EPTHowever, I have seen evidence to definitively conclude that he has acted in a way that would lead many others to definitively conclude, justly or unjustly, that he is guilty of such misconduct.
This makes it reasonable for sponsors to demand that Sea be banned from the tournament from which they hope to generate positive publicity for their brands. Even if it is ultimately revealed that Sea is innocent, there is a significant risk that the media coverage of the ASL in the interim would be largely negative. For the employees of these sponsors who decided that sponsoring the ASL would be an effective form of marketing, the realization of such a scenario could even lead to the loss of their jobs.
1) We do not yet know whether or not Sea is guilty of committing immoral acts.
2) We do know that Sea very publicly acted in ways that would invite suspicion of such acts.
3) The sponsors are justified in removing Sea from the ASL even in the absence of confirmation.
From this, we can definitively conclude that Sea is an idiot. Perhaps he is an idiot who has been unfairly pilloried, but he is an idiot nevertheless.
I applaud the removal of Sea from this ASL and have the following question: What took you so long?
Sea has been sullying the reputation of pro gamers with his public misconduct for many years now. The only difference is that the launch of SC:R has brought more eyeballs.
I have discussed these actions with others here on TL.net via private messages over the years. In light of the latest controversy invovling Sea, I feel that the time is right to introduce the foreign StarCraft community to the dark side of Sea and the post-KeSPA StarCraft era in Korea. The foreign community needs to know this. Blizzard needs to know this going forward when sanctioning tournaments. There are truly wonderful streamers and pro gamers who have kept the community going during the pre-SC:R years. There are also people like Sea who have disgraced the community repeatedly and attract viewers through his questionable conduct.
None of what I am about to write is a secret. Everything that follows comes from what was seen by the public on past AfreecaTV streams. This isn't some secret info obtained through back-room conversations.
Far more disturbing to me is this: Sea has fraternized with individuals who publicly admitted to gambling on his games in the post-KeSPA era and even gave them insider information that may have moved the lines.
Here is the incident in question, which was streamed live by Sea himself. Since I saw the stream (as did many others), this is not second-hand information. After he lost to Piano in the group stage of the HungryApp Starz League with Kongdoo, Sea had a guest who called himself Jo Jeho on his stream. Jo Jeho, whose real name is Mo Yeongtaek, was someone who had made a habit of publicly boasting about his illegal bets on StarCraft. Mr. Mo was a so-called “named” (i.e., famous) personality to Korean viewers of Sea’s streams because he had donated much money (in the form of AfreecaTV’s star balloons) to many former MBC team members, including Sea. On this stream, Mr. Mo boasted about making a large sum of money by betting against Sea in his match with Piano. Mr. Mo also thanked Sea for providing him with a piece of insider information that he put to good use. Sea apparently had an eye ailment that required treatment prior to his game against Piano. If you watch the VOD of the game, you can hear the Korean casters mentioning that Sea’s eye issue may affect the game. Of course, by that time, Mr. Mo would have locked in favorable betting odds.
So here’s what we know:
1) Sea fraternized Mr. Mo, who illegally bet on his (Sea’s) games.
2) Sea gave Mr. Mo insider information about Sea’s eye ailment and used it to illegally bet against Sea.
3) Mr. Mo had donated many balloons to Sea and other pro gamers.
4) Sea continued to fraternize with Mr. Mo afterwards.
This Mr. Mo was not a just a comic figure. He would later be banned several times by AfreecaTV for a variety of distasteful actions, including harassing female streamers.
Mr. Mo would continue to cast a shadow over Afreeca until the infamous nuking incidents that shook up the post-KeSPA StarCraft scene. During these incidents, which took place in January 2016, multiple StarCraft streams were shut down by DoS (denial of service) attacks that employed packet flooding. These so-called “nuking” attacks were accompanied by demands related that Mr. Mo be unbanned from some streams and allowed into online game rooms as a real-time observer of “spon” matches (i.e., sponsored by individual fans using AfreecaTV star balloons as the prize) between pro gamers. These attacks did not target the pro gamers friendly with Mr. Mo. These DoS attacks even led to the cancellation of a match sponsored by Danawa.com, a price-comparison shopping site. Most pro gamers capitulated to the demands of the attacker. The minor streamers had their entire livelihoods threatened.
The purported attacker boasted that he would never be caught. After all, pro gamers have little formal education and have no idea how these things work. However, there was one person who refused to give in. That was former Sparkyz coach Zeus (Jeon Tae-gyu). His wife comes from a well-to-do family and has connections to good lawyers and know how to work the levers of society. In an emotional stream that took place in the aftermath, Zeus said that he swallowed his pride as a man to seek help from his wife’s family. He eventually secured the help of experts who were able to track down the attacker. It turned out that the attacker was not very technologically advanced. The DoS attacks were not distributed! In other words, they were not launched from multiple sources, which would make it difficult to locate the attacker, but a single one.
There are many things that are amazing about this incident, but perhaps the most telling is this. Zeus said that he secretly withheld from Kongdoo (and other pro gamers) part of the evidence that he had acquired. He said that this was because he suspected that some of these pro gamers would share the evidence with the attacker, which would allow him an opportunity to counter it. This how deeply embedded the attacker was in the post-KeSPA StarCraft scene at that point! At one point Jaehoon, a pro gamer who, like Sea, was friendly with Mr. Mo, joked that Mr. Mo should only nuke him when he was losing a match so that it would have to be replayed.
At this point, Zeus revealed enough information to show that he had tracked down the attacker and demanded a handwritten apology from the attacker with a promise to never set foot in the StarCraft scene again. At this point, guess who uploaded a handwritten apology? None other than Mr. Mo, who had already been the prime suspect. Unfortunately, the apology turned out to a parody of a famous apology letter written by Kim Dae-jung, who was the leader of the democratic movement in South Korea. At that point in time, Kim was sentenced to death by South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan after being framed for conspiracy to commit treason by fomenting rebellion under the direction of North Korea. The international community opposed this blatant fascist action and demanded that Kim be freed. At this point, Chun coerced a letter of apology out of Kim in return for allowing him to travel to the United States to receive medical treatment. In other words, Mr. Mo’s apology was slyly implying that it was being made under duress and not a sincere one.
Having discovered the insincerity of the apology, our hero Zeus was furious and promised to bring the force of the legal process upon the attacker. Not long afterwards, Mr. Mo essentially disappeared from the StarCraft scene and barely a peep has been heard from him since. The logical conclusion is that Mr. Mo was indeed the attacker with high probability.
This is the kind of person with whom Sea was frequently fraternizing on stream.
Sea, along with Pusan, has also been responsible for damaging the reputation of the pro gamer community as a whole. For example, I have seen him on stream openly talk about how MBC Protoss players would frequent “massage parlors”, which most Koreans will understand as establishments that provide prostitution. I have also seen him crudely joke on stream about excessive auto-erotic stimulation taking place in the showers of the MBC team house leading to the clogging of drains by an accumulation of bodily fluids.
I believe that this was the kind of conduct that Stork was speaking about when he criticized streamers for destroying the public image of pro gamers.
The story does not end here. Mr. Mo, in addition to being an avid gambler, is a member of a far-right political community web site called Ilbe. This is something Mr. Mo admits himself. To give a sense of how extreme Ilbe is, think of a Neo-Nazi web site like Stormfront. Being a member of such a community would have a negative impact on your job and dating prospects. At one point, Yellow (Hong Jin-ho) was accused of using Ilbe lingo, which he vehemently denied because that would have led to the end of his career as a public figure. In the aftermath, the computer programmer who co-founded Kongdoo with Yellow ended up creating an Ilbe dictionary to help people avoid accidentally using Ilbe lingo.
Why is this important? It is important because Sea gave a platform for Mr. Mo to spread his Ilbe ideology. For example, Sea once streamed with Mr. Mo as a guest and gave him the platform to spread the far-right lie that the Gwangju Democratic Movement was a riotous rebellion sponsored by communists. Ironically, Mr. Mo cited faulty translations of the word “uprising” used in UNESCO’s documents on the incident to justify his point. If you read the actual UNESCO document, it says:
Students and citizens from across the country were enraged by the situation and took to the streets in protest against the government. On May 18th, 1980 the people of Gwangju passionately protested against the nationwide imposition of martial law. The new military government responsible for the coup dispatched special force paratroopers to Gwangju in order to suppress a peaceful protest led by university students and citizens.
The paratroopers brutally and randomly assaulted men and women, old and young, regardless of whether or not they possessed sticks. Such attacks aggravated the situation further, and more and more people joined the demonstrations.
The paratroopers brutally and randomly assaulted men and women, old and young, regardless of whether or not they possessed sticks. Such attacks aggravated the situation further, and more and more people joined the demonstrations.
In Korea, being a denier of the Gwangju Democratic Movement is somewhat like being a Holocaust denier. You can see why given that many innocent people were indiscriminately killed by the military for resisting dictatorship. This is the kind of message that Sea was endorsing in his stream.
While the recent conduct of Sea is suspicious, we have not confirmed that sexual harassment occurred. On the other hand, I have laid out the case here that there are many cases of confirmed misconduct that are bad enough for the community to disassociate itself from bad publicity landmines like Sea.
May StarCraft and the streamers who conduct themselves properly in public prosper. They do not deserved to be lumped in together with the questionable personalities in the community.
Peace.
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/xHrguQJ.png)
