My Beef with Tralf

This has been slowly building up over the past 3 or so months, and I'm pretty tired of being asked about it on streams, on skype, and even by fucking text message; and I'm just gonna air it out on my last blog post on hongossip before I move to the stayGreen website. So here goes:

I never really understood why Tralf decided to get so mad at me for seemingly no reason. At first I thought it was because I blogged here about him. Shortly after those blogs went public I started to get people coming to my stream telling me that Tralf called me a faggot. Understandable, I guess in some way, as I had basically outed his intentions of playing competitive HoN again. But at the same time, I wasn't really posting anything in an inflammatory way about the guy.. just the information I was getting. And it's not like I was the first and only person who was talking about it.

Then I posted the second blog post, which speculates about him posting under the name T90ly, where T90ly (who is supposedly Tralfs former roommate) praises Tralfamadore in a few threads and also disparages his at the time teammates, including current (assumed) teammates; Moonmeander and Bkid. I ended the post saying that if it were actually Tralf posting on T90ly it wouldn't surprise me. Again, this is hardly anything offensive.

My third post about Tralfamadore was about his very controversial exit of the clan One Trick Pony, which lead to a flurry of hate posts on the HoN forums. I simply picked posts out of the threads and left some remarks as to what I thought about the posts in general, as well as had some very obvious sarcastic comments like:

 "Luckily for OTP, CM decided to let Xibbe have Chipper both in both games 2 and 3, leading me to believe that Milkfat asked CM to throw to allow OTP to stay in Diamond while cursing the name of Tralfamadore under his breath."

Again, nothing really spiteful or even untrue. Everything I posted about Tralf quitting the team and the way he did it was completely factual, which was supported in the fourth blog post about Znoowy's response on the official HoN forums.

So, as this continues on, I start losing focus on HoN Gossip. Yet while streaming I keep getting people coming to twitch.tv/S2phil and telling me stories about Tralfamadore talking copious amount of shit.

"Phil is a sad person. He's such a faggot. Why would someone who got fired still try to support the company by keeping the S2 name. Why is this person still allowed to be on podcasts. I can't stand the guy."

The entire time, I'm thinking about my history with Tralfamadore. So I'm gonna talk about it here. I never really knew Tralf that well when he was in SK. I was pretty friendly with Cardinal and we TMM'd in low brackets every now and then. Sometimes I would see Tralf but never really talked to him until we launched NASL Season 2. Of course by that time I was working for S2 Games but it hadn't been made public (Honcast was acquired by S2 Games in July 2011). My times talking with Tralfamadore were pretty minimal as Swindle was the captain of the team, but we spoke every now and then. I started to get more involved with the event coordination of things and Breaky mostly took over the administrative roles for NASL and I basically tried to back him whenever I could but my heart was mostly in casting the games and working with the marketing team on the new Honcast studio, the NASL Finals and the upcoming  MSI Beat IT tournament which would lead into Dreamhack Winter 2011.

I knew that Dreamhack Winter was going to be my last Dreamhack spent casting, as things were getting rough around the office with the Director of eSports position. So when Dreamhack Winter 2011 rolled around, I made sure that I started talking with the players. I made sure to meet with Bkid, Sender, Tralf, Swindle, and all of the vocal members of the competitive community who were in attendance. I wanted them to know that things were in the right hands now, and even though I said a lot of things and made a lot of promises that took a long time to appear, I truthfully meant what I said. I wanted the best for those players and for competitive Heroes of Newerth. In December when I was appointed as the interim Competitive Director I tried my best to show that I could be of worth as more than a shoutcaster, and in January after a successful CES event I was offered the position full time. I knew that I had to get out of the casting role because the scene had been left in complete shambles. This is a bit off-topic but I want it to be said here plainly: It takes time to plan events guys, especially at the time because S2's upper management wasn't really buying into the eSports/marketing venture after watching NASL's 3 week turn around post production errors.

I knew that we needed to make a change and some of the competitors were already on the move. Rumors of Fnatic leaving for DOTA 2 lit the fire under our asses at the office, and I can't count the amount of times that Breaky came into my office asking "what can we do to save HoN." This was around the time when I left casting and Breaky was stuck with the King of the Hill tournament that we were trying to get off the ground but the teams were just so unstable due to lack of events. This is also the time when Breaky started casting with Zyori. Now, I don't want to sound like a huge dick, but I was never a fan of Zyori's casting. I didn't think he was a better caster than me. Maybe a better main caster and certainly a better cameraman, but he didn't bring anything dynamic to the team and when they were talking about bringing him on I was not a fan. Want to know who I was advocating before he even expressed interest?

Tralf.

It doesn't really matter though, because he didn't know that and I'm sure my desire to have Tralf brought to Honcast wouldn't have made any influence at all into the hiring decision, but I'm still gonna put it out there. I was supporting Tralf before he asked for my opinion on him possible casting. When Tralf and team sent in their deck to Complexity Gaming do you know who they asked first about the team? Yep, it was me. I told them, they will be the best team in HoN for you to pick up. This is the only team who can give Fnatic a run for their money. Ask Jason Lake or Jason Bass, Tralf, ask them what I said about you personally. That you were a stand up guy who could lead your team to success.

Then Dreamhack Summer 2012 rolled around and man we had problems. Not Tralf and I, but the tournament had problems. I'm not gonna go into why, but still, we all toughed it out. Tralf and I would go out and smoke cigarettes during breaks and just shoot the shit. He asked me about the quality of life at S2, and I told him he would be a great addition. I wanted my friends to get hired at S2, because who wouldn't? Who wouldn't want to have that kind of work environment. And so it was. You got the job as the new co-caster and we all couldn't wait for you to get there.

And when you got there everything seemed great. We talked all the time at the office, I even offered you and Lisa the option to sleep in the spare bedroom that I had if your apartment wasn't ready. When I left, I sold you a $1,500 bed and box spring for $200 because I wanted to help  you out. I know my desk and chair weren't in the best shape, but I offered them to you for free, because that's what friends do.

So tell me Mark, at what point did I get "annoying." At what point did I wrong you so badly that "you can't stand the sound of my voice?"

I might troll, and I might be caught in a place where I'm in love with a game that is run by a company that hates me, I might play Legionnaire every game and still be fucking awful at it... but those are my problems.. not yours. To my recollection, between the two of us, we've never had words. Nothing but a smile, some light humor, HoN talk and bummed cigarettes ever passed between us... yet I get to hear things like this:

http://www.twitch.tv/tralf/b/398769032?t=30m30s

Listen to yourself.

Congratulations. You've won the hearts of 1,000 stream viewers, all the YEA PHIL SUCKS and LOL'S PHIL FAIL LEGIONNAIRE comments are the wind beneath your wings. But remember, that guy who "you don't like" was always one of your biggest supporters. I'm sure you won't lose any sleep over this; but once HoN is gone, once your ability to press buttons on a keyboard has faded away, I hope those people will still be there...

Because I won't be.