In the fourth and possibly final chapter of the Rattlesnake versus Speed Gaming debacle, Kurtis 'Aui_2000' Ling expressed his feelings about his former Speed Gaming manager Marco A. Fernandez in the form of a blog earlier today. The long and detailed post covered how and under what conditions the former Kaipi team signed with Speed Gaming, their trip to Korea to compete in the Nexon Invitational Super Match, and all the threats and alleged lies by Fernandez throughout their short stint with the organization.
According to Ling, the team had their first conflict with Fernandez just three days after signing the contract with Speed Gaming. Due to Fernandez's "imperfect English", there were some slight communication problems about their travel arrangements during November and Fernandez seemed to have difficulty juggling his real life commitments and his job as the manager, or as Fernandez would call it, babysitter. "It was just incredibly annoying to deal with such a disorganized person," Ling explained on how Fernandez would constantly ask them when their games are instead of scheduling the games himself.
When Fernandez started scheduling the games, he would schedule the games at 15-16 CET which was very inconvenient for Ling since that would be 5-6 A.M in his timezone. Ling stated the team did not think much of these issues but collectively, together with Fernandez flaming the team after every loss, they became pretty significant.
It was not until their trip to Korea that stuff got a lot worse. Apart from the salary issues, Fernandez allegedly threatened the team that Gamefy was thinking of rescinding their invite due to their loss to Dignitas in the Super Match. Ling wrote that Fernandez would constantly remind Jacky 'EternalEnvy' Mao and himself on how much the team sucked and that they did not practice hard enough. Ling also accused Fernandez of attempts to cheat Nexon by giving Hwanni, one of the organizers, receipts for food when the team clearly wasn't with Fernandez during meals. Hwanni suggested that the whole team could gather to settle the reimbursement at the end of the day, which Fernandez was not pleased with. Fernandez told Ling that Hwanni was mad at the team for approaching him rather than talking to him through Fernandez himself. Hwanni stated that was not true later on.
In the chat logs posted, it was clear that Fernandez disliked Mao and Ling , and threatened (chatlog 1, chatlog 2) them again as soon as they returned from Korea. Ling claimed that Fernandez asked the team to lie on their Chinese visa applications and continuously expressed on how badly the team is performing. Ultimately, Fernandez said if the team did not make it to top three in MLG Columbus, they would be breaching their contract for not trying hard enough. At that point, the team, Ling and Mao specifically, more or less had enough of Fernandez's shenanigans. They felt insecure about going to China with a "shady" guy managing them and told Fernandez they did not want to go to China with him.
The team members then approached Speed Gaming's sponsors directly (Weir) through some connections and were very surprised to know that Weir speaks English, albeit a little broken. Upon knowing that the players now have direct contact to Weir, Fernandez got extremely agitated and wrote a wall of text (chatlog) complaining about what Weir had heard. The relationship was beyond repair at this point of time. More arguments happened in the days leading towards MLG and when Fernandez found out Charlie 'Monolith' Yang, team manager for Dignitas, was going to help the team in MLG, Fernandez asked Kyle 'Everx' Canary to relay to the team that Charlie will not be allowed to manage the team in the tournament. The team ended up going to MLG with Yang anyway.
Due to Fernandez's poor flight scheduling, the team was late to Columbus and had close to no sleep prior to their match on the first day. After the infamous statement went up on Speed's website an hour prior to their grand final match against DK, the team felt more relaxed and probably attributed to them playing better in the championship game.
To conclude the blog, Ling said, "I know that some people might think that this blog is just childish drama, and they’re correct. But there are some things that, in our opinion, need to get out there. In an industry growing as quick as esports, there are always people that may try to take advantage of the growth and we need to be careful with something as big as DotA. There have been a lot of teams that have been taken advantage of heavily by organizations, but they have kept it inside in order to avoid drama."
Read the full blog here.
