WesternWolves shutting down - Page 3

On December 21 2013 01:42 Martijn wrote:


We were actually in a position where we could continue the team without an SC2 squad, or close the team as a whole.

It’s no secret that WW invested a lot in StarCaft 2. We already had world top fighting game players, Fifa players and held a promising CSGO roster among others. But with my background, my personal commitment was always going to be focused on StarCraft 2. I think we can be quite proud of what we've accomplished. We look back at having held an IEM title, and now qualifying for ATC establishing ourselves as a top 4 foreigner team.

Unfortunately our formula is one that simply can’t last in the current scene. We've always focused on finding and training new talent. For example Stings pickup was followed by an IEM win and Check has been tearing up qualifiers very close to a breakthrough moment. That means we deal with a lot of relatively new players. These new talents aren't going to have a stack of WCS points. This was never too big of a problem, WW focused primarily on IEM/DH which we could send players to regardless. We’d like to take a moment to thank these 2 organizations for their role in esports. Without them our journey in esports would not have been possible.

The climate is changing however. You can no longer send players to IEM events if they don’t have sufficient WCS points and DH Winter (arguably the main focus of the team) no longer has an open tournament. This means that we have to count on our players to win qualifiers to attend events. This isn't a bad thing; it’s just how the new system works. Unfortunately qualifiers are often finicky. If you look at the names Check beat in stage 1 of the IEM NY qualifiers, you’d think it’s an amazing showing, only to be confronted with Innovation right off the bat in stage 2. If players do qualify, often the qualifiers are too close to events to be able to budget for them, or the events pay for travel at which point a team contributes very little to begin with.

Traditionally, the most talented players got support from teams, now a team is better off picking up someone that already has WCS points. We got caught in a position where we had talented players that we couldn't send to events. We were paying them but we couldn't show a return to our sponsors. We tried to make up for this by providing a lot more content for sponsors, but that just delayed the inevitable and a team like ours can’t function within the WCS system.

We didn't believe in the WCS system and we can’t sell to our sponsors something we don’t believe in. So the decision was made to either continue on without a StarCraft 2 squad or close up shop. Arguably, we could have taken the money we were offered and survived. To be frank, our remaining players (meaning those in other games) are in such a good position within their respective scenes that they’ll be fine even without us. I spent much more time dealing with SC2 than I did with all other teams combined.

Does that answer your question?