NYC LAN Tournament, Sat. July 13th - Page 15

Chobo AKA Jealous

This all started when I was playing a very minor role in Puck Frotoss, a team on the Coach Pupil League (CPL), a team league focused on the improvement/learning of beginner/intermediate players. FlashFTW, Chobo, and I were the coaches. I had only done replay analyses up until relations between Chobo and I broke down.

I learned that he and FlashFTW had already reviewed several replays there that were put into a document called the replay analysis queue where students would submit replays for review. And, at the time, I was sleep deprived and stressed, and generally just not mentally stable. I said I wanted to redo them all without having even seen the original responses from chobo and flashftw.

This didn't seem to anger Chobo strangely enough, but it was a dick move by me to assume that they were done badly and was definitely me overstepping my bounds, especially when I'd done very little for the team. I even interjected that I wanted to apply my own curriculum and coaching methods as "supervisor" when Chobo/FlashFTW had done so much work setting up the infrastructure and I wanted to make such drastic changes.

Overall, the way I acted was from a lapse in thought, insensitive, thoughtless, inconsiderate, me getting way in over my head, and my ego getting to my head. Just plain and simple, I was being an asshole.

I apologized and explained why that was a horrible thing of me to do, and acknowledged that yes it seems like I'm coming over to wipe away everything they'd done. I even said I wasn't right in the head, wasn't thinking clearly, and speaking before thinking. Chobo summed up what I was trying to do when he said I was trying to "minimize the impact of the flashFTW's and Chobo's coaching of the team."

And he was right - that I was trying to undermine their coaching because I thought it was bad. In the conversation I tried to worm my way around it initially by BS'ing that I was being tactless and what I said was not what I really meant or wanted to get across and I just wanted to be more collaborative. Then I finally threw FlashFTW under the bus by saying I said what I said because I dislike him.

But, I was feeling honest, and fessed up finally that undermining their coaching was the real reason I said that I wanted to redo all of the replays. That was clearly wrong in so many ways. I regret what I said in the moment, and I apologized for it and said it was disgusting behavior to try to undermine their coaching.

Strangely enough, Chobo said he was "fine with having less control over strategy n shit." But again, I didn't want to take control of the team or the fun parts of actually coaching team members especially when Chobo/FlashFTW have put in a lot of work, have genuine passion for the community/game, postiively contribute to it, and do have genuinely good advice/coaching to give. At this time I was also totally ignorant of what things were like on the administrative side of things.

This conundrum was started all from flippant statements I made that I apologized for. And just as I had about made amends I ended up saying something else stupid. Ironically I said I have one more thing to say but I'm really not in the right mindset and should go to sleep. And chobo said something like "You can't leave me on a cliffhanger man lol."

I said that I loved Samyang Fire, a team I hang out in that my friends are on and that I love their system and how everything is chillax there. And I just felt like if Puck Frotoss just chillaxed...

And this set off Chobo, because not only from his perspective was I trying to take over the strategy portion of the team, but I was taking control of the administrative parts of it, and pretty much repeating all of the mistakes I had just made several minutes ago by acting presumptuous, thoughtless, insensitive, and just being an asshole.

I never did get a chance to elaborate on what I meant exactly by the chillax and I didn't mean to replace Jealous's CPL team's system with Samyang's system. In fact, I didn't even know anything about Jealous' system which I would learn about later.

What I meant at the time was I wanted to be able to stream pupils' replays on stream and team practices for the fun of it but Jealous was against that because that would be a potential breach of intelligence that teams would have. Moreover, because I'm reviewing them, players from competing teams would know exactly what their weaknesses are when I point them out. I thought personally it's a bit too serious for the league, but I accepted it and moved on.

I also wanted to not make it a hard requirement for people to play 5 games per week to get into the lineup, because I thought that'd just scare players away. Anyway that would've been presumptuous of me to say anyhow, but again, I wasn't in the right mindset. That said, I didn't get a chance to elaborate to Chobo.

Chobo flipped out on me and handed me over the team to the effect of saying "Fine, you want to take control of the team? I'm done dealing with this." With Chobo more or less leaving it in my hands I felt like I had to lift the team up even though I didn't want to take control of the team or take on all of these responsibilities.

So I made some announcement saying I'd help out more in the team's coach channel in the most diplomatic, politest way possible to not do a repeat of last night, and most importantly I wanted input and to talk it out with the other coaches and avoid "taking control of the team" and just add to what was already there primarily. But things already went bad from the start.

In one of my proposed ideas I asked if it'd be okay to stream pupils' replays and team practices on stream as long as the pupils were okay with it and just for fun. Then Chobo comes in and says it's a slimy thing for me to do when he already said no to it already. I only brought it up in the first place because Chobo said he was handing the reigns over to me so I thought he wouldn't care.

Then Chobo says "Ty2 I am still 100% against you using this team and the player's replays for your own gain and self-promotion." At the time those words definitely stung but more than that I was just uh...in disbelief that he actually thought that and how fast things went downhill. He was mischaracterizing my actions as having a desire to take over the team and control it after Chobo and FlashFTW had done a lot of the work of setting everything up and using it for my own self promotion and gain, which was not my intent at all.

Afterwards I talked w/ FlashFTW the other primary coach to mediate any awkwardness. We made amends, and were just going to go forward and focus on the pupils and put the drama behind us.

After that I slowly came to the realization of how much administrative work Chobo had been doing, and it was clear he put a LOT of work into this team. I didn't do away w/ any of Chobo's systems like making sure each player had played their 5 required games per week and checking each 19 individual players' folders, checking which ones had gone to which KoTHs, which ones played their mandatory weekly Bo3 games w/ the sister team, goon squad, and all of this was collected in a spreadsheet. I even didn't stream when Puck Frotoss' KotHs would come up or when I had to review a Puck Frotoss replay.

I really did try to keep everything as it was before out of respect for Chobo and to appease him and make an eventual smooth transfer back to him after he'd be back from vacation, but eventually it got too much for me to handle. I was definitely humbled by this experience and I even tried copy pasting the system Puck Frotoss had onto the other two teams to show Chobo that I thought his way of doing things was good.

Unfortunately, this backfired when he said it looked like I was acting as an informant for Puck Frotoss' competitors. The workload only increased when I was trying to help two other CPL teams where both teams had a coach drop out. The other coaches still present didn't help as much as needed so i had to take a more central role in those teams too. So, that was poor planning and foresight on my part to say the least.

After dealing with the stress of trying to maintain everything with 16 hour days KOTHing, updating the spreadsheets, organizing everything, and tension between chobo and I getting worse as he'd pick at and undermine what I'd say, and me trying to just assuage everything and being as polite and courteous as possible, eventually I...started making mistakes like accidentally deleting the folder with all of the players' replays.

I was like "oh shit, chobo is gonna be so pissed at me," so I went up to him, apologized. The system had each player having their own folder, and they would ask for replays to be reviewed w/ the corresponding replay in the player folder and the spreadsheet of if players played their mandatory 5 games per week was also filled out using these folders. I had already filled them all out so in essence nothing was lost. I said hey, I already recorded everything on the spreadsheets on who played what and the replays in the queue were already reviewed, so it's no biggie, could you try to restore the folder?

And that was the very last straw for Chobo, who said, in short, "You've drained all of the fun of managing this team for me in CPL, I'm leaving this team. Have fun doing whatever you want."

And you know I've apologized. I admitted what I did was wrong that first day things started going downhill and every day after I was trying my best to repair everything so things could go back to the way they were.

Despite all of my best efforts, none have worked. And I got into the misfortune of getting into a conflict with the person who happens to be the organizer of the NYC LAN. I will say Jealous is passionate about the game and community and excels at organizing things very well. He feels very strongly about keeping things organized, and in my case, when I stepped on his toes, that was definitely a very bad move.

In this whole debacle I'm not excusing myself, because I do hold fault here and made a series of mistakes. I was oblivious, naive, ignorant, insensitive, presumptuous, and abrasive when I told Chobo from the beginning that I wanted to "redo all of the reps" and that I thought the Puck Frotoss team would benefit from adopting a more "chillaxed" system like Samyang when I hadn't contributed at all to the team prior and had no understanding of how things were done at the time. You all already know where I stand on that and despite my best efforts to mend fences and get on Chobo's good side, obviously that hasn't worked. But above all I didn't have any intentions of malice, self promotion, or sabotaging Chobo's team, Puck Frotoss.

And why I'm speaking up is that I can easily say I've dedicated my life to this game, this community, coached in all 3 recent season of CPL, and coached dozens of people, played in dozens upon dozens of tournaments, written guides, provided content, hosted showmatches/tourneys. Even through all the ups and downs, I just straight up love this game and want to talk to people about it. And for me to hang out and have fun talking to people IRL about this game for the first time in my life would mean a lot to me.

Sadly, I can't even show up to hang out even if I don't play in the tournament with the prize pool. I talked w/ Tim who is a secondary organizer and we reached a compromise that yes, I wouldn't be playing in the main tournament because Chobo wouldn't be able to take me profiting off of his hard work. I understood that and respected Chobo's perspective and was more than content with just showing up, but not playing in the main tournament. Later on though Tim told me Chobo made it very clear that he didn't want me to show up at all and that if I did, he'd leave the LAN altogether.

Anway, that's my side of the story. And again, this is Chobo's tournament. I understand he can ban whoever he wants for whatever reason no matter how unreasonable it is.