Before ending his day last Sunday, Jack 'EternaLEnVy' Mao a professional dota 2 player currently playing for Team NP posted a 7,500-word blog post accusing the managements of his former team, Team Secret of mishandling tournament prizes, mismanagement of sponsorships and more. The original blogpost can no longer be accessed due to the heavy traffic the issue has caused. The contents of his blog can still be seen in this archive.
The Secrets behind the Organization
The lengthy blog post can be summarized into important notes which will affect a lot of eSports team in the future. Here are the important contexts from EE's blog:
Team secret had taken a 10% price cut which was unknown to all of its members except for the team owner and captain, Clement "Puppey" Ivanov. Players were originally promised that the management of Team Secret will take 0% from prize winnings which clearly didn't happen in this case. EE allegedly accuse that Puppey knows this price cut and had remained silent throughout the run.
Player salaries are either delayed or in some cases, didn't receive by the players. EE accused the management that the promised salaries amounting from $12,000 to $15,000 were not received by him or some members of the team including his former teammate Rasmus "MiSeRy" Filipsen.
Players joined the team without legitimate contracts which was supposed to be signed and agreed by both parties. EE claimed that there's no physical paper or contract which they signed from upon joining Team Secret. With regards to this issue, a famous Dota 2 host and analyst, Alan "Nahaz" Bester has this to say:
And please remember that a text, Skype/Discord/Twitter DM conversation, etc, is NOT the same thing as a written contract. Not even close. https://t.co/jTdiLjXZbL
— Nahaz (@NahazDota) October 9, 2016
The current team captain and owner Clement "Puppey" Ivanov was lazy and mishandling Team Secret to the point that the organization lost a record deal from PandaTV which would have amounted to $1 million and another $250,000 from stream donations. In exchange for the deal, Puppey and a former dota 2 superstar player, Artour "Rtz" Babaev was supposed to deliver a minimum of 30 hour in-game live stream for PandaTV and another 250 hours per month for the entire team. EE claimed that Team Secret didn't land the deal primarily because of Puppey's laziness to stream and to practice for games.
Aside from these, EE also claimed that Puppey is apparently very unprofessional as he tends to resolve problems through provocation to physical fights. Also, the team's captain was reportedly more focused in casual leisure such as drinking and playing guitars instead of practicing scrims with the members.
The post also attached a video depicting Puppey's violent reaction during a game.
