Drama overshadowed the competition in North America's second Winter Circuit outing
This is The Final Circle, a newsletter about esports
Buckle up, everyone, because this is a long one. I’ve helpfully divided the post into 4 parts:
Fragment East ain’t big enough for the both of us
Ranked to Riches secures the bag (and a 12th place finish)
The official broadcast contests ImperialHal
Upcoming tourneys
Without further ado, a big congrats to the winners of Winter Circuit #2! You can find the full results here at Liquipedia. The action in Europe deserves high praise in particular, where K1CK prevailed by a single point over Nessy, who almost won the whole tourney with a strong performance in the final game.
Fragment East ain’t big enough for the both of us
While Europe enjoyed a close contest, drama ran high in North America, all but overshadowing the competition.
After two lucky zone pulls that led them to back-to-back wins, CLG continued putting enough points on the board to give them the tourney, eventually winning by 11 points over NRG, the 2nd place team. But other circumstances made CLG’s confident win almost an afterthought.
For better or worse, TSM is the face of competitive Apex, and everything they do is under a microscope. In this Winter Circuit outing, Snip3down’s stream brought in about 20% of the viewer count of the official tournament broadcast just by himself, while Hal, the most popular streamer in Apex, averaged more than 3 times the viewers of the official broadcast
The quality of TSM’s tournament is correspondingly the quality of the viewing experience for a majority of the NA audience.
So when Team_F8 made it clear that they were dropping on Fragment East, the same spot on World’s Edge where TSM has been dropping for over a year, TSM’s large fanbase did not react well to the development. F8 were accused of only dropping Fragment East to generate controversy and make a name for themselves (“griefing for clout”), and it doesn’t take a particularly active imagination to see why people could reach that conclusion: rather than directly contesting TSM in each game and fighting them outright, they played cat and mouse with the better-known team, running off and delaying the engagement to the detriment of both teams.
In any battle royale, dropping in the same area as another team and hoping for better loot than them is never an optimal strategy. Every high-level Apex player knows this, including the members of F8. So why drop with TSM, all but guaranteeing that neither team would do well in the finals? (TSM finished in 14th place, while F8 finished in 17th.)
Protectful, one of the members of F8, explained his rationale after the tournament on Twitter:
Acknowledging that “Rng was ass” is a glimpse into the ostensible strategy of F8: the team was simply hoping for better loot than TSM. Other good spots on the map are also taken by good teams. It’s also worth paying attention here to the notion that F8 never expected to win this tournament, and had no intention of doing so. The thread continues:
Though he has a vested interest in stopping this from happening again, TSM’s coach Gdolphn chimed in with an entirely reasonable suggestion: drop on some other team.
Needless to say, not everyone was prepared to accept this as an explanation or excuse. Many comments on social media accused F8 of dropping on TSM simply for notoriety—a bit like John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Reagan hoping to get famous enough to impress actress Jodie Foster. If that was the case, mission accomplished.
But well-known rosters, as we’ll see elsewhere in this debrief, face more scrutiny than lesser-known teams. These accusations of unsporting conduct were followed by a fresh unearthing of other, more grave wrongdoings. First, evidence was produced concerning Protectful’s teammates Xynoa and Skittles: an old video of them teaming in ranked, that is, unfairly grouping up with another squad in the lobby, a practice tantamount to cheating.
And it didn’t take long to dig up worse. Thekine, a popular content creator for SolaFide, who is, I believe, of native Hawaiian descent, accused Xynoa of racist harassment:
But that horrible conduct wasn’t the full extent of Xynoa’s wrongdoing:
One instance of documented racist conduct should be enough to ban a player from the ALGS, in my view. The same applies to Esports Arena, where Xynoa just won a Series E contract. This behavior was brought to the attention of Tyler Endres, the founder and CEO of Esports Arena, who acknowledged it; but at this time, neither the ALGS nor Esports Arena has made a public announcement about Xynoa’s contract. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if a ban was forthcoming. Maybe dropping Fragment East wasn’t such a good idea after all.
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Ranked to Riches secures the bag (and a 12th place finish)
It gives me no pleasure to report that there was further unsporting conduct in the tournament. Ranked is Harder, AKA RP>ALGS, AKA Ranked to Riches, the team that almost bulldozed their way to an ALGS win in Winter Circuit #1, ditched the Horizon-Gibby-Caustic team comp that had brought them success in favor of a Revenant-Octane wombo combo of highly aggressive play. While that is almost certainly not the way to win an ALGS tournament, they qualified for the finals and can use whatever characters they like.
But not taking the tournament seriously is categorically different from taking active steps to ruin its competitive integrity. I haven’t been able to verify the above information, but if this is true, the team was offered the possibility of $7500 to play without comms, putting them at a severe handicap and making them artifically easy targets for other squads.
I’d be shocked if this wasn’t against the ALGS rulebook. But more broadly speaking, Ranked is Harder’s entire tournament saga has shown that talented players on the scene can only be expected to take the tournament circuit seriously as long as there is sufficient financial incentive to do so. Prize pools and org salaries in Apex continue to stagnate compared to revenue from streaming (and other healthier esports). Since I began drafting this post, MiTH, the dominant Thai org, has officially left Apex, dissolving their last roster. At one point, they had three teams, getting rid of first one and then another in December, leaving the popular player Genburten and his teammates out of a job. MiTH was at the very top of APAC South, but it looks like the financials in Apex just didn’t make sense for them any longer. (They continue to field other esports teams, including in PUBG.)
As it stands, players are increasingly realizing that there’s more money to be made from using a crazy team composition in the ALGS tournament, for example, than there is in a fourth or fifth place finish playing on a talented but unsigned roster. It’s not a tenable situation for the integrity of this esport.
The official broadcast contests ImperialHal
Finally, TSM was confronted by another opponent during the tourney, this time from the casters on the official broadcast. Tsquared, veteran esports figure and caster, appeared to denigrate the team’s comms:
Anyone who’s watched more than a few minutes of pro Apex has probably discovered that Hal is a spirited competitor, and that intensity is one of the reasons so many people are drawn to his stream, which again, is consistently more popular than the official broadcast. Hal, for his part, took the mild criticism personally:
A flurry of pros and other well-known players jumped to Hal’s defense. Others suggested Tsquared’s comments were completely reasonable. Tsquared, seeing the reaction his comments had garnered on social media, offered an apology to Hal live on air. He also defended himself: analysis of the competition was his job, and his observation wasn’t a personal attack, but a sober assessment of the state of TSM comms. I don’t believe Hal should be immune from criticism altogether, but, as others pointed out, it was unevenly applied: Tsquared doesn’t routinely jump into lesser-known players’ streams to monitor and analyze their communications.
What to watch:
Today at 7 PM EST: the $10,000 prize pool Throwback Throwdown, organized by the pro Teq. This specialty tourney, funded by the community and casted by Daltoosh, features only one team composition: Wattson-Wraith-Path.
This weekend: yet another ALGS! Winter Circuit #3 goes down Friday-Sunday. TSM, Sentinels, and Complexity will all have to qualify for the finals, and as usual I’ll be live-tweeting the action from my couch.
