Lazarus · @Lazarus
10th Jul 2019 from TwitLonger
America's Minor CS:GO Statement
We want to address why Lazarus CS:GO will not be participating in the Americas Minor in Berlin:
We started off the qualification process earlier this year with both Tenz and FNS joining us to stand-in for Brax and Dapr for the event, however once we won our spot at the minor, things unexpectedly changed. During this time, Tenz was approached and offered several deals by many teams, which were ultimately & respectfully declined for his decision to pursue Cloud9 which we were understanding of. We were hopeful Cloud9 would still allow his completion of the Minor with Lazarus, however upon contact with the organization, Cloud9 decided it was in his/their best interest to prepare with the new team and withdraw from our roster.
After being down a player already, we then tried to approach the situation of having FNS and our coach Danny (fRoD) act as our stand-ins for the roster for the Minor. Danny was fully prepared to do this and had been prepared in and out of game for this situation to occur, however FNS was unwilling to play with respects to this option and we were unable to reach an agreement on contracting him to participate in the event with us, ultimately leading us to a roster of 3 core players plus our coach willing to participate.
We asked Starladder to consider the option of allowing us just 1 additional player and Danny to act as our stand ins for the Minor, however it was met with the decision handed down from Valve (via Starladder administration) that no new additional players could be added to our roster, thus forcing us to withdraw from our spot in the event as a whole. We were informed in writing by Starladder both players situations (Tenz and FNS) were considered “emergency situations”, yet we could not add additional players to our roster even under the circumstance. This is a point of frustration as our replacement and other teams were allowed replacements, stand-ins, or additional roster changes. Albeit every teams’ situations may have differed slightly.
In the future we hope & believe that Brax may be given the opportunity to play to alleviate these issues, or at the very least, teams be given more options to compete when situations like this arise. We were willing to do anything within reason to field a competitive roster for the event, but were not given the ability to do so, which was a disappointment to our roster, our organization, our partners and our fans.
As echoed above, we thank our community, fans, partners and our players for their continued support in Lazarus Esports and the team. We continue to strive for excellence and work tirelessly for continued success. We believe all teams should be treated with the same fairness and equality, and hope to see changes that reflect that moving forward.
- Kyle “Zzxq” Vognsen, Lazarus General Manager