Community eSport ethics - Page 3

On June 25 2008 04:23 The.Crow wrote:
I am just coming back home from the office and an admin from TLnet I respect pretty well, passed the link to this thread to me. That sounds like I was almost asked to reply here even though I was thinking about it for quite a while, since I am not the fan of forum discussions.

But let's give me a chance to clarify some issues and points here.

First of all I was pretty surprised to be attacked in such an obvious and public way by TLnet (and with 'I' that means the company I represent). I would have preferred that Manifesto or someone else from the prestigious admin crew (that I respect a lot for their work) would have contacted our editor in chief or me on MSN to discuss that issue. Sure, it is fine that you wanna discuss this with the community and want to hear people's opinion, but you could have kept that on a much different level if you would have left out the name MYM since - in the way you wrote the OP it looks like you just want to move MYM in a bad light - what you are aware of for sure. But yeah, it is your site and you are totally free what u do here. Though when you talk about ethics I am not sure if it was the best way to do an OP like that then.

Though, I won't say with this, that we did something totally wrong we have to apologize for. But more about that later...

Secondly I just want to point out that it is a total mistake when you say 'MYM is posting...'. MYM are the teams we have and the players in it. On the other hand we have the eSports page myMYM.com that is related to the different teams of MYM. Means, I am not a member of MYM but of myMYM.com . If you weren't able to follow the progress we made during the last years, I just want to sum that up shortly so that you can see what I am talking about (and it is important to know for the rest I write here).
We started as a team page called meetyourmakers.com. That page basically had the duty to represent the teams, inform the community about teams and players. A bit later we started to mix up those team news with general eSport news, since a new way of business developed quick and people more and more requested eSport news and coverages, articles, etc. We reached a point when we realised that we are totally biased when it came to eSport news, since we always highlighted our teams and players and of course never wrote negative news about them. This thing and you may agree with me, is totally unprofessional and blinds our readers. So we decided to make an extra space on our page where we had team news, and an extra space with eSport news so that people can clearly see what is written biased and what neutral. Later we even went ahead and changed the URL of our page to myMYM.com to show the people that we are no longer a clanpage, that we are no longer the page that is there because of the team MYM, but we are there as an eSports page. We are totally free in what we write. It is a common thing to post also news or interviews abour or of other people that criticize the players or teams of MYM. Example can be found lately with the MYM]Grubby issue when we posted an interview with TH000 where he talks only bad about him. People actually wondered why we posted it, since it is bad for us. But we also gained respect with that step, since many noticed that can post whatever we want and that there is censorship or whatever from the management.
The other topic that should proof that we are an eSport page and not a clanpage is, that we do heavy investments when it comes to event Coverage. Maybe you noticed that I am working full time as the Content Supervisor for the company behind MYM and myMYM.com and also our Editor in Chief is full time employed. Next to that we got our ESUPs who are all employed part time.
We are also covering since more than 1 year every event that has at least a few ;known; players while we send people there to do live coverage, videos, videointerviews, pics and more (mostly for CS and WC3). Just lately I have been in China for almost 4 weeks to create a documentary about eSports there. And we didn't visit any MYM player. That is only about Esports in general, about any team! Yeah, and I do this cause I love eSports, cause I love gaming and cause I love to do something for the people!

That (last paragraphs) should also help to proof that we did not get the player list from any of our players. Many of our editors actually never talked to any MYM player. Further our players are more or less all contracted, they are not allowed to leak information or act against the ‘law’.

Actually it is also not fully correct to say that we did publish the list. Replays.net was posting the list hours before us and the source in our news gives replays.net as the official source. We just did a news about what they wrote before - btw: now they even have the brackets online!

And I can tell you that I know the player list for StarCraft myself much better then we posted it. But the question here was not about to post a totally correct player list or not, we were aware of that the list may incl. some mistakes. But it did what we wanted to reach with it: a discussion and hype about WWI. We actually wrote in our news that we are not sure if we tell the truth, we wrote that this is just rumors, no one has to believe it, but people always love to discuss about rumors, right?

And let me also ask something, you totally disagree with what we did, so why did you accept my thread here? You could just have closed or deleted it. But you didn't, since you also noticed quickly that people love to discuss rumors (and that it of course creates also traffic for you – maybe you didn’t think about that second point in that moment). Just check how many clicks and comments the thread has, that is speaking for itself.

And on the other hand, you need to say, that many people that later messaged me and blamed me for what we did, posted themselves comments here on that page and spoiled out information, since they said the list is not correct. Just by saying that, you join my side.

And I wonder, where do they have all the player list from? If you ask me, the discussion about ethics is much bigger then, since many people couldn’t keep silence. Of course you (I don’t address you Manifesto, don’t get me wrong please) can tell your gf about the list, but if you tell people that are deeply involved in eSports the list… doesn’t that create a further discussion about ethics?

And to come back to the point that we are an eSports page... it is our job to inform people. Check out a newspaper or a TV station. Everyone tries to get information about news that is not published yet. Everyone tries to make a special report (that no one else has). And how often does it happen that CNN or whoever have information that are not officially released yet but they news it as rumors... so often! Actually there is a big competition between all the companies who gets the best information - and it is the same in eSports! And no one blames them to be unprofessional or says they are no longer a serious media. Yes, also cause people wanna hear such stuff! Again: They love to hear and discuss about this! It is in the nature of every human being! And I think we shouldn’t get blamed for that...

And we didn't have an agreement or whatever with Blizzard that doesn't allow us to say what we know. How could anyone censor the media in the western world? If you have information, and if they are rumors, you are allowed to post them. So the sentence "that is because confidentiality was requested in the emails" doesn't make sense at all for me. I never received an email from Blizzard. I am just an ordinary news guy. They reason why you received this email is a different (yes it is a secret yet and we cannot say why you got it)... and do you notice that you spoil people already while posting that sentence?

So Blizzard never asked any eSport page about not to post the lineup before the official release if any page is able to receive some information... If they really didn't want to get rumours posted, then they could have informed the major pages about that and asked for cooperation. Furthermore, there have been so many information leaked about Blizzard in the past, aren't they got used to it already? ;p

So overall, I don't think we did anything wrong. We did our job. We try our best and the fact that our readers and all the pages that wrote about the news we posted and the comments that have been posted on their pages just shows me that people want to read even more rumors. Actually I read only a very few comments that said that we did something wrong.

And by the way, until today Blizzard didn’t contact us and blamed us for what we did. So on the one hand I wonder why they contacted TL.net about it, and on the other hand that shows me that it is not such a big deal for them that this rumors news was posted. Honestly, I don’t see which disadvantage they take from our post. In the end people talk about Blizzard and WWI, that is good for them, isn’t?

And don't understand me wrong, I think it is great that you bring that topic up, since it wasn't discussed much in eSports thought it is pretty important. I just tried to explain here why we did what we did and that some people just didn't know all about us, that hopefully is changed now. Please ask more if something is not clear.

And I would love to continue that discussion with you Mani and the other TLneters that attend WWI, I think we could all learn a lot from it and maybe try to understand each other.

p.s.: I am sorry for the messed up spelling and grammar, I just had a 12 hours working day behind me, and feel totally tired, so don't flame me too hard about my English ;p And yeah, I know that every single user out there will hate or love me for what I wrote. I just had the feeling so far, most people liked it so far that the list was up, that confused me even more that i saw a big discussion is starting now... actually only a very few ppl got angry with me mhm



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Here the official statement:

"I feel deeply sorry to see that a respected page like TL, and a respected eSports personality like Manifesto, dashing myMYM.com for our journalistic ethics. Now I feel that we are targetted on a false foundation. I would like to stress out that we have had the players-list for the whole time, and could have published it if we wanted to break the story and get the hits. We didn't.
We respect Blizzard's wish to not publish the list. On the other hand we are a news page, and a news page caters its readers. So when Replays.Net publishes a rumor about the participants of WWI we are going to bring it. Please note that this has nothing to with our agreement with Blizzard. Publishing the NDA'ed list is not the same as referring to a rumour.
How much I would like to extend this explanation, going through it with the same care as Jonas 'The.Crow' Gebhardt, I think this was very much the basics. If a bigger and more extensive answer is wanted, I can be contacted through him.

Yours Sincerely,
Phillip 'Phil' Rasmussen
Editor in Chief / Global Content Manager, at myMYM.com"