ByuN leaves X-Team

On May 26 2016 03:05 dyDrawer wrote:
Xiaose's long and angry post on weibo details the reason of his departure (it was not an amiable one).

ByuN questioned Xiaose on why he didn't give ByuN an invite spot for NSL. Xiaose wanted to cool him off a little bit, for as Xiaose put it, ByuN's behavior had not been very nice: demanding pay raises at the last minute before signing contracts, simply because he thinks he's the star player. So this time around, Xiaose didn't give ByuN an invite spot for NSL (where Xiaose is the main organizer). He told ByuN that he wanted some new faces in the tournament.

And ByuN replied that he's leaving the team.

On May 26 2016 03:31 Yiome wrote:
Well things are a bit messed up judging by Xiaose's post here
So basically they did not even get the contact settled down
Byun was paid by Xteam based the amount of games he played and he did not have a monthly salary
The plan is to also let him stream on Douyu and Douyu will give him a contact for streaming (>10k RMB per month, which would be about >1.5k USD per month. not through Xteam, just between Byun and Douyu). Not a bad deal if you ask me...But that deal broke when Byun require some last minute raise at WCS Shanghai
If there is indeed no settled monthly salary and no streaming contract I can sort of see why Byun decided to leave since he cannot get much money from Xteam when the teamleague has not started this season. Though it was kind of his own fault to blow off such a good streaming deal in the first place.

On May 26 2016 12:01 Caihead wrote:
Well the issue is blowing up on Chinese forums, I'm seeing at least 25 forum threads on NeoTV alone active with in the last hour, Looks like to me Xiaose's biggest issue was how the Douyu deal was handled.

1. 91 and Xiaose wanted to give ByuN a stable source of income which would then ALLOW him stay on xteam at the same time, because xteam is unable to give ByuN a stable salary due to their finances and ByuN would not have a stable source of income otherwise. The deal was at least 10,000 RMB.
2. The contract is from Douyu to ByuN, xteam stands to gain or lose nothing from the contract. The idea was first brought up to ByuN with people from Douyu with translator at the Starcraft League floor where ByuN played.
3. The deal was for ByuN to return to Korea while Douyu and Xiaose hashed out the contract for him, they translated it first into English then into Korean at ByuN's request, but ByuN insisted to wait until WCS Shanghai to sign in person. This delayed the contract signing by 2 months. Xiaose insists that all the conditions in the contract were hashed out between Douyu and ByuN, not with xteam.
4. Douyu flies personnel from Wuhan into Shanghai specifically for the contract signing. ByuN suddenly at Shanghai demands a contract amounting to double the pay. Basically putting Xiaose and 91 in a really awkward and socially problematic spot having to apologize to Douyu and negotiate with ByuN.
5. ByuN then returns to Korea, after a month ByuN reaches out to Douyu, saying that he could sign the original contract but then demanded additional clauses including xteam paying him a stable salary, Xiaose gets wind of this and doesn't reply because he thought ByuN was being outrageous.
6. ByuN asks Xiaose why he wasn't invited to NSL. Xiaose did purposefully not invite ByuN because he wanted ByuN to "cool his head and consider his position since he is just one of many players in China" and told him that it was mainly to promote other players. ByuN says he is leaving the team on the spot.

From Xiaose's perspective, he pushed hard (basically "begging") for invite spots for ByuN and contracting work with Douyu out of good will and got spat on.

On May 26 2016 23:01 verecunda wrote:
This is a translation of ByuN's response to Xiaose's recent post on weibo. ByuN originally posted this on the DCInside Starcraft Gallery.

Original post: gall.dcinside.com

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I'm posting this here in the Starcraft Gallery that I visit all the time, since I didn't think it was appropriate to post this on my personal social media account.




I first came to join X-Team after winning quite a few Leifeng Cup tournaments, which are online tournaments hosted in China.
The team contacted me first, saying that were at risk of being demoted in the Chinese team league (T/N: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Starcraft_League_2015 ) they were participating in, and they asked me to join their team as a mercenary (or loan player) for the season.

However, they said they couldn't pay me a regular salary but only on a per-game basis. At that time I was active in online tournaments, and since the team league was mostly online except for post-season games, I thought the mercenary position was suitable for my situation. So I accepted the contract.




I joined the team on October 17th, 2015 and my first game for X-Team was on October 25th. The Chinese team league is divided in two halves and the matches are played once a week. There are 8 participating teams, 9 matches are played in the first half and 7 matches are in the second half. I joined after the first half was over and the second half was about to start. The lowest two teams are demoted to the secondary league. At that time, X-Team was in 7th place.

At the end of the regular season, we were able to make 3rd place. So we advanced to the post-season in Shanghai, and even ended up with the championship title. The post-season was in December 25~27th.



After the finals, the X-Team representatives wanted to talk to me personally, and the topic of a contract came up. I thought it would be about a contract with the team, but instead they said they would help me make a Chinese streaming contract with Douyu TV. I enjoy streaming, so I said OK.

At the time there were five people present at the scene, F91 and Xiaose from X-Team, a representative from Doyou TV, me, and my translator.

Once the discussion was underway, they said that once I entered a contract with Douyu TV, I would not be allowed to leave X-Team.

I wanted to know why a streaming contract with Douyu would tie me to X-Team, when I wasn't even receiving a salary from X-Team in the first place.

Then they said that Doyou TV will pay me a monthly salary, and that if I join X-Team, they will always invite me to tournaments held in China.
The first tournament they offered to invite me to was the Kung Fu Cup that Stats won recently (but they ended up not giving me an invitation, and told me I had to go through the qualifiers).

I requested a written contract in Korean, but they didn't have one prepared and told me that they would send me one by e-mail.

I returned to Korea, and had no occasion to speak with Xiaose since then.




There are claims that Xiaose wanted me to chill out for a while and dropped me out of NSL, and that he told me that he wouldn't treat me as an exception because I'm only one of many Chinese players. But none of that actually happened, because we never had any occasion to speak to each other.





On February 5th, I received a written contract in Korean by e-mail, but I found the translation incomprehensible. I inquired about it, and found out that they had hired a Chaoxianzu (T/N: Chaoxianzu are an ethnic Korean minority group in China; they are not native speakers of Korean) to translate the contract for them.

Around then, there was an e-mail from Blizzard telling me that they wanted to invite me to the All-Stars Challenge at the WCS Circuit: Shanghai tournament (T/N: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Gold_Series_International_2016 ) on March 27th. So I thought that since I would be coming to Shanghai on March 27th, I would confirm the contract then, with a properly translated contract and with my translator.




Until the Shanghai event came up, I did some research on the other Korean gamers who had streaming deals with Doyou TV. I found out that they received a monthly pay from Douyu TV in addition to their normal salary from their team. So I concluded that these were the standard conditions. And when I arrived at Shanghai for contract negotiation, I asked X-Team to pay me a regular salary in addition to the pay from Doyou TV. But X-Team flat-out refused.

So I asked them to at least raise the pay from Doyou TV, if X-Team wasn't going to give me a salary. They told me that they would think about it, but disagreed at the last moment.

So I refused to agree to the contract. The contract period they wanted was two years, and it is impossible for me to play for them for 2 years without any salary.

That's how the contract was annulled. Please feel free to ask questions in the comments.


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In the comment section:

1. X-team claims that I demanded double the salary from what they originally offered. Actually, it's not true. It was only about 1.5 times and that was because X-Team refused to pay me anything in the first place.

2. I am interested in joining a KeSPA team and participating in Proleague. However, there weren't any offers as of now.