The Tale of irninja aka Freelancer - Page 6

On November 25 2013 05:37 DefMatrixUltra wrote:


http://teamlegacy.net/topic/13058-ode-to-a-troll-team-legacy-official-response/

Two things: you have to register to read the actual post. Not a valuable use of your time imo. Secondly, it's not a real "thread" since it was autolocked as soon as it was posted.

Good morning Team Legacy!

High Council, and I in particular, wanted to publically cover something for the sake of our community members. Apparently we’ve seen some recent bitter apples coming from a poster or two in the Team Liquid community, where Team Legacy had its start. We had planned to simply ignore this “Serejai” troll and devote our energy to constructive pursuits, but due to the defacing of one of our recruitment threads (and a subsequent troll post deletion and troll ban by the moderator), it seems appropriate to make a statement. I'm not known for being brief, so here we go:

This "Serejai" troll is a long-time member of the Team Liquid community. This is relevant only because our original membership came from the Team Liquid community, and our early philosophy of exceptional gaming came with them. With early support from Team Liquid staff (including giving us our first private Teamspeak channels for tournament use), we were able to launch into GW2 with the focus and organization that Team Legacy quickly became known for. Though over the years we’ve become a fully independent organization, we remain incredibly grateful for that early logistical leg-up, and have never been on bad terms with Team Liquid!

That said, we have a few troll claims that should be addressed, and I’d like to handle them individually:

1. We genuinely have no idea what made Serejai decide to go full on rage troll against Michael/Freelancer. Discussion of the subject has come up without a clear motive, and the timing has the lot of us baffled. Why he or anyone else in the Team Liquid community would choose to troll a Wildstar thread has us equally confused. No, Freelancer isn't a perfect person, and these two butted heads years ago, but we have no idea why this is coming up now.

2. Yes, everything the troll is saying is distortions, or outright lies. For those interested in particular what he seems to deem a Minecraft scandal in 2010 (let’s call it “Minecraftgate,” for entertainment value), we would be happy to release this screenshot of Serejai himself declaring Freelancer blameless, and apologizing appropriately on October 10th. Hooray for internet records! Am I seriously having to type this? I need a beer.

3. No, we are not making a profit. No we have never made a profit. This seems to come up with surprising frequency, despite our open records. Our Amazon Affiliate account provides a fraction of the cost of our server upkeep (Amazon sends us the "advertising fees"), and community donations make up another notable portion of the cost (thank you, donors!), but much of the money keeping Team Legacy afloat comes out of our pockets. There is certainly nothing extra coming back to us, even on the best of months. Ask Free's wife some time, I'm sure she'd be willing to let you hear all about it.

4. No, we were not some poaching splinter group looking to start a magnificent master gaming community at the expense of Team Liquid. They gave us great support to start, many Team Liquid members founded Team Legacy for Guild Wars 2, and we've given them that much-due credit all along. We are not pretending, and have never pretended to be, Team Liquid. This was not brand-stealing, or some demented attempt to create a fake Team Liquid, that's simply where our original members started. As you can clearly see, we are our own organization, and we've never been beholden to Team Liquid for funding or recruiting.

5. SHEEP! YOU'RE ALL SHEEP! DANCE PUPPETS, DANCE! But seriously, we know (all too well) that you all are incredibly independent people, and you're not here for some Freelancer personality cult. Aside from a couple of facepalm-worthy trolls, everyone else knows it, too. Your reputation is sterling, with other communities, moderators, and developers alike aware of your pleasant no-drama demeanor, skilled gameplay, and proper respect for NDAs and the development process. Please don't be rattled by a troll, Team Legacy is and was a respected name in gaming, and you are not being blacklisted or stigmatized.


To conclude, please, do not feed the troll, whether on the Team Liquid forums, or in our recruitment posts elsewhere. We chose to address this here briefly (ha) for the sake of letting you folks know we're aware of it, and that indeed, it's just a bad troll with an apparent three-year-old grudge against Freelancer. Please feel free to contact any of us on High Council about this via PM, and we'd be happy to answer any other questions you may have to the best of our ability!


TLDR: Serejai trolling is trolling.

I'm saddened that Nazgul (Team Liquid Staff) would not bother to look into his own history of PMs or check with the history of his own staff members/mods before taking anything to heart so quickly (i went imgur crazy for the last hour taking pics of PMs <3 ). He gave me a knee-jerk ban and while it's sort of a rite of passage to be banned on Team Liquid, I wish I had gone out in different circumstances based on truths I've spoken already with a few friends there and while surprised, they are looking into it.

That said -

Yes!, We absolutely were a Team Liquid guild to start (no hiding that at all), using Team Liquid teamspeak and a single forum thread. Then as any guild finds as they grow, we needed a dedicated forum (and not just a thread), and teamliquid would not make one. We started one on a new site. We couldn't obviously name it teamliquid.net again. (obviously?). We called it Team Legacy. Team Legacy grew huge, so large and bringing in so many members outside teamliquid it was anything BUT a teamliquid guild.

You all know quite well our values and what we started with. It's all in our history above in the links. Basically we wanted to flip the average "idea" for a MMO guild upside-down and say "to hell with what people have done, let's do something new". Well, yes, GW2 happened. We did things differently and not everyone "liked" the different guild on the block. Our idea of mixing hardcore and casual, while recruiting "intellectuals" instead of "#1 and top players" went against the grain and we loved it.

You betcha that Team Liquid posters and fans created a guild that brought in even more Team Liquid friends early on - that gave us an incredible and magical foundation to try something new. We don't ever deny that. Those same members are also the ones that held votes to start cutting off ties completely with Team Liquid, as they felt if we recruited more non-team liquid members, we would be disrespecting the Team Liquid community being that we were no longer "pure" if you will. The vote was near unanimous.

We made other strong changes back in 2010 to start separating ourselves from Team Liquid (again with mod support). While in the beginning we were all Liquid-posters enjoying idra while looking forward to GW2, it became more apparent we couldn't say we were a 'sister' guild or anything like that because we were recruiting more and more people outside Team Liquid. We dropped the whole idea of being officially the "fanclub guild" of Team Liquid to try and make our own name for ourselves. A year later in GW2 we proved not only were we capable of that, but we were damn good at running our own complete show.

If the above is so hard to understand, then I need not go further. The history does not stop there, but know every step of the way I had permission and transparency from far more PMs than even what Grey shared in the early beginnings of Team Legacy years ago. Our own vets here in the community are not idiots as well - we don't "pay them off" and certainly haven't developed a way of brainwashing them yet (stubborn bastards).

Go ahead, hollar at them. Ask if they were "forced" to post in threads, or "change their names" when posting. You see, its very easy to take screenshots or something out of context and convince masses of sheep to hop on the bandwagon. Ask them to do their own detective work or bother to look at both sides of the story and you'd be called crazy (insert joker pic). I think they call this journalism in America... not sure.

I know this is old news for our TL vets (many that are old Team Liquid posters) and they're probably giggling, but for god sakes the internet has lost its damn mind this time.

I need a vacation.


________________

Update 11/23:

We tried to reach out to some of the Liquid mods a second (and last) time, as we accumulated more screenshots and PMs than what we sent before, but they will not look into it. We privately livestreamed all of our financial data for the last 3 years as well. We compiled an album of images showing mod discussion, from changing our name to Team Legacy, to the conditions of promoting ourselves in affiliation with Team Liquid after our separation. Basically a line-by-line complete rebuttal with proof of everything mentioned.

A lot of this stuff throws certain people under the bus, and we are confident in that being a contributing factor to why we are being ignored and squelched.

We discussed in staff that their community appears to be well into the "argumentum ad populum" mentality, so it does us no good to continue pressing the matter, as they have no will to see reason or multiple views.

Remember that not all of Liquid is bad, so please don't discriminate against them based on the actions of few. We have posted a thread in the private forums with all links/screens available for our own members to digest and discuss freely. Have a great Thanksgiving holiday everyone!