Welcome to the first edition of Ask Esports. One of our goals for 2018 is to be more active in conversations that haven’t been adequately addressed or areas where we just haven’t been present.

The first one we wanted to tackle is a retrospective on a contentious investigation: Tainted Minds. The last time we spoke about Tainted Minds was in our competitive ruling, where we investigated allegations that TM mistreated its players and staff and that the situation was intentionally mishandled by the OPL team because of a conflict of interest between Riot’s Head of Esports in Oceania and TM’s owner.

Reception to that ruling was not good.

The feedback we got was that the investigation lacked details. Unfortunately, while others were able to put out public documents to reinforce their perspective, we had to conduct our investigation behind closed doors to maintain the confidentiality of our sources. This is still the truth. That said, we know there’s still a lot of dissatisfaction with our response, so we’re going to instead try to give more insight as to how we investigated and made our decisions.

Here, Chris Greeley and Mirko Gozzo will be talking about the investigation itself. Mirko is the country manager of Riot Oceania, who can speak to the details and timeline of the events, as well as how they gathered evidence. Chris Greeley can speak to the conflict of interest investigation.

LET’S START WITH THE EVIDENCE. WHAT EVIDENCE DID YOU GATHER? WHAT CAN YOU REVEAL?

[Greeley] So by the end of the investigation, the evidence we had amounted to the following:

• Examining the documents and narratives provided online by Tristan “Cake” Côté-Lalumière and Fasffy, which included more than 250 emails, Skype conversations, tweets and videos
• We got the OCE office and Tainted Minds to provide all of their contracts, notes, emails, internet printouts, receipts, Skype logs, Twitter DMs and text messages.
• We reviewed every internal communication between every member of the OPL team, the players, and TM management.
• We also had video from inside the team house that was filmed by an OPL features team for a video piece on Tainted Minds, which we were able to review.
• Finally, we sat down and talked with everyone we could: the coach, the manager, the team owners, the players, and the OCE office. This included…
• Interviewing representatives of Tainted Minds over Skype, including John McRae
• Interviewing members of the Riot OCE office over Skype, including Daniel Ringland
• Conducting a Skype interview with Fasffy and some follow-up written conversations with her
• Conducting an in-person interview with Nick “Inero” Smith at the Riot offices in Los Angeles
• Posing questions to and receiving responses from Ryan “ShorterAce” Nget, Aaron “Chuchuz” Bland and Tristan “Cake” Cote-Lalumiere (they declined Skype interviews, so this was performed over email)
• Posing written questions to Andrew “Rosey” Rose, who did not respond to our inquiries

Ultimately we had close to 20 interviews, a thousand pages or so of documents and an hour or two of video to go through. These documents were the basis of our ruling.

In terms of what evidence we can show, most of it is tied to corroborating the timeline of events, but that wasn’t in much doubt. As with any investigation, the perspectives are what tie things together. This is where I draw a hard line in not connecting comments with specific players and staff. This is a small industry. If we out a player or a coach or a manager for their statements to us during the investigative process, we wind up in a situation where we may do harm to these folks – put them in a situation where they are publicly attacked, blacklisted by teams or ostracized by teammates. The next time we have to do an investigation it will be impossible to find players or staff who are willing to talk to us because we are going to expose them for their honesty. I can’t trade their trust for yours.

In scenarios where we have critical pieces of evidence or interviews with individuals in a black box, we have no choice but to conduct our investigation behind closed doors. We simply cannot change this philosophy, even in the face of public heat.

WE’VE SEEN THE FILES DUMPED BY PLAYERS AND THE MANAGER, AS WELL AS BY TAINTED MINDS – WHAT WAS GOING ON AT THE OCE OFFICE DURING THIS TIME? HOW AND WHEN DID ALL OF THIS HAPPEN?

[Mirko] I can give a timeline and a bit of a personal perspective. In the spirit of transparency, it’s also important to say that I, and a few others in the OCE office, were close friends with the team’s manager, Fasffy, and had a lot of conversations with her throughout this situation. I actually had to excuse myself from the early official dealings with the team, because I was too biased in her favour. At this point I can talk about some of those past events and conversations. This won’t be exhaustive, but I’ll try to hit on the important points for myself.

2017 was the first year we (the OPL) provided a stipend for player housing and/or flights, because it was the first year we were hosting the OPL offline (meaning teams would need to be in Sydney to play). This also means 2017 was the first year many OPL organisations were moving to Sydney to set up their first gaming houses.

An OPL team, The Chiefs, had just seen their Oceanic Challenger Series (OCS) team promoted to the OPL, so (as per the OPL ruleset, an OPL owned OCS team promoted to the OPL has to sell the slot) they sold their slot to Tainted Minds. Tainted Minds hired their manager, Fasffy, but at some point decided they wanted to take on additional resources/investment. Those owners started looking for potential investors and began speaking with John McRae on their own accord, who had invested in an OCS team but was also interested in the OPL. So near the end of 2016, John became a partial owner of Tainted Minds, but kept the old owners and manager onboard, allowing them to maintain operational control of the team.

Everyone in the OPL learned of the financial support the OPL would be providing to teams in August, which left about five months for them to get set up. TM’s manager wanted to find a place as soon as possible to get the team settled, so she tried finding a place for November (ultimately settling on December). Eventually, TM’s manager found what she believed to be a great house. It hadn’t been rented in a long time, but the manager insisted on it and said the international players would not sign if they didn’t have a house secured, so they got it.

December was when all of the team moved in, and they immediately had to deal with the realities of the house they’d signed, including the house not having air conditioning, electrical load, internet stability, no doors on some rooms, standard residential waste management facilities (not commercial), cleanliness, and more. The team manager asked the owners for more resources and, when the owners didn’t provide what she asked for (or didn’t provide it fast enough), she decided to cover it out of her own pocket. The owners did compensate her for these things, but they didn’t agree with everything she wanted. For example, the owners believed the team should handle cleaning themselves, when the manager believed they should supply a maid service (this disagreement resulted in the house not being cleaned).

The owners also didn’t agree that the manager should have been doing other things at all, and wouldn’t pay her for her additional efforts. The team and manager tried to negotiate compensation that they could agree to, but were unable to reach an agreement. Throughout this time, the manager was talking with a few of us in the OCE office (as we were friends) and was asking for personal advice on the matter in which we advised her to only do what was required of her.

I remember specifically telling the team manager to stop doing extra work without getting a contract agreement in place. It was clear that she was deeply invested in the team, but that the majority of the work she was doing was outside of her contract and wasn’t being asked or expected of her. The metaphor I used was an employee who works double overtime without telling the parent company, and then bills the company after. The work might be amazing and important for the company, but the employee has no idea if the company wants – or can support – the extra cost. The manager disagreed with me; she believed her extra contributions were necessary in keeping the team together. I didn’t doubt this point, but she needed to get the team owners to realise that, and I told her so.

One concern for us was when she and some of the players began asking if there was a world where the team could stay together in the OPL, but not playing for Tainted Minds. In other words, get the OPL slot transferred to herself and/or the players, which we wouldn’t do here. I know she was asking about this to a number of members of the OPL staff, which made us more careful in navigating the situation. There had been an earlier situation in the OPL where the slots were ‘given’ back to the players (Team Immunity, then rebranded to Hellions), however that was the previous year, when we didn’t have partners and dedicated investors within the league. I’ll admit we were initially concerned that the players, coach and manager weren’t working well with upper management because they thought they could inherit the slot if there were enough issues.

In January, the coach for the team reached out to the OPL with some issues around his contract. This was the first time we officially heard from anyone on the team. The coach also said that the players didn’t want to be a part of the Tainted Minds organisation, but they all wanted to stay and compete together – repeating the theme we heard from the manager. At this point, we reached out to central operations to see what guidance they could give. Central operations advised us to remain neutral and attempt to mediate the contract disagreement between the players and management.

[Greeley] Also, it’s important to highlight the difference in mediation vs. arbitration. Mediation is when we bring parties together to have a conversation, but remain neutral in facilitating the discussion. Arbitration is when a party acts as a judge, reviewing the contracts and claims of the parties and making a binding and final decision on who is right and who is wrong. Legally we cannot arbitrate a situation.

[Mirko] Yes. When the players first asked for mediation, we emailed the owners of Tainted Minds to set things up. The owners showed us evidence of how they were trying to fix things, and they asked if they could sit down to talk with their players first, without us. We agreed and let them discuss things on their own, which didn’t work out.

At this point, the players asked us to come in and investigate the team for contractual breaches (computers, buyout clauses, etc). Additionally, they voiced unhappiness with the condition of the house, like problems with the internet, air conditioning and cleanliness. For contract breaches, we looked and couldn’t find any issues. Regarding the living conditions, we did an informal investigation on the condition of the house. Worth noting: heat was not the primary concern raised by the players (the complaints of the house were broader), and at no point did any player tell us they were in danger. This is why we were more informal in checking on the house.

We contacted other players within the house. We checked with friends and staff who visited the house throughout this time. We also saw there was a video shoot with our film crew that had been scheduled to happen the next day, so we asked them to investigate. Off the back of that, we had an hour of footage from inside the team house that we reviewed.

While the conditions of the house weren’t up to the player’s expectations, they weren’t at a level where we could intervene on the basis of player endangerment (nor did we see early warning signs). That is, had we gotten any signs that players were in uninhabitable conditions, we would have taken action immediately to protect their welfare, but we didn’t hear or see that. We should have investigated specific concerns more explicitly, but we also saw the team owners putting in considerable effort to solve things during this time (spending thousands of dollars on cleaners, hounding the property managers, etc). The players still requested mediation.

At first, we mismanaged scheduling – we accidently scheduled it over an Australian holiday and had to push it until the mediator (Daniel Ringland) was in office – but mediation finally happened in early February. Based on how the mediation went, we were optimistic about the future. However, things took a negative turn during a follow-up discussion between the team owners and the manager, wherein they fired the manager.

The following week, the players informed us that their contracts were breached, they wouldn’t play any more, and that they considered themselves free agents. The basis of the players’ claim was that ‘material damage’ had been done to the players as a result of the manager leaving and that their performance, and brand, had been impacted as a result. Since this was a subjective call of judgement, we informed the players we couldn’t legally make a judgement and told them to seek counsel.

[Greeley] To clarify: we are not and cannot be a court of law – that is, we can’t examine subjective evidence and make a binding ruling. The moment this crossed into subjective judgement, we told the players that they needed a court to recognize the truth of their claims. We can enforce objective breaches because the evidence in those situations makes the outcome clear. If, for example, in a contract it says the org would provide a computer – and they fail to – we would be able to enforce the contract. If it says the org would provide a ‘high end gaming computer,’ the players need to take it to a court of law to judge whether the computer was high end or not. In other words, where we have indisputable evidence (a player was not paid, a computer was not provided, etc), we are able to take action and when the claims are more subjective (an allegation that a reputation was harmed or that someone didn’t act in good faith), the disputes are inherently so factually intensive and subjective that we do not delve into the middle of them.

[Mirko] So the players looked for outside counsel but, over the next few weeks, both sides wouldn’t budge. The position of the owners was that the players were contractually bound to the organisation and by not playing, they were in violation of their contracts. The owners had also spent a fair amount of money importing some players and wanted compensation for their investment, in addition to a guarantee that the talent they’d imported wouldn’t immediately sign with a competitor to play against them. Meanwhile, the players believed that the ownership was in breach of contract and as a result the players should be free to seek out other opportunities.

We informed both parties that the disputes weren’t clear enough for us to rule on, and that they should seek counsel, which they did. Unfortunately, those negotiations also fell through and in late February the whole thing was catapulted into the community, with players, managers, and staff taking to Twitter, Reddit and industry news sources. We felt we should be transparent about the situation, so we decided to respond.

… WITH AN ARTICLE WRITTEN BY THE MAN WHO WAS ACCUSED OF BEING BIASED. WHAT WERE YOU HOPING WOULD COME FROM THAT RESPONSE?

[Mirko] In our mind, this was a misunderstanding that we could clarify with a straightforward response, but we misread the situation. We thought that Daniel Ringland (CptStupendous) should be the author because if anyone else’s name was on the response, it would feel like we had something to hide. In hindsight, this was a poor decision. Really poor. The worst. Reception went the opposite direction: it read like we were so uncaring of the accusations that we could have the guy being accused write up an official response excusing himself. We were way too close to the situation and didn’t realise that a lot of fans had made their minds up already.

After we published this response, things turned supernova, so the investigation was moved from the OCE lead with central support to the Central lead.

WHAT DOES A MOVE LIKE THAT MEAN?

[Greeley] Just to clarify the difference between what we’re calling central vs. regional Riot offices: while Riot is one global team, we are in reality fourteen different offices around the world that run regional leagues with a fair amount of autonomy. Want to know why LPL does something that NA LCS doesn’t? It’s because the folks running the LPL think it makes sense for their region and the folks running NA don’t. It is more accurate to think of Riot leagues as independent entities that all qualify up to international events. Our shared mandate is to develop competitive League of Legends in the most regionally sustainable way, but the ways we operate are different because our ecosystems are different. The job of the Central team is to understand where our ecosystems can – or should – be consistent, and to help every region apply best practices.

So when the investigation shifted to Central, myself and a few others gathered as much evidence as possible from all parties, and began digging in. We contacted everyone who was connected to the situation and kicked off some lengthy conversations as to how all of this happened.

From an outside perspective, it is easy to say we were investigating ourselves, but in reality I was working with the Central team and – with respect to the conflicts – investigating the OPL team. To repeat from the video: before I joined Riot in January of 2017, I was a lawyer for 13 years and one thing I did a lot during my career was run internal investigations for clients – digging in when something went wrong to help them figure out what happened, and why.

The reason I say this is because I had been at Riot for not even three months when the investigation kicked off. I had spoken to the folks on the OPL team on several occasions, but candidly had no dog in the fight. I wanted to get to the right answer, but if that answer was conflict or no conflict, I didn’t really care. I was also given full freedom to get to the right answer from the highest levels at Riot. We take these allegations seriously and spent a lot of time on them over the course of the investigation.

SO WE INVESTIGATED DANIEL RINGLAND FOR CONFLICT OF INTEREST. WHAT DID WE FIND?

[Greeley] We went very brief in our initial ruling, so I’m going to go deep here.

The most enduring part of this whole situation has been the idea that Daniel Ringland – the head of esports in Australia, conducted this investigation – he didn’t, and that he had some relationship with TM or its owner that caused him to be biased – he didn’t.

The allegations were generally that Tainted Minds ownership was given preferential treatment because of a preexisting relationship between John McRae, and a member of Riot’s OCE office, Daniel Ringland. As purported evidence of this bias, it was pointed out that during Week 5 of the OPL, Tainted Minds had 13 players on their roster, three more than the ten permitted under OPL rules. Team members also suggested that the mediation scheduling was orchestrated by the OPL team to help TM.

We found no evidence of a personal relationship between Ringland and McRae. The only allegation that any of the players or staff made focused on a meeting McRae had with the team, during which he said that Ringland had encouraged him to invest in the league. Coupled with the mediation reschedule and the Week 5 roster issues, they connected those issues to conclude that there must be a personal relationship and a bias. We dug on this with everyone and no one had any additional evidence or theory suggesting some conflict or bias.

Here is what we did find – In 2016, McRae contacted Riot’s Oceanic office to inquire about purchasing a team in the OCS (the Oceanic Challenger Series). Ringland fielded that inquiry, reached out to all OCS owners via email and asked whether any teams were interested in selling. Those that responded were passed on to McRae. McRae eventually purchased an OCS team. Separately, and without an introduction from Riot, McRae and Tainted Minds began speaking about the possibility of McRae investing in the team. Eventually, McRae purchased an interest in Tainted Minds.

Part of any region’s role in growing the league and competitive scene is making introductions between team owners that are looking to sell their team or take on investors and individuals or entities looking to invest. It is not uncommon for members of all fourteen regions to make such introductions, which are beneficial to the organizations, investors and the growth of the league. We also know Daniel Ringland facilitated many of these introductions through the development of the OPL, and his interactions with McRae weren’t any different.

There was also an allegation during the investigation that Tainted Minds and Riot do business together in New Zealand. We knew that McRae owned a part of a company, which, amongst other things, organized and ran amateur high school League of Legends competitions in New Zealand. While setting this tournament up, the company applied to Riot’s Oceanic office to have Riot provide Riot Points as prizing for the tournament (which we gave). That request was not made to Ringland, nor was the decision made by Ringland. The relationship was at all times handled by a different member of the Riot Oceanic office who oversees these kinds of community outreach programs. Riot, in every region I’m aware of, provides this kind of support for amateur events that are registered with us.

That said, the OCE office did provide additional support for the league during this time, such as promoting them in the OCE League of Legends client. To be clear: we know this support has grown since the investigation. In 2017, we provided physical swag and player prizing for two High School League Grand Finals in Auckland Armageddon, and we partially covered the cost of player travel to the finals. This year, Riot will again be working with High School League as they bring competitive League of Legends to schools around the region.

REGARDLESS IF WE DIDN’T FIND A BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP DURING THE TIME OF THE INVESTIGATION, COULDN’T WE HAVE BEEN OPERATING IN OUR BEST INTEREST BY CATERING TO MCRAE’S NEEDS IN ORDER TO SECURE A LONG TERM PARTNERSHIP?

[Greeley] It would be suspicious if we had evidence of preferential treatment that was out of line with our recommendations, or if the OCE team was interfering with the investigation when it moved to central. Neither of these points were true.

I think it bears repeating: we never found malicious intent or proof that this was a team owner who put his players in danger. We found a team owner who was wildly misaligned with a manager who was promising a lot to the team, and a regional OPL team who had to maintain neutrality when there weren’t clear contractual infractions.

I do want to say that we (Central) dropped the ball in supporting the regional office. The OPL team did not have a league operations person at the time – they were hiring – and they were looking for some guidance, especially from folks who had dealt with these kinds of player issues in the past. Our advice from central was pretty shallow: “We can’t mandate how organizations run their teams (beyond the basics) and we have to treat the players like adults, so focus on helping the team and players work things out directly. Stick to contractual agreements.”

If we had been more attentive to the situation, we would have suggested that the OPL team be ironclad in how they mediate, like sending explicitly identified investigators to the house to demonstrate responsiveness, or pushing mediation through as fast as possible. We all misjudged the boiling point of the situation.

But, once again, we can’t negotiate on behalf of the players and if we begin to play a more active role in enforcing things we’d like versus things that are on contract we are effectively abusing our power, which makes things very messy. This is especially scary if we’re making teams or players do things they’re not contractually required to do. We’re not a court of law and cannot arbitrate situations between players and their team. This is why we turn to mediation. When we pushed the players to solve disputes on their own, it wasn’t us trying to favor Tainted Minds, it was us saying that we couldn’t get involved.

WHAT ABOUT THE ISSUES WITH TAINTED MINDS HAVING 13 PLAYERS ON THE ROSTER, WHEN WE SET A MAXIMUM OF 10? OR THE EVIDENCE THAT NAMES HAD BEEN DELETED OVER THE WEEKEND WITHOUT THE “LAST UPDATED” COLUMN UPDATING TO REFLECT THIS CHANGE?

[Greeley] At the time, the OPL team was consulting with central League Operations regarding whether or not to allow Tainted Minds to hold 13 players on the roster through the weekend. Tainted Minds was trying to assess its options to field a competitive team while still negotiating with its players who had declared their contracts violated. It’s important to note that the free agency of these players wasn’t legally established (as we mentioned above), so we had to be neutral.

Central – not the OPL – approved the expanded roster because, through the evidence we saw, we believed that Tainted Minds was trying to repair the situation and we didn’t want to punish those on the team who did want to play. We told Tainted Minds to drop 3 players by Monday. On Sunday, the team provided those names, so we deleted the rows.

There were some theories around Riot backdating the roster update so it seemed like Tainted Minds never exceeded the player cap, but this is more about the database being a basic tool to track player eligibility, and not an overly designed piece of software. For anyone who wants to check, we run our database on Google Sheets and use the onEdit function to trigger the “last modified” script. Deleting rows doesn’t trigger the script, so if you delete a row without changing a cell, the last modified date at the top of the database won’t update. We were able to confirm these facts through contemporaneous emails and interviews with the individuals involved. In addition, as commissioner, I use the Global Contract Database all the time – If I delete a row or paste a row in from another document, I have to remember to edit a cell or the script won’t trigger.

GOING BACK TO THE PLAYERS DECLARING THEIR CONTRACTS BREACHED. YOU STILL KEPT THEM ON THE GLOBAL CONTRACT DATABASE THROUGHOUT THE PROCESS AND IT LIMITED (OR OUTRIGHT PREVENTED) THEM FROM JOINING NEW TEAMS. WHY?

[Greeley] This was a case where us being neutral impacted the players more than the team, but like we mentioned above: the players were declaring their contracts void on a subjective issue that we couldn’t rule on. There was no indisputable evidence to show Tainted Minds’ owners were in breach of contract.

Since we can’t be the arbitrator of a dispute between an employee (the players) and an organization (Tainted Minds), we mediate through the contracts. I know I’m repeating myself. Through the last few weeks of this confrontation, we kept getting emails from the players claiming a breach of contract on a subjective ruling (material damage to their brand), but we kept telling them that those claims did not hold enough weight for us to unilaterally grant them free agency.

Eventually, the players found a lawyer to declare their contracts void anyway, but it was on the same claims as before. We encouraged the parties to settle their differences, suggesting third-party arbitration at several points. Ultimately we had to let the process work itself out.

OKAY, THEN LET’S TALK ABOUT THE HOUSE AND THE HEAT. REGARDLESS IF THE PLAYERS ARE IN REAL DANGER, WHAT ABOUT ENFORCING BASIC LIVING CONDITIONS?

[Mirko] I know it was very hot in Australia during a lot of December 2016 and January and February 2017. So when some of the players and staff who lived in that house say it was awful or that they were really hot, I’m not disputing that.

There were vocal complaints and discomfort, but the broad feedback we were hearing from others living in the house and people visiting the house is that the players weren’t in danger. If we heard otherwise, we would have taken immediate action. As I mentioned earlier, we collected the following information on the state of the house during our informal investigation:

• The manager moved into the house, of her choosing, on December 4, 2016. During the initial investigation carried out by the OCE office, we spoke to several mutual friends we had with the manager that were at the house around the same time who said that while the house was not clean, it wasn’t uninhabitable or oppressively hot by Australian standards.
• The team put a portable air conditioner in the gaming room on December 6 – two days later. While that is just one room, there was at least some space in the house that had A/C – and it was the space the team spent the most time in. This was in addition to providing fans for all rooms of the house.
• We know from people who were in the house around Christmas that the house was hot but not unsafe – definitely not ideal.
• We know from interviews we did with the players and staff that the imported players had it worse than the native Australians. We also heard from some within the house that they didn’t consider it to be “unsafe” and “unlivable” as discussions online have suggested. The idea that this house was a torture chamber was just not reinforced during the interviews we did.
• We also had an OPL film crew at the house in January the day after the team first contacted Riot – completely by coincidence. We asked them to investigate the house, and reviewed all of the footage they collected.
• In mid-January, management installed one additional air-conditioner and an evaporative cooler unit.
• Finally, and this is just to clarify things for fans outside of Australia: We saw some belief that there was an entire month of consistent 115°F weather during Australia’s heatwave, which is not true. Looking at a calendar of temperatures near the house through December 2016 and January 2017, there were only a handful of days hitting a peak of 100°F+ (38°C+), with most days peaking at 80°F (29°C) to 95°F (35°C). There are many factors that contribute to the heat – like how some players were acclimating – so this isn’t to dispute the pain of others, but to contextualise the overall situation.

Throughout these discussions, we thought we had the full picture painted. Unfortunately, because we weren’t explicitly sending over official investigators to document everything, to the players and manager it felt like we weren’t taking the situation seriously.

The second issue that compounded things was that the house was not wired to support the electrical load that the team wanted to put on it. The house was a rental – you can’t just rewire a rental house to add more capacity without buy-in from the landlord. This got more complicated when we saw that the manager was the one who advocated for the house in the first place, knowing it didn’t have AC and being Australian. TM’s owners did, what we thought, was the next best thing – they offered to move the team to another house.

I understand the players and manager didn’t want to deal with the headache of moving so close to the start of the season and that they didn’t trust the owners to do another move right. Still, Tainted Minds’ offer was an important piece of evidence that demonstrated to us they wanted to fix the situation but didn’t have the ability to do so. This was a pretty untenable situation: you have an org that wants to solve the problem one way, and a team that wants to solve things a different way.

We also know Tainted Minds was trying, but the holidays were slowing things down: upper management called and emailed the property manager on December 20 about a number of issues in the house – about two weeks after move in. The management company was closed for the holidays at the end of that week and remained closed through January 9. Nonetheless, TM continued contacting the management company during this period and emailed them again as soon as they reopened to follow up on repairs. They followed up a third and fourth time about ten days later and three days after that. In between these emails, there’s evidence they were pursuing the management company by phone and that some repairs were being done. John McRae went to the house after Christmas to pick up and dispose cardboard boxes. Finally, the team was withholding rent payments in an attempt to get the management company to make the requested repairs.

During this time, the management company made a number of promises to TM about when repairs would be made and what would be done. TM, in response passed these assurances on to the team. When the landlord came up short, TM was left holding empty promises. I’m not saying TM handled this competently, but it was clear they were putting in effort.

WHAT ABOUT THE INTERNET? OR THE SUB-PAR GAMING EQUIPMENT? OR GROCERIES, LAUNDRY, AND CLEANING?

[Mirko] Like I mentioned above, once we knew that living conditions were tolerable, if uncomfortable, all of those issues became internal disputes between the players and the organisation. This isn’t to sound like we don’t care, but we would be overstepping our boundaries as a League if we started micromanaging how a team provides for their players, even as they try to fix the situation.

WE ENDED UP PUNISHING TAINTED MINDS WITH WHAT SOME CALLED A “SLAP ON THE WRIST.” OTHER TEAMS AND OWNERS HAVE BEEN PUNISHED FAR HARSHER, WITH LESS EVIDENCE, LIKE RENEGADES. WHAT WAS THE DIFFERENCE HERE?

[Greeley] We got a lot of feedback as to the amount of the fine ($7,000 AUD). If you can see our perspective from all of the above, I hope you also understand why we don’t think Tainted Minds is completely at fault in this situation. The fine we levied was purely for the late payment of players and failure to provide computers to the coach and manager, and not any of the other issues.

For more insight, our goal in issuing fines is also to be consistent to the economic climate of the region. If these violations happened in a more affluent region – for instance, in Korea – the League may have fined a team 10x the amount that TM was fined, but we have to take into account the size of the league and the other teams in that league when deciding at what level to issue fines. The fine we give one team in a league has to be applicable to any team in that league. The individual wealth of an owner or organization has no bearing on the size of the penalty. We structure fines based on how developed the league is and the state of the ecosystem it operates in. If the entire ecosystem is sitting on more money, then the fines will reflect that.

Renegades has always been a tricky issue – mainly because that investigation was based largely on information and documents that were provided to Riot with the express condition that they be kept confidential. The guys who did the investigation were able to corroborate all the information they relied on, but because that information is essentially in a black-box, talking about the Renegades case never feels satisfying to the community because all the information that people actually want is gated.

On a broader level, very early on we had to make a decision on how we wanted to conduct investigations. On the one hand, we could run them with an eye toward total disclosure – no promises of confidentiality and all the information gathered during the investigation is dumped to the community when a decision is rendered. While this method provides maximum visibility (which is great) and engenders a ton of trust (which is even better), in a small industry like esports (and a smaller industry, like LoL esports), there are a lot of people who are unwilling to give us information if they know that as soon we publish a decision they are going to be (i) attacked by the community; or (ii) blacklisted by teams; or (iii) ostracized by pro players. In a lot of situations, given the choice between providing information and making enemies or staying silent, people tend to stay silent.

The other alternative (and the one we went with) is prioritizing getting all the information possible and protecting the whistle-blowers. While teams in many regions have professionalized immensely, including self-reporting incidents within their team that we would otherwise never had known about, the scene (including in NA) in 2015 and 2016 was much different. Making sure that pro players were being protected and that teams were following the rules was a crusade, and taking information on a confidential basis to aid an investigation was really important.

In any case, the decision to force a sale of Renegades accelerated a sale process which was already under way (which I understand people argue negatively affected the price the owners could realize for the team) and led to the institution of an appeals process to a third-party outside of Riot for fines over 10k, suspensions over 3 games (for players/coaches) and for bans and termination from the League.

ON THE TOPIC OF “WHAT WE LEARNED” OR “WHAT WE WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY,” THEN, LOOKING BACK AT THIS WHOLE TAINTED MINDS INVESTIGATION, WHAT WOULD WE HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY?

[Greeley] If we had unlimited resources, we should treat any of these situations as combustible and ready to go off at any moment. To the players, manager, and coach I think we appeared to be too relaxed or distant in the conversation, when they wanted our full attention. In a way, they might have accomplished their goal of accelerating the conversation by dumping all of those documents public, but I believe things would have resolved in the same way. This is a very hard thing to say, especially given how bloody things turned and how ineffective our reasoning was when we couldn’t dump public evidence in the same way. This long wall of text may also be more of the same, but I don’t think we could have done much better after the fact – just before.

I mention this in the video, but I want to repeat it here:

The reason we are neutral as the League is because we firmly believe that any alternative would be worse for the advocacy of pros or the development of the ecosystem. In situations like these, I know it seems cold-hearted when we don’t insert ourselves into contractual negotiations between players, or managers, and their team owners. Sometimes it can feel like we allow players to get into tough situations, like with Tainted Minds. That said, if pro players expect us to be negotiating on their behalf, we stunt their growth with our sensibilities. We replace their judgement with ours. We can’t tell a player what they’re worth – they should be doing that independently, and demanding the most they can of the orgs they sign with. Also, if we continuously overstep our boundaries as a League, team owners can’t meaningfully invest in the ecosystem without fearing they’ll be strong-armed into things they didn’t – or can’t – sign up for.

Tainted Minds made us very aware of the tradeoffs we made in being neutral, and we messed up by not clearly explaining why we could only mediate the situation, but not legally arbitrate it. That said, our end lesson here is not that we should be more active as wardens when pros are signing contracts, it’s that we need to do more to educate pro players as to what they deserve when they play professional League of Legends.

[Mirko] The OCE office is a small one serving a small region, so I don’t think we’ll ever have the kind of staff that larger leagues do. In terms of what we’d have done differently, I can call out a few things specifically:

• We should have provided the information contained here much earlier as the situation unfolded, and been involved in the ongoing conversation, rather than watching it spin out of control
• We should have shown more clearly to the players, coach and team manager that we were taking their claims very seriously, and been more transparent as to what we could and couldn’t do for them
• We should have established much clearer, more professional lines in our relationship between the OCE Rioters and Fasffy
• We should have visited TM’s gaming house for an official inspection, instead of relying on the information described earlier on in this post
• Our first response to this situation should not have been authored by Daniel Ringland

We’ve also learned a lot since then, and have introduced a direct-line email address that players can use to contact one specific Rioter anonymously, as well as conducting regular surveys and meetings multiple times per year to check in on player welfare.

The OPL has also evolved. We now have several teams living and training in separate facilities, including two teams who train alongside traditional sporting teams in the SCG (Sydney Cricket Ground) and the Hanger, in Essendon. We’ve also seen almost all teams move beyond the ‘team manager’ model towards having a general manager and coaching staff, sometimes in addition to a sports psychologist. The OPL staff have also stepped up player education on the importance of doing diligence on contracts, as well as implementing a confidential third party assistance program, which all OPL players have access to 24 hours a day in times of personal stress.

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CONCLUSION

We’d like to thank the passionate fans and community who are so deeply invested in the welfare and safety of pro players in the league. Our failure to clarify the situation in April of last year – and our silence thereafter – was a mistake that we need to learn from moving forward.

Thank you for reading this entire post. If you have additional questions, please leave them in the comments or we will be around to answer questions on reddit.