Goodbye, Vainglory, for Now
Gankstars was born in Vainglory in early 2015 and it’s where we made not just our fame, but also our income. By early 2016, however, this changed and we’ve been putting more into the game than making from it. I didn’t mind — Vainglory is home and we always believed in the game and the game developer.
Instead of taking all of our profits and investing them into expansion, we reinvested the vast majority of our funds back into Vainglory. More than $150,000 of it, just about all of it going to competitive salaries. Vainglory was our home, and we wanted to prioritize a home game before spending elsewhere.
When I got the email recently about Gankstars not being allowed into the 2018 franchise program, we decided we could no longer justify this expense. For a game of its size, Vainglory is very expensive to compete in. During this critical time in esports, we have to be very purposeful about budget allocation lest we miss out on some critical opportunities.
We had an amazing time in Vainglory so far. It’s hard to argue with the fact that Gankstars is the poster child of Vainglory’s grassroots. If you zoom in on esports only, LibX comes to mind as well — the winner of Vainglory’s first-ever non-Korean live event. Hammers are close runner-ups, IMHO, and I at least hope they made it into this year’s program.
Speaking of LibX — 2018 Gankstars VG team was going to include both Martohh and Exhail, two original members from LibX. Cull was a maybe. MackDaddyB was to be the 4th. I’m sorry that we don’t get to debut this amazing roster for you all.
Vainglory wasn’t just any game to us, of course — it was our genesis. We attended more live events in Vainglory than any other org. (FlashX holds a tie, I think, just not under the same org). I felt like we couldn’t depart without leaving our fans with something special.
So today, I am unsealing some of our history, things only a few people knew about. There’s more to tell than a single blog post can hold; I hope you enjoy this selection of stories. For a few more, subscribe to Brad Chmielewsky’s Shatter the Vain podcast and catch me on its 200th episode, which will air in a few weeks.
Vainglory Deserves Success
I hope this post isn’t misconstrued for anything other than an opinion piece and sharing of our history. I wish Vainglory all the best, truly; half of our staff found Gankstars through VG. Too many people have put in too many hours of blood and sweat into this game for me to wish it anything but the biggest success. And at the core of it, Vainglory has great potential.
I have tremendous respect for many people at SEMC. So many smart people work there. I’ve worked with people in esports who would go bananas over a business disagreement and then try to publicly diminish and hurt the other party; that’s not me. The decision by SEMC to not extend our franchise contract (and some others’) is a business decision, and while I do not understand it given Gankstars history, presence, and deliverables, it doesn’t change my opinion of the great people at the company. A franchise is a privilege, not a right. This year, someone else gets that privilege. I’m sure SEMC has a good reason for it.
Alright, grab a snack and get comfortable — we have a long story ahead of us.
Esports
We’ve said multiple times that Gankstars believed in increasing the size of the entire pie instead of just fighting for a piece of it. The larger the pie grew, the larger our piece would be — a simple philosophy. So for Gankstars to really win long-term and not just short-term, we had to do all we could to help everyone else win, too.
Few know about how committed we were to putting our money where our mouths were.
VIPL
After winning the first VIPL in Seoul, we secured a great sponsorship by Mobcrush. We immediately put this money and political pull to use. When I heard that FlashX’s team (Ardent, NA) didn’t have a way to afford a trip to season 2 of VIPL, I convinced Mobcrush to sponsor them. Mobcrush declined at first, not knowing much about Ardent yet and understandably not wanting to sponsor 2 teams in a new game. I persisted until they changed their mind. As you remember, Ardent ended up beating us at VIPL 2. We literally ended up sacrificing our own 2nd title and prize pool money for the good of the community. We helped Ardent despite the fact that I removed FlashX from Gankstars a few months prior over a disagreement. Being a co-founder is like being married: you will only find a match with a few people in the world. However, you can have a professional relationship with almost anyone in the world, and it’s almost always beneficial to return to that relationship once you’re no longer co-founders. To be clear, all credit for winning goes to Ardent — they practiced hella hard. I saw it first-hand because we shared an apartment together. Here’s a letter from FlashX acknowledging the assist.
R3D (EU), the team that later became SK Gaming, also had trouble affording a VIPL trip. So we lent them money to ensure they could attend. SK Gaming refused to repay the loan after R3D was acquired, so it became a gift. That’s fine, as it wasn’t SK Gaming who agreed to it. In fact, we’re good friends with SK Gaming today. Here’s letter from MYQ (then-captain of R3D, now SK Gaming’s Head of Mobile) confirming our assistance.
Infamous (SEA) had the money, but couldn’t pay for the apartment due to some weird issue with a credit card. So we paid the apartment cost for them, agreeing that they would use an ATM in Seoul to pay us back $300–500 at a time every week, which they did. We’re friends with these guys to this day and they made the tournaments more fun for everyone else involved. Here’s the letter from RJ, leader of Infamous at the time and now tournament manager at Tesseract Esports (which had been running Vainglory 8 in SEA for the past year).
One of my favorite teams in Vainglory is Hunters. QUEEN and I hit it off as friends right away; I have so much respect for her. After Hunters had lost to us in one of VIPLs, her and Godfather met with me to discuss quitting Vainglory. QUEEN was disheartened by the loss and wasn’t sure if she could run her team well enough to make it a success, especially in a new title that was facing so many challenges in China. I told her that she is amazing, she got this, and that she is welcome to copy anything and everything GS does if she finds it useful and thinks it can work in China. I assume she had conversations with other people, too. QUEEN decided to stay in Vainglory (although a year later she passed on leadership of the team to someone else and got involved with Vainglory tournaments instead) and Hunters are to this day one of, if not the best team in China. QUEEN’s letter about our friendship is here.
Miscellaneous
More publicly known is the fact that Gankstars served as the launch pad for many of today’s top players. IraqiZorro, CullTheMeek, and gabevizzle are the trio everyone knows about. What fewer people know is that iLoveJoseph learned petal, many soft skills, and how to troll less from Chino’s coaching while at Gankstars. FooJee was considering quitting VG and focusing elsewhere before we offered him to join GS in 2015; after that offer, he decided to give this another shot. R3cKeD was always capable; and, I feel it’s fair to say that he really grew into the amazing roamer we know him for today while under IraqiZorro’s leadership. (Shout out to Iraqi for generally making a ton of positive contributions to Vainglory.) We were the first to recognize XenoTek’s talent and invite him in; though our first adventure with him didn’t work out, it was a part of growth that helped Xeno become the competitor he is today (and why he ended up coming back to GS for 2017).
We were also fortunate enough to have many firsts. Gankstars was the first to pay players enough for them to afford to stay in Vainglory full-time. We were the first to introduce real, player-friendly contracts. The first to publicize our prize pool earnings and distributions. The first to recruit and train analysts and start publishing some of the findings so that others could benefit from it. The first grassroots org to have a Vainglory team house (TSM was the first overall). The first and only org to bring not one, but two teams to a World Championship (shoutout to Cerberus). Lastly, we were the only org to bring NA strats to EU, helping the region grow competitively in a small way (NA > EU ❤).
When Cloud9’s analyst, physiX, needed a place to stay during the London event in Spring of 2017, we welcomed her even though her job was literally to make us lose to her team. Cloud9 ended up defeating us in the grand finals.
When we were growing too big and there was a temporary threat of GS becoming a monopoly in VG, we would release some of our players. I remember promising SEMC founders during a meeting at their office in 2015 that Gankstars isn’t seeking a monopoly, ha. What nobody knows is that at the very same meeting I suggested they hire FooJee as Director of Esports. SEMC already had a different plan at the time, but I’m glad to see FooJee in that position now — he will do a great job there.
At every turn and every opportunity, Gankstars did what it could to help the overall esports scene in Vainglory grow, even at our own expense. A rising tide lifts all ships, as they say. Looking back, those are the things I’m most proud of us doing. Winning is nice, it really is. But it only truly means something if there’s a thriving, highly-competitive scene around you.
Community
There are not many stories related to our community participation that aren’t already widely known. So instead, I’ll reminisce about our history.
Here is our original recruitment post on the Vainglory forums :)
(We even had “vg” in our Twitter handle back then. Fanboys.)
A great, great number of people have grown up in Gankstars before they went on to help grow other teams and orgs. The community we had, especially during the Line days, was by far my favorite part of this whole adventure. We laughed, we fought, and we played Vainglory together so much back then. Remember how we all pitched in to help Tatya make it to Worlds? That was awesome.
There were 2 particularly large community undertakings at Gankstars: GS Academy and Vainglory Collective. The Academy consisted of high-quality, polished, short video series that were to help people learn Vainglory. The Collective (originally known as GSD, or Getting Sh*t Done) was a group of 50+ community leaders and doers across all of Vainglory that I brought under one roof to think of cool projects that would help VG community grow.
Gankstars Academy made some amazing videos, though struggled due to lack of funding and unfortunate real-life situations coming up for its successive managers — from deaths in the family, to illnesses, to other sad events. Nevertheless, we made a dozen and a half videos that became community’s favorites and gathered hundreds of thousands of views despite the channel being brand new to YouTube. We were even featured inside Vainglory game client itself! (Thanks, SEMC)
VGC was responsible for the birth of and/or inspiration behind many great projects, from VG Dispatch (where many community members came together to brainstorm best features to suggest to developers, and filtered/edited that list before we’d send it to SEMC) to The Barracks (VG training grounds), Girls & Glory (to support female community), etc. Sometimes VGC was the sole source of these projects; other times, it served as a connection for people who already had project ideas or even started on them, and just wanted to recruit more people for them. I will forever be impressed by the effort everyone in VGC put forth and am grateful for their time. I hope SEMC is grateful for their time. And I hope to get the privilege of working with these stars in the future.
Not All Rainbows and Sunshine
We had our stumbles. It was hard to kick some people out of Gankstars for account-sharing, or for breaking guild rules such as ones about purposefully sniping fellow guild mates. When you work with younger players, it’s hard to know where to draw the line; the idea of ‘trolling’ is different when you’re older than it is when you’re younger. Sometimes we handled that really well; at other times, we missed the mark. You could say that Gankstars always tried to bring Overwatch League-like ethics to Vainglory, but a good motive isn’t always the same thing as the right motive; sometimes, you need to wait for the right timing.
For instance, CullTheMeek recently texted me apologizing for leaving in 2016 and not recognizing that we were trying to do what’s best for him. Thank you, Cull, but it’s me who should apologize — I should have been a good enough team owner to find a way of communication that worked for you. It’s a two-way street and players need humility to succeed, yes, but as someone who’s 15 years older than you, it was my job to find an approach that landed well. I was a very inexperienced coach back then (I’m hopefully just inexperienced now). Happy to see you back in VG and I hope you find success here! ❤
Then, of course, there’s the IraqiZorro thing. I am not at liberty to go into it. I will say that I feel same about him as I did in 2015 and 2016. Iraqi is like a brother in many ways, even though we couldn’t agree on some business matters and that wedged a big gap in our relationship. As I mentioned — being co-founders and being colleagues is a profoundly different experience. If I could do it all over again, I probably would have agreed to Hamza’s terms, though I’m not sure it would have changed things long-term as the premise of our conflict was still correct. Business-wise, we’re doing really well. But friendship-wise, I really miss Iraqi. Sometimes we need to split separate ways for awhile and learn lessons on our own. I wish Hamza only success and will continue rooting for him everywhere I can.
We had some player stumbles as well, though most were simple miscommunications. For example, a player reached out recently asking why he still wasn’t paid his sign-on bonus; I sent back a screenshot from the bank showing it was actually paid over a year ago. Life tip: miscommunication is the culprit of 90% of disagreements/arguments; communicate, communicate, communicate.
Gankstars was perhaps the only organization in Vainglory to pay players their prize pool share immediately after the tournament, if we had the money in the bank for it. We would then wait for months for the tournament organizer to wire us the money. We haven’t always nailed the player experience, but we always tried to.
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
Gankstars was blessed with a big following in Vainglory. I can’t share the numbers from the badge sales that happened in Nov-Dec, but I can say that we did extremely well. And that’s during our worst competitive season… It’s truly amazing how much love came from the community. On behalf of anyone who’s ever been in GS Vainglory I want to say THANK YOU to all who showed support. We love you, guys! I hope you follow our escapades in other games; we will work extra hard to make you proud there.
This is the end of an era. But where a door closes, another door opens.
Gankstars today is entirely independent of Vainglory. As I mentioned at the start, in the past few years put more into the game than we got out of it. The small portion of our resources that we dedicated to expansion paid off well for us. Today, we have a World Champion team in Critical Ops, a #1 challenger team in Paladins, a top 5 H1Z1 team + H1PL franchise, and a great Fortnite PC team.
2018 is setting up to be a great year for us. We have H1Z1 Pro League kicking off at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on April 21. One of our teams is attending a yet-unannounced LAN event in May. And another team is attending a yet-unannounced LAN event in June. We’re working to roll out a new merchandise line in time for H1PL. We’re entering a new mobile game — announcement soon. We’re hard at work on content production infrastructure so you can see more content from us in the coming months. And in a week or so, we’ll be announcing a very unique initiative regarding player payments; something nobody else is doing. We’re even able to pay some money to all of our key staff. We’re growing up. *tear*
To all of the fans that we’ll be letting down with our decision to leave Vainglory — I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have written this long of a post were it not for how special Vainglory was to us and to you, our fans. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.
Thank you. We love you! ❤
Stay tuned — great adventures ahead.
