State she's an "asshole" and sing and dance the "tea-pot" song - that's what one Hearthstone team manager apparently was forced to do when trying to raise a rules issue with a HearthstoneOpen admin.
As most Hearthstone drama, this too appeared on reddit first, as Hearthstone team manager by the name of Aleirri told a tale of abuse and mockery. On February 23rd, Aleirri and her team sign up for the third edition HearthstoneOpen's DraftKO 4v4 tournament to defend their back-to-back titles from previous weeks. In the middle of the process, however, Aleirri spots a discrepancy in the rule set - a new "no sideboarding" rule has been included but only on the match pages of the tournament and missing from all other places including the official rules page, website homepage the sign-up window and the support chat. Upon bringing said discrepancy to HearthstoneOpen's main and only admin, DangerousAndAdrenaline (DnA), Aleirri gets quite the response. At press time, the ruling on if sideboarding is allowed is still missing from the rules page.
DnA's first reaction is only mildly impolite, saying that having the rule written out in "giant letters" on each match page should be a good enough notification. "At this point I just want to know where the change to the rules would have been viewable to me and the team so I can avoid the team getting DQ’d," writes Aleirri in her reddit post regarding the following skype chat.
Aleirri doesn't get much farther than this, however, as the admin in question stops communicating with her and brings it to her team-members. "Your team is going to be DQ'd, unless [Aleirri] says 'I'm sorry, won't happen again' in the next minutes," the admin writes and continues: "That's my rule and I just made that up now." In a talk with GosuGamers, Aleirri also provided all the unedited screenshots displaying DnA's nicknames on Skype and Battle.net.
While over-reacting to a simple request isn't really scandal-worthy, DnA's next actions are. Upon deciding they've had enough with an admin "without any kind of ethical or moral backbone", Aleirri and her team withdraw from the tournament. The result is a team-wide ban with a very abusive redemption requirement:
Shortly after this point, Aleirri brings the story to reddit but that's not where the story ends. As the story develops, along comes one Bryan "Gwop" Andersen, team manager himself but also DnA's partner at HearthstoneOpen. Andersen's response assures the community he was never aware of his partner's behavior, that discussion with him is pending and that Andersen's team might or might not continue to stream HearthstoneOpen tournaments on their channel.
Four hours later, Andersen returned with an update of the situation, saying he and his team have broken all ties with DnA and HearthstoneOpen. Details of the conversation between the two parties were omitted and all Andersen said was that there's been an obvious disagreement about how the situation should've been handled.
One doesn't have to look far to understand Andersen's decision to abandon his partner at HearthstoneOpen, especially given the fact that between Andersen's two statements, DnA took to himself to post a Reddit AMA thread, since deleted, titled "I'm the asshole that runs HearthstoneOpen.com -- you can ask me anything!" Part of DnA's answers in the thread include:
More complaints from users followed up, as redditor /u/sleightlol brought up a conflict he had with DnA four months ago, where he faces the now familiar impoliteness.
This scandal certainly can't be helpful DnA's involvement in the Hearthstone scene, more particularly aiding his crowdfunding campaign to organizer a $2,500 pro-team tournament.
We've reached to HearthstoneOpen's DnA for comment but at press time there hasn't been an answer. DnA did hop on reddit to defend himself, however, listing the sizeable investment he's put in the tournament and saying "the people [he] banned on Monday are the type of people that make [his] hobby not fun."
I've probably sunk over $2,000 in providing a great tournament setup and about 300 hours of my time over the past 8-9 months I've been doing this.
So for the people that I banned on Monday.... that's because you're the type of people that make my hobby not fun. If my hobby isn't fun, I won't do it. So instead of ruining it for everyone, I just remove people like you.
Luckily, I am not ESL or some other organization, I am just me. So when I encounter people like you, I don't put up with it.
There is no customer service department. There is a ban department.”
