Hi, this post is a long time coming.
Obviously this is prompted by my UPL team being given away by hosts who are both inexperienced in UPL and who are out of touch with the events that transpired last year. In short, I was not selected to return as a manager this season due to Cipher's poor performance last season. On the surface this seems like a reasonable conclusion, but the hosts have demonstrated that they are clueless as to the circumstances that plagued us and did not provide us with rational consideration.
At this point it's no secret that one of our team members from last year,
Kill The Messenger is an alt of the banned user Konzern. KTM is a user that Colonel M and I discussed very early on in UPL, and after several tryouts we decided to pick him up as a sub - after all, scouting new talent is a key part of UPL. It was not until after the draft that I began to suspect, and then confirm, that KTM was a Konzern alt. From the moment of suspicion, this struck any chance for him to start, as it would put our team at risk if it was found that we allowed a suspected banned alt to participate. This did not sit well with KTM.
After the draft I was contacted by senior staff with inquiries to WhiteLion. In short, they had explicitly told me that they had ties to a banned user. As a result, I communicated with Fireburn on the issue and had to bench WhiteLion in a similar fashion to KTM. This did not sit well with him either. It turned out that WhiteLion had shared accounts with said banned user, which opened up a bunch of doors to dark places. In short, our team could not afford to make much use or contact with WhiteLion either. I do not have any animosity or blame WhiteLion for what happened, but this pretty much tied my hands and prevented me from allowing him to participate despite his enthusiasm.
As if this wasn't enough, following the suspicions of KTM I had uncovered evidence that Holy Break was ghosted through his UPL tryouts, through other games, and was also connected to KTM. For the sake of the rest of the team and the integrity of UPL, I had no choice but to also bench Holy Break, which again, they were not too thrilled about. As a result our team was down three players, all of whom were frustrated in different ways. In a normal PL-tour there's a midseason to help guard against things such as this, but UPL V decided not to have one this time around, leaving our team in even more trouble than it was otherwise.
By the middle of the tour I had done enough investigating to conclude that our team's builds were being leaked, which is especially apparent in Orch's games, and vs. Helix (not a coincidence they have ties to STAG). It wasn't until much later and after the SPL VIII invalidation that I dug deeper and found that the same bot that Mazar used to cheat through SPL was also used to feed our teams to the opponents. So now not only were we down three players, but our teams were being leaked. Chat broke down because everyone knew teams were being leaked. Cohesion was lost. We no longer even shared importables. Testing was done in secret. Orch disappeared.
It doesn't take a master tactician to realize why Cipher had such a poor performance last season. It's virtually impossible for any manager to lead their team to victory when you can't even discuss teams together. It's hard to get pumped up for your next game when your opponent will have the perfect CT. It's hard to look back on the experience with pride when you lost every week. I'm actually shocked more people didn't complain about the experience, or didn't call me out as being a terrible manager, but I guess this community is less toxic than everyone makes it out to be.
I strongly considered making this post at the end of last UPL, but did not for several reasons. One was because it would've kicked up, in my evaluation, a lot of drama. I was mindful of my position as a manager and was not about to make a big mess in the tournament, despite it being the truth. I gave this community the benefit of the doubt - that they understood our team had challenging circumstances we had to deal with, and spared them this post. The hosts of this UPL did not give us the same benefit. Instead they were keen on making jokes day after day on discord about their refusal to post the manager list and subsequently selected me as the individual to bear the brunt of all of last year's circumstances that were beyond our team's control.
There is little that can be done now as it's all in the past, and it wouldn't be fair to rescind one of the select managers for this season. It also isn't right that the decision behind my team being cut was based on misperception and misinformation by hosts that also coincidently lack substantial UPL playing or managing experience. It's hard for even seasoned TDs to make good calls in tournaments, but this incident leaves me skeptical of the hosts' capacity to make informed and rational decisions. At any point they could've easily reached out to the managers themselves and had them explain each of their positions. They could've been in the know, they've could've made a more informed decision, but they didn't even try, and I'm not yet sure if I'm going to take the time to play in a tournament that is in their hands.
They already gave my UPL team away, next they'll be giving my win to an opponent who timed out.
