Open letter to ESEA

Previously unpublished open letter for competitive gaming team Tricked ESports where I work under the pseudonym 'Caliburn'. The team wanted to express displeasure after a rules interpretation and subjective system lost them a tournament spot that typically would have been theirs.

Why ESEA blocked our qualification to premier and the problem with subjective invites

Over the last few months our Counter-Strike team and the staff supporting them have put in a seemingly never-ending amount of hours to keep up with all of the leagues that we’ve been eligible to play in, now after a long journey through ESEA Intermediate and ESEA Main we’re all hit with the news that despite a top 4 finish, we won’t be making the move up to ESEA Premier. Tricked is one of two teams held back from making the switch, the other being fellow Danish squad ‘Alpha Gaming’. I wanted to take some time to share the facts as I know them and my speculation on why this has happened.

For a while now ESEA has ran a simple qualification system taking the top teams from the play-offs in one league and moving them up to the next one, presenting any team with sufficient talent a chance to progress. Today we’re awkwardly reminded of the league transitions FAQ as some teams skip all the way from Open and Intermediate to Premier, whilst the rest have paid, played and thought they qualified only to be stuck in limbo.

“Premier Divisions:
Move up and move downs for the Premier division are done based on admin discretion and the below guidelines do not necessarily apply. We reserve the right to add or remove teams based on our own guidelines during the off-season. We also reserve the right to adjust the amount of teams that are moved up or moved down between seasons to maintain competitive divisions.”

In short, a team can put in the work and achieve the success, but the final barrier to entry is an ambiguously worded paragraph and an admin turned bouncer who gives no notice or explanation as to why a team didn’t make the guest list. Unsurprising then that the comment section is filled with complaints and calls for more transparency.

The subjective invite problem

The main issue with subjective invites is one of professional integrity, when personal preference becomes the status quo, at best it bars the hard work of lesser known teams and at worst damages an entire league organiser with accusations of corruption. Tricked and Alpha Gaming may both be a way off from becoming a household name in the Counter-Strike scene, but they’ve both done the legwork to start heading there. Being robbed of a chance to progress by more famous teams that didn’t even take part in the ladder system, watching them arrive and quietly be fast tracked to where it becomes lucrative to do so raises more than a few questions.

The only European team without an instantly recognisable name to be invited in this way is Bulgarian squad ‘Bpro Gaming’, skipping straight to ESEA Premier after a first place finish in ESEA Intermediate. It’s worth mentioning then that Tricked finished first in the previous ESEA Intermediate league but still had to battle through ESEA Main. After our third place finish things were looking good, now it looks like thanks to admin subjectivity we’re going to be forced to do it all over again.

“I understand the league should be as strong as possible but how does that explain the Intermediate league winner moving directly into Premier? Tricked won the Intermediate division last season and received no bonus for doing so.

Before taking part in ESEA Main we looked at the rulebook changes on the website, when an ESEA admin was asked, they confirmed that the moveups would be done the same way as before (http://archive.is/ml9Cp). As a result, we were sure about how many slots were being given and what we needed to do.

People have to understand that playing an ESEA season is very hard work, it leaves teams open to getting “strat countered” and drastically increases the fatigue of the players. At this point it seems we invested our time into this league on false information as we were never given any warning about the premier spot changes. Naturally we would have dropped playing ESEA if we knew about this strange decision to let the lower division winner get a direct spot and to hold qualifications for the last to spots. Tricked could have saved both time and money, and yet would still have had similar chances to make it into Premier.”

Morten Jensen CEO Tricked Esport

At the time of writing our appeal to ESEA has sadly been dismissed and the last European spots are set to be decided by the ‘Mountain Dew League’ and ESL’s Major league qualifier. After all the talk about prestige and team quality in the leagues it seems strange to schedule the first qualifier at the exact same time as E-League’s open qualifier. The first season of E-League saw such explosive popularity that it seems obvious where the most talented teams will be trying their luck, opening up the Premier spots given by the Mountain Dew League to teams that might not have qualified if all things were equal.

ESEA, let’s not make the same mistakes next season. We’re at a time when our industry is growing every day and your company is nicely set as one of the premier tournament organisers in the business. Nothing is perfect and sometimes the decisions we make can’t please everybody but with no communication before the big day it’s hard to argue that you tried as hard as you could have.