competition quite considerably if you remove them.
Of course it’s clear that were this not a team of relatively obscure players who had come straight up from Main and into the LAN finals, then chances are they’d be dealt with differently. You see, ESEA, and in particular Eric, might crow from the rooftops about how they don’t want to be associated with undernage drinking but they’ve refused to punish Check Six Gaming for doing it. Oh, and they’ve failed to take action against one of their admin team being in the room when it was happening, clearly, you know, approving of it.
The fact that to show they won’t tolerate this sort of behaviour they’ve elected to ban a team who weren’t indulging in the behaviour they won’t tolerate, while affording those who were tolerance, is so mind bogglingly stupid it’d be hilarious. Yet what’s not hilarious is the fact that Team ForbiddeN, as with all serious ESEA competitors, are paying customers. They’ve paid for a service, broke none of the terms and conditions associated with that service and been punished all the same. For doing nothing wrong they’ve also had the chance of another season’s earnings taken away for them…
The ESEA would contest that they have indeed done something wrong – filmed it happening and uploaded it. Clearly this is what Eric is taking issue with. His actions in response are a clear confession to this. Why else would you punish the team who were responsible for the video, while ignoring the ones that actually broke the rules? Why else would you make a crazed demand for a sleeping person to remove the video in no less than one hour in the dead of night, safe in the knowledge that nothing would happen? Why, if it was a matter of publicity, would you sit and argue on your own forums when you could simply delete threads about it?
The stupidity of the decision was not in isolation – several paying users who spoke out in favour of the team, who remember have done nothing “wrong” by any stretch of the imagination, said they would cancel their subscription unless the decision was changed. Lpkane happily jumped the gun and cancelled them for them, publicly, making quite a show of it all. There were some who didn’t want to show that much solidarity but were banned for speaking out in favour of the team in threads. Once this had been done all further discussion was quashed and the players had to come to European websites to have the facts of the matter published. Yeah, ESEA also pretty much have the news side of things wrapped up too now that GotFrag is an empty shell of what it used to be soon to be a mouthpiece for the MLG empire.
I read the statement provided to me by ForbiddeN’s captain, Jonathan “Messiah” Hammond, in disbelief. First, I’ll speak plainly and say I found the statement to be borderline hysterical, extremely over the top and trying to sound like we were in the midst of some sort of court battle. Whatever, we’re all guilty of that in e-sports anyway, the pettiness of it all seeming all consuming at times. There was no need for eloquence to point out the stupidity of lpkane’s actions, to demonstrate that the ESEA ruling was completely without merit or foundation. ESEA have released no formal statement on the matter. Quite simply, they don’t think they have to. Yet what they’ve done sets a fairly dangerous precedent.
Ultimately they have wrongly punished a team, stuck to that incorrect decision based on their status, then used it as an opportunity to flex their muscles and show just what a monopoly they have on the US scene. The message is clear – we’ll do what we want and there’s nothing you can do about it, paying customer or not.
It’s true of course. They are absolutely on the money. There will be no large show of solidarity even if there is a lot of simpatico. No-one will rally a boycott or even threaten to because they want to use the service and don’t want to have it taken away from them. The majority of people who use ESEA won’t care and the competitive community can breath easy because there’s one less team to worry about now. Everyone will go back to business as usual now that the drama has blown over.
Except Team ForbiddeN of course, who for reasons not covered in any code of conduct, find themselves back to square one and probably likely to throw in the towel. Their success was unprecedented, the first time a team has come from main and made it to the LAN finals. To have to do it twice without the benefit of catching people off guard? It’s unlikely. And that’s if they even want to try, the players rightly wary of competing in a league again that operates in such a manner.
All I’ll say is this. It’d be nice in a few days to see that Eric has come to his senses and decided to do the right thing. It’d be nice to write a column about how ESEA made a mistake but were savvy enough to admit that and to put it right. That’s not going to happen. Lpkane is having too much fun “defeating people” and for them nothing has changed. They still remain the only league worth talking about in North America, with the best prizes and the biggest interest. They still have a business model that allows them to earn money and to eye expansion to increase their capacity to do so.
Remember this then if you have sense of justice because the only difference you’ll make is by shunning them when they do come back. Any league that makes the ESL’s decisions seem sensible and fair by comparison is not one to be welcomed and e-sports on this side of the water has an abundance of megalomaniacs. There isn’t room for any more.