jiadee_

Jia · @jiadee_

1st Jul 2019 from TwitLonger

Why I’m no longer casting GM


TLDR: visa issues

‪‪I’d like to preface this with a big thank you to everyone I’ve been venting to and everyone who offered their help and everyone who checked up on me over the past few months. Lots of people know bits and pieces of what I’ve been struggling with, but now that it’s final, I can share in a bit more detail.

In February, I received a formal offer to cast Hearthstone full time— my dream job. Similar to most players, “full time” for casters this year means Grandmasters or nothing. I had been in talks for casting GM Seasons 1 and 2 since the previous year, so I dropped all other plans for 2019, including a grad school acceptance. ‬After years of working my way up through HCT, I thought I had finally made it.

‪After several months of sudden changes of plans on the logistics side and wondering why my contract hadn’t arrived, I was finally given the go signal to do 2 weeks of GM. By this point, I already knew something was wrong, but I still held out hope that it would all work out. In the middle of Week 3 of GM, I got the news that couldn’t work more than two weeks at a time in Taiwan to cast APAC— meaning no more consistent casting work for the rest of year. This is because of myriad reasons, but the gist of it is that Filipino citizens need to jump through a ridiculous amount of extra hoops compared to citizens of more privileged countries in order to obtain work visas in TW: namely, I would have to be (1) a full time employee of (2) a TW entity, both of which were not feasible under my theoretical contract.

As you might expect, I was devastated. I wasn’t eating or sleeping properly for the rest of my stay in Taiwan, and I didn’t go out other than to do the cast, which itself was incredibly difficult knowing I only had two weeks. Suddenly I didn’t have a plan for the rest of the year. The only thing I was looking forward to was the Las Vegas Masters Tour, which I would play the week after I left GM.

‪A shred of hope appeared when we identified the possibility to apply for a work permit through a talent agency. Seeing everyone at Vegas did wonders for my morale, so when I got home I began to inquire with several agencies with branches based in Taiwan.

By this point, I had already estimated my chances of being able to cast Season 2 to be 1% at best. But call me naïve, because I still held out hope. ‪I had a very narrow window to get the visa on time for Season 2, so I spent the last couple weeks emailing back and forth with the talent agency and Blizzard reps, running around different government offices and my university trying to get all the documents in order, and haphazardly educating myself on Taiwanese and Filipino foreign labor policies.

But as it turned out, the agency informed me that the Philippines is literally the only country in the world where they don’t have agents on-site to assist with obtaining this document called an Overseas Employment Certificate. Aside from just the OEC, the Philippines has this bad habit of requiring redundant documents, a tendency that seems to serve no other purpose than to hinder its own citizens from getting anything done quickly. For example, my original Transcript of Records somehow doesn’t suffice as a legal document but a certified true copy, which takes a week to process, then a week to get verified by the Department of Foreign Affairs, and then another week to be authenticated by the Taiwanese Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines, would.

In short, there is no way all the required paperwork would be done on time for me to get the job for Season 2. My 1% turned to 0, no outs, GGWP bureaucracy OP. I guess I should’ve conceded earlier, because this is far from the first time I’ve gotten screwed by visa issues. And it’s just one of many other stories of Filipinos not being able to pursue their passion in esports due to either our own country’s failings, or other countries’ perceptions of it.

I’ve honestly never felt lower. I’m angry, disappointed, and frustrated. You can’t imagine how depressing it is to watch your colleagues get everything you need months to do get done in a week, for no other reason than a different citizenship. The hard truth I learned from this experience is that when you’re from a country that the rest of the world doesn’t trust, it often doesn’t matter how qualified or diligent you are— there’s just too many extra hoops to jump through.

I got shot in the foot before I even started the race. But I still tried to make it to the finish line, because I didn’t want to look back one day and wonder if I could’ve made it if I just hustled a little more. Lately, though, it feels like no amount of hustle can beat an unfair system.

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