Dawn Of The Dumb: A Tale Of Two Danes
The stupidity of esports fans is by now well documented. Stupidity can be tolerable in relatively small doses... Rank hypocrisy not so much.
The latest entry in the never ending tome of moronic fan reactions comes during the Saudi Arabian state’s esports content delivery system known as IEM Cologne. ESL, to show how really down to Earth and fun they are, have of late arranged the seating so players can make eye contact and shout at each other during competitive matches. Not a problem for those of us who partook in esports in the before times, when for every single tournament this was not only normal but a genuine tactical consideration. The fans, of course, professed to love it. LOOK AT THE BANTER. THIS IS WHY CS;GO IS THE BEST ESPORT. WE’RE NOT LIKE THOSE SANITISED OTHER ESPORTS.
Then of course the thing that always happens happened. An unpopular player decided to get in on the action and suddenly the thing that was so good was actually so bad. Heroic in-game leader Casper "cadiaN" Møller is one of the most inexplicably maligned figures in the CS:GO scene. He is fallaciously called a cheat because the dumb don’t know the difference between being a member of a criminal conspiracy and a refusal to inform when someone confesses their crime to you. The dumb call him a failure when in reality he has built budget rosters, in a small market country, that have remained incredibly competitive at an international level. He turned around a prematurely ended career where he was already a member of the broadcast talent pool and has since gone on to win trophies. But in the eyes of the dumb the biggest crime of all is that during games he channels his energy into trying to fire up his team and also trying to make his opponents feel self conscious as they lose. It’s a standard sporting practice in all but the most polite of contests – tennis, snooker and the like – and while it often looks silly it can work against the right opponent. With that in mind, who better to use it against than Mongolz, a fringe team currently punching above their weight in a weak scene that are bedding in a 16 year old talent? So, in a series that should never have been as close as it was he called his opponents “fucking noobs.”
Oh, my foolish friend, don’t you know how this works yet? Can’t you see all the constituent parts for another lazy fan narrative laid out before you? Must you provide your own firing squad with the bullets soon to be embedded in your chest? And so it came to pass as soon as the word “Noob” left his lips it suddenly became a slur prompting the type of faux outrage the average dumb fan would rather talk about that the actual matches themselves.
We’ll get to the part where the fans prove themselves utterly worthy of every crumb of contempt you can serve up but I wouldn’t even need to get into that to know first hand how hypocritical it all is. This industry from the bottom to the top is absolutely incapable of two things – the truth and any form of moral consistency. My work down the years exposes this as irrefutable. I seem to possess the shittest superpower of all time, which is I can turn almost anyone with even a casual interest in esports into a blubbering hypocrite, so determined to prove me wrong that they renounce anything and everything they ever claimed to believe.
And so of course I also made the community love Cadian’s outbursts. At the PGL Major in Stockholm after Heroic managed to scrape through the New Challengers stage 3-2, he decided to flip some furniture around and celebrate as if he’d just won the whole tournament. In a throwaway line in the next desk segment as the footage played in the highlights package I remarked that considering they’d nearly fallen at the first hurdle they might want to dial down the celebrations and “grow up” a little because Heroic should have higher standards. This is the type of statement you’d hear maybe a dozen times a week across the world of sports talk. Alas, what I’d really said was “HOW DARE CADIAN CELEBRATE LIKE THAT? THEY ARE SO WRONG TO CELEBRATE WINNING! IT MAKES ME SO MAD TO SEE PEOPLE HAPPY!” I know I must have said that because the fans told me I did en masse.
On that day not only was Cadian right to jump on chairs and scream because he had beaten the mighty Movistar Riders, it was actually wrong for anyone to try and temper his exuberance in any capacity. “Imagine being so up your own ass you criticize people for celebrating if they didn’t win hard enough for your standards” said one anime obsessed gremlin. “For newer viewers perspective I find it kinda demoralising that team can’t even celebrate according to desk” said the original poster. “Cadian is not only the IGL but also the captain and hypeman.” “Richard Lewis and Thorin are toxic idiots and it shows time and time again” said someone who spends every day arguing with strangers about League of Legends. This was alongside a few hundred comments all concluding that the throwaway comment was proof the desk hated Cadian and that I should never have been hired to begin with as I offer nothing to a broadcast.
Unfortunately for Møller I hadn’t complained about him using the word “noob” this time otherwise it would have been OK, but in the absence of a greater villain to pelt with rotting fruit it was his turn in the stocks. The resulting complaints on Reddit and HLTV need to be preserved for their eventual induction into the Idiocy Hall of Fame. “Cadian has always been annoying. He’s so douchey in how he acts on a team that’s won nothing of note” said one user before mocking the BLAST’s they won… By now everyone should know a BLAST tournament only matters if G2 win it. Another said they had ZERO respect for Cadian because he should have realised that the Mongolz were just like him for real for real. “What is his problem” asked another thread. Over on HLTV there was a thread saying the exact same thing I’d said at the major about the timing of celebrations and another saying it was disrespectful to shout in their face like he did.
It didn’t take long for the bullying angle to be brought to the table. Remember, one of the team was 16 years old, so that was also a huge problem. After all we know that there’s nothing worse in your teenage years than being called a “noob.” “The young underdogs went up toe to toe against the the number 1 team in the world and cadian couldn't handle it. And it should'nt require the #1 team in the world shouting mental warfare against 16 year olds who had never been in a LAN to defeat them. That just made cadian look like a dick” was probably the pick of the bunch. “He is insulting poor 16 year old kids who have a lot of respect for Heroic” presumed the accompanying HLTV thread. The streaming king of the new dumb, Ohnepixel, also jumped in. “He’s trying to save and getting shouted at like a 40 year old” his brain completely oblivious to the fact he was only born 3 years after Cadian. Even after a commentator at the event told them that the Mongolz players wouldn’t be able to hear and understand what Cadian was shouting, Reddit’s best facial recognition and body language experts were deployed to say he was lying. The drama fizzled out with the hardcore haters trying to find if there were any rules Cadian had violated because surely anti-sportsmanship must be punished. In response to this another commentator joked that maybe Cadian should be executed by firing squad, which given ESL’s new ownership isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
It only took twenty-four hours for the pendulum to swing back the other way and the entire community to contradict their new found standards. After a particularly brutal loss against FaZe a Ninjas In Pyjamas player, Kristian "k0nfig" Wienecke, decided to tweet that the experience had left him feeling like he was sexually assaulted. This is presumably what he went with after his inner editor told him to omit the word “raped.”
There’s been a clear line drawn in esports about using that type of phraseology when talking about beating an opponent and it’s not a recent development. In 2014 Starcraft was disqualifying players for this type of comment but hey, NiP are a Louvre Agreement team so their players can do whatever the fuck they want and ESL won’t ever take action. Just to also make it clear, in this game, Wienecke did exactly what what his Danish counterpart did and no-one cared. The fact he managed to follow it up with something inarguably worse and still get away with it is a testament to how little fans actually care about anything beyond dogpiling people they don’t like.
It’s hard to imagine why, given the fact that it feels like there is a story every week about someone in esports being sexually harassed or abused by someone in a position of authority, he would choose this specific phrasing. He just seems to be someone whose mouth and brain have never held a meaningful conversation with each other. For example after their elimination loss to Apeks at the Paris Major, despite his own performance being pretty poor, he went straight into an interview and publicly placed the blame on his in-game leader. “We managed to outplay ourselves a little bit” he said “not trust in our team, not trust the players and only trust the stratbook, and I think that was what let us down today.” Imagine not trusting Wienecke. Inconceivable.
Despite all the praise and second chances It is now a matter of public record who Wienecke is. Passed over for a spot in the greatest team of all time because he was late for the job interview, since then he has been surrounded by enablers that refuse to let him waste the talent he’s determined to squander. The past couple of years has seen him do things that would be the end for almost anyone else. He initiated a drunken fight with a Maltese local after being denied entry to a nightclub in the notorious Paceville region. The end result was a broken leg for him and then a delayed journey home that resulted in him missing a Major qualifier for his team. Days later he’d appear on another Danish player’s stream, laughing and joking while playing CS:GO. Astralis didn’t qualify for that major, an outcome that cost them millions of dollars. When they cut him from the team for this lapse of discipline the fans said they had gone too far.
Of course, anyone who goes to events or speaks to events knows the stories and so it was then reported that the Maltercation wasn’t his first go around. A post on Jaxon revealed that he was already on a warning from conduct at IEM Cologne that saw him behave aggressively with hotel staff and try to get into a fight with a member of broadcast talent that involved the police being called. The next day ESL staff, Astralis management, Wienecke and the on-air personality he had threatened had a meeting and agreed that no further action would be taken as long as he behaved in future. He violated that agreement and indeed the explicitly written rules in the ESL/IEM handbook about behavioural standards while attending events.
All this probably should have given any organisation looking for a player pause for thought but of course it wasn’t long before he walked into a top spot on a team, the serially mismanaged Ninjas In Pyjamas, on a year long contract. His period of self improvement lasted all of five weeks and the fans rejoiced that he was back. He certainly was. After NiP crashed out of ESL Pro League he was spotted – not hard when the player and staff hotel is adjacent to Paceville – drinking right in the same spot he’d had the fight in. And hey, I like a bit of rock and roll but if that’s you then own it without the pathetic manipulation of the gullible cretins that make up the majority of the esports fanbase.
The resultant Reddit thread was downvoted into oblivion and filled with comments like “touch grass” and “get a hobby.” Then came the “apology” which was the exact opposite of what any competent PR strategist would tell you to say. Wienecke basically blamed you for being offended and said “I’m sorry if i hurt your feelings. It wasnt meant to be offensive. It was a joke. I know sexual assault isnt a joke and it actually happens. Stop trying to make it into something when it isnt. It wasnt my point. Relax.” See? It was just a joke about sexual assault made during a sports event. No need to get upset even though it violates the rules of the tournament.
Of course the same community who had been trawling the rulebook to see if Cadian should be penalised for shouting “fucking noobs” seemed to miss the very explicit rule about behaviour and social media posting while in attendance at IEM events that states players must behave as a role model. It was no longer important what competing players say during IEM events. Only “snowflakes” would be upset about a rape joke they concluded and anyway that was Twitter. Cadian was worse. He did it during a match. Just like that time k0nfig did. But that was different.
Perhaps even more worrying was a response from NiP’s coach of their women’s CS:GO team, Anton "ToH1o" Georgiev, who said “People nowadays looking to find something to cry about, boring days, not too much social life. It was taken out of context as always, leave them Brother.” Lots to unpack there isn’t there? Again, if it was a more notorious or less well liked figure there’d be screeching, lurid headlines along the lines of “coach with duty of care to women’s csgo team thinks sexual assault is nothing to cry about.” That’d be a yikes wouldn’t it? But again don’t worry, it’s NiP, a Louvre agreement team in bed with the Saudis and Emirates, so they can do what they want. Hell, they’ve even hired sex offenders at this point so just relax guys. This is the new normal in esports.
This is the reality that you need to understand if you’re going to work in this dumb industry. If someone who hadn’t recently pandered to and begged forgiveness from the plebs says this and it’s a huge deal. We would spend 48 hours posting on social media about how it undermines all our efforts to make esports a safe space for everyone, especially women who find themselves disproportionately affected by sexual violence. We tag in sponsors and ask if they are OK with this type of language from someone who wears their logos. We say that we will never support NiP or ESL again trying to obfuscate the fact that “support” in esports is meaningless because no one buys anything or spends any money on this dogshit hobby. And in the end that person loses a job and we all applaud each other for our efforts in selective policing. But Wienecke had banked enough good feeling that we decided not to go for the most uncharitable interpretation of his words and ruin his life over it, even though everyone lost their minds trying to destroy a professional player for far less only days before.
I’ll be clear about this as well, I know these games are stupid and I think it’s generally pathetic to try and ruin someone’s life because they said something you didn’t like. That said, if you’re going to do it for someone for saying “fucking noob” or “Fallen’s overrated” but not someone making light of sexual assault or using homophobic language, then I’m going to point out how fucking stupid that is.
Golden