Kackis · @kackis95
24th Sep 2019 from TwitLonger
My Perspective on Leaving Valhalla Vikings
Regarding Valhalla Vikings
The start
The name Valhalla Vikings originates back to the very first Ragnarök tournament which Riot Games arranged. I got into a team of swedes and we needed a name for the team. I came up with the name Valhalla Vikings and we played the tournament and that story ended there.
At the start of 2018 Challengermode announced they will hold qualifiers for the Nordic Championship spring 2018 held by Dreamhack. Some of my old teammates from Ragnarök kept the name but wasn’t active anymore so I asked for permission to use Valhalla Vikings for my team that I would play in. They all agreed and gave me the Challengermode team and also the Club ingame in League of Legends. Now I build this team and we practice a lot before the actual qualifiers. The qualifiers consisted of 4 tournaments and right before the tournaments they asked if they could swap me out for another jungler (which was better than me). I agreed as long as I could be the “owner” of the team and try and find an organisation for them. My team managed to qualify for the Nordic Championship and I decided to start my own organisation built around my team. I asked Maxi and Krallex to help me out since I knew they had a burning passion for Esports. I would have the title CEO, Maxi COO and Krallex GM.
6 of June the organisation Valhalla Vikings is founded and Krallex and me work with the League of Legends team to try and secure a spot in EU Masters. Maxi was supposed to be the head of partnerships and try and get us sponsors so we could help the team with infrastructure and maybe give them a salary to motivate them even more.
The team ended up 3rd in the Nordic Championship, losing to NiP in the semi finals. Even though we wanted more, we were content with the outcome of the tournament. We still did not have a single sponsor and I’m not even sure Maxi reached out to corporations regarding sponsoring us at the time.
Krallex builds up a new team for the IESF world championship 2019 qualifiers to represent Sweden. The team managed to get to the finals but ended up losing in a very close series. Me and Krallex were on-site talking to people and supporting our team. Still no sign of making progress from Maxi and he couldn’t be on-site because of personal reasons which I completely understood.
Maxi creates his streamer team to help get social media activity for Valhalla Vikings and some marketing. He did a great job with getting GTA V RP streamers from Sweden but it came at a cost. We needed design for Valhalla Vikings and the streamers so me, Maxi and Krallex had to invest money into the design.
FSP (our main sponsor) contacted us first, so Maxi didn’t reach out to get them interested. They said they liked our League of Legends team and wanted to start a partnership.
Around this time Krallex decided to leave the organisation because he felt he wasn’t looped in enough. Which he should have been, he was one of the 3 founders of Valhalla Vikings and had every right to take part in everything that was going on.
There was nothing going on in League of Legends because we didn’t have SEL (Swedish Esports League) at the time so the players left the team to look for other opportunities. Now we stood there with a new sponsor who wanted a LoL team but we didn’t have any. In comes Fortnite.
I was in charge of the Fortnite division during the start since Maxi had streamers and Head of partnerships. I recruit a couple of players and suddenly the interest took off in joining Valhalla Vikings Fortnite. I did a poor judgement call and accepted too many applicants. I quickly realised that some were falling behind in the skill curve and had to let people go from the organisation. The ones I kept left were McDaBeast, Redrush, Mrrjagged and Mjukiiz (these were also the ones I approached myself and quickly learnt that approaching players usually gave a better result).
This is also the part where I noticed Maxis interest for the organisation grew because we were growing rapidly. We now had 4 partners (3 of which contacted us first) and the last partner was Maxis IRL friend who owned a business.
We went to Northspawn, an event organiser which was one of our partners and competed in the Fortnite, League of Legends, Counter-Strike and Fifa tournament. Right before this event I recruited Kris and Verox to the Fortnite team and after Northspawn we let go of Mjukiiz and Mrrjagged.
Time passed and we finally got SEL started up. I immediately took my Challengermode team Valhalla Vikings and built a roster to compete. We qualified for Division 1 and won the first season of SEL with me as a Jungler.
I had a lot of IRL stuff going on so I decided to leave Fortnite to Maxi so I could focus on what I was best at; League of Legends. Maxi wanted me to step down as a player and only be manager, so I did. (which was my first big mistake).
Maxi tried to find other people to be head of partnerships which is understandable, it didn’t seem to be his true area of expertise and now he had Streamers, Fortnite and Head of Partnerships on his plate.
Maxi wanted us to not have corporate titles so we just said we wouldn’t use corporate titles in Valhalla Vikings. Later Maxi wanted to have the title Managing Director (which is essentially CEO) and he wanted me to have General Manager. At this time I started feeling like he wanted to overtake Valhalla Vikings and set me up. ( I let this happen which was my second big mistake).
All the sponsor money we got now went to Fortnite and design. The sponsor went into partnership with us because they liked our League of Legends team, yet once we got money we didn’t invest a single penny of it into LoL because Maxi wanted to progress Fortnite and design.
Our sponsor quickly drops us out of the partnership. I have no idea myself what happened since Maxi still was in charge of partnerships but this was the largest setback.
Maxi managed to sign Crue and Chapix to our Fortnite team and started actively working in Fortnite. This is probably the best area Maxi worked in and I give him all the cred for everything that happened to Fortnite after I handed it over to him. If anything I personally believe Maxi should work as a talent scout/general manager in Fortnite.
Crue and Chapix qualified to the Fortnite World Cup and suddenly everything exploded. I was hoping this was our big break and we could finally go full-time Valhalla Vikings. We got a Business Coordinator and a new head of partnerships. We also got a new social media manager. All the big corporations wanted to talk about potential partnerships.
Suddenly Epic Games sent out a letter to let everyone know that they had strict policies regarding sponsor logos appearing at the event. This was one month before the actual event and we were getting deals done and suddenly we weren’t interesting anymore. The only actual sponsor we had was YLDR who gave Crue and Chapix their entire outfits.
Our business coordinator left which was understandable since he/she had a new job and we couldn’t provide salary and Maxi suddenly disappeared.
Suddenly I had to manage everything that was happening in Valhalla Vikings. I couldn’t handle it and so I let everyone go who wanted to leave since I was getting DMs from fortnite players and staff that Maxi had been ignoring them and they wanted to look for other opportunities. I even had a conversation on the phone with one of the players since his contract was up for renewal and he wanted to stay but not since Maxi had been away for so long. Nobody knew why either. Maxi didn’t give any notice.
Proof: 1. https://gyazo.com/3c9846714d42e60e400b57692e18ad76
Translates: Can you tell Maxi to answer DMs and not ignore me.
2. https://gyazo.com/a432f1142104d0f843402f64e6111d2b
Translates: Maxi have ignored me for awhile now. My contract is running out. Haven’t had a talk about it. I’ve asked to talk about it. I don’t want to leave discord and say FA (Free Agent). Need to talk. I think it’s very unprofessional that nobody even said anything about my contract running out.
Proof: 3. https://gyazo.com/b082dc5ecebd98db3ea00425b8b28de4
Translates: Hey Kackis. This is very important.(I say hi). I have been thinking a lot and I’ve realised that it’s time for me to move on. (I tell him it’s ok for me. Then I ask if he gets a hold of Maxi). No I don’t get any response from him. But I don’t have a contract.
At this point Teamfight Tactics was blowing up. I became very good at it and decided to stream when I played. My stream blew up and then I made a decision to keep playing and streaming instead of continuing the work with VHV. Maxi was still gone and I didn’t want to work by myself.
Suddenly I get a message from Maxi out of nowhere. I didn’t know he had returned or that he was working with VHV. I also didn’t know he had meetings since he never sent me any messages or used the discord we have for meetings.
https://gyazo.com/26e357a5e8c500a0f3dccf23f776eb65
translates: Hello Kackis, as you know there have been inactivity from various people lately. With an understanding we have seen past this and understood during vacation periods this can happen etc. However me and others have seen lack of activity and work, you know yourself since we had a meeting about this a few months ago. I have been open about how things have been handled and where we have been, even regarding the company/money and everything that happened and been honest with everyone and asked for forgiveness from my side. After everything we wanted to have an vote about the situation and left mine blank in this case since we shared a lot of sweat blood etc, and I wanted the rest of the teams opinion and not leave mine at all, where all members voted for you leaving VHV, atleast as commisioner/manager, whatever you want to call it, and we agreed to start over with new roles new recruitment etc.
Feels sad to type this to you but I called in the rest in the shape of a business meeting you have been voted out from the organisations board with majority, and this was without my vote (I didn’t vote at all).
I would like a comment or whatever you feel around the situation and I will bring up on a meeting we have tonight. But the votes are counted for, I want that we can move on from this with professionalism and happy faces, transference of mail/password/discord, etc.
(This is not anything I want to affect our friendship I hope, since I didn’t vote in any direction.)
End of translation.
I never got any indication regarding this happening at all. From my point of view. Maxi have told them lies and partly some truth to make me look bad in front of the other members of Valhalla Vikings to persuade them to dislike what I’ve done lately and to vote me off.
Honestly I was fine with leaving VHV at first since It didn’t really interest me anymore. Partly because we suffered a major setback but mostly because Maxi disappeared and I didn’t really feel like going into business with Maxi anymore (we were about to start up the company, which we never did).
However I did not expect to be backstabbed like this. I expected us to have a meeting or honest conversation about this and we could establish what happened and how to move on (including most likely me leaving).
When I first got this message I felt sad. A lot of work, time and money had been invested into this. Then I got angry because I realised Maxi had backstabbed me as hard as he could to get full ownership of Valhalla Vikings. I let it go however and continued with my life. I took what was mine and left VHV.
This is the part where I get so frustrated I need to write all this. I take my team on Challengermode, which I own both according to the law and Challengermode rules. I sell this team to another interested party. Now Maxi decides it is his team because it was played under the Valhalla Vikings name. He starts to tell the admins Valhalla Vikings owns this team. But for Valhalla Vikings to own the team. He needs a written and signed agreements from the players and me as team captain. Which I never signed and I’m sure not even all the players did maybe 2 or 3. So now not only did he backstab me, he also wants to go after my assets, and he wanted to keep calling me friend after what he did. Now I started hearing rumours how I took something that wasn’t mine to try and make some profit while I can and a lot of shit is thrown at me. According to Challengermode rules for an organisation to own the spot in the league they need to have signed contracts on all the players. If they do not the spot goes to the team captain. Once again, I never signed anything so the spot is mine legally and I took it and I sold it to another organisation. The fact that he goes after my assets made me frustrated enough to write all this. My perspective on everything that has happened (in a short version).
Proof of rules: https://gyazo.com/bd05ca877ae79fc0eb66a39206774a30
I would also inform Valhalla Vikings that they must change their logo now. I have the rights to it. Payed from my own personal account and have the receipt.
I would have quietly left Valhalla Vikings but I just can’t stand getting assaulted like this from Maxi after him ripping everything away without a varning. Let the world know how he treated me and how he might treat you in the near future.
I didn’t earn a single penny from Valhalla Vikings. All I ever did was work hard and invest time and money. My passion is for Esports and competing. When I founder Valhalla Vikings it felt like whenever we won a game I was a part of it winning. In the end I did not get the same feeling anymore.
I want to give a special thank you to André who were the CSGO manager for more then a year now. He never disappointed, always worked hard and became loyal to the family. Thank you André I hope you get to work with you dream.
I also want to give a huge thank you to Krallex for helping me out during the start up. Hard worker with a passion for Esports. I’m glad to see all the success Krallex is getting in his new organisation and hope to see more of him in the future.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I have appreciated every single kind word I've gotten since Valhalla Vikings was created and how far we got in a short period of time. Now is the time to take a step back and reflect on what is next.