My issues with how C9 portrays themselves.

---

C9 is generally considered one of the most moral orgs by the community.This is a reputation they work hard to maintain. To me, it doesn't make sense that C9 is associated with ethics whereas other teams aren't. When C9 is faced with decisions, they make the best business decision for themselves. That doesn't make them a bad org by any means, but I do think it indicates that their status over other orgs isn't very well-deserved.

To help better explain what I mean, I'm going to compare C9's actions to those of CST/Apex. CST/Apex is known to be a really shady organization by fans and C9 is known as one of the cleanest. But a lot of their actions are just really similar. The main criticisms of CST are that they kicked two players for Koreans, people think they are farming challenger spots for cash, and they tried to swap their LCS roster into challenger to keep their spot. (Right before I wrote this, Jacob Wolf reported that APEX kicked their Challenger team out of the gaming house the day after they didn't qualify. This is a great reason to dislike CST and I don't think C9 would ever do this.)

C9 has had pretty similar actions. When the LCS team was in danger of getting relegated, Balls, Sneaky, and Jensen were all signed to the C9T roster as substitutes in time for them to play in the Challenger scene. It's possible that if C9 had fallen into relegations, they would have split up the two teams to double their chances of making it back into LCS, which is exactly what CST did. If not, it seems strange to sign these players as substitutes for no reason.

The C9C situation is the most prominent example of this. Fans were mad at CST for farming LCS spots after they sold out to NRG. In this case, C9 is farming challenger spots in a much more sophisticated manner by using actual LCS players. Again, this is a legal business decision, but fans have treated the two instances very differently.

Where C9 and CST differ in their actions is in what Hai said to his fans who questioned C9C. In Hai's explanation post, he claimed that the team was to farm Challenger talent. He then commented that C9 should receive a franchised Challenger spot and that they were more qualified to develop talent than other orgs. With the regular season over, it seems like Hai lied to his fans for no other reason than to maintain his reputation as a good guy. (It's important to note that Hai is both a major voice for C9, the face of the franchise, and a big part of managing the C9 Challenger team. If he wanted to develop talent, they would have.) Imagine what a joke it would be if CST made a similar statement.

Finally, fans were mad that Rhux/GGlue got kicked after all their hard work. In this case, Rush worked hard to build a reputation in NA, and then went back to Korea after C9 moved him to Challenger. (Riot's import decision may have came into play here, but it seemed like Rush wasn't interested in playing Challenger for even a single split.) These situations are pretty similar. Both orgs contracted players who worked hard for them and then replaced them. It seems strange to me that fans had such different reactions.

In these three cases, C9 and CST took similar actions and fans had really different opinions about them. I do think C9 is a more moral org than CST - I don't see C9 kicking players out of the gaming house. But I do think the gap between these two orgs (and C9 vs. other orgs in general) is much smaller than fans think. The biggest difference is these specific comparison cases is that C9 has better players and more charismatic players, so fans like them more, not that they behaved differently from CST from a moral standpoint.

The following comments are side notes, so ignore them if you would like:

As a somewhat speculative side note, the recent CS:GO petition removing SK from the last chance qualifier cited "conscience" as the main reason orgs "couldn't compete" against SK. CS insiders such as lurppis have speculated that C9 was the main ringleader of the petition. In this case, it would be in line with their M.O. of passing off business decisions as morality issues.

As another side note, C9 also uses their morality the same way TSM uses public opinion. TSM always uses public opinion in disputes because they have the most fans. In the same way, C9 hopes to turn non-moral issues into moral issues to try and sway fans with their perceived good moral standing, but these cases usually seem a little hypocritical. The comments around Jatt's criticism of Balls turned away from actual discussion as to whether or not Balls was good and towards "TSM Jatt memes," concerns that Jatt was biased, and concerns that Jatt was bullying or picking on Balls. However, C9 players themselves haven't really had a problem criticizing other players publicly. Similarly, Hai earlier on this year posted a screenshot of Diamondprox flaming him in solo queue onto Twitter. In this case, Hai publicly encouraged Riot to punish Diamondprox. When fans said that he shouldn't have aired his dirty laundry, Hai called people who disagreed with him idiots. (He later deleted those tweets.)

The C9 fanbase perception of trolling/memeing is also kind of weird to me. Lemon commented on Reddit that C9 wasn't signing "Incarnation." A lot of C9 fans were really happy that Hai was staying on the team and others flamed the Daily Dot for their reporting. It turned out that Lemon was just trolling, typing Incarnation with an o instead of an 0. C9 fans fawned over how clever he was, but I didn't see any fans admitting that their attacks on the Dot were wrong. I also have a hard time believing that Lemon didn't think his comments would mislead fans in a potentially damaging way.


--

Ryan Tang

Reply · Report Post