Episode two of the Spike Drop weekly VALORANT newsletter is here!

The early support for Spike Drop from last week is much appreciated, but we don’t have much time to dwell on the past, as the offseason is heating up even more. In fact, I wasn’t even able to write this first section without some breaking news!

Let’s not waste anymore time!

NRGeez, this is getting ugly

Without a doubt, NRG’s offseason has been a hell of a lot more exciting than their past VCT season. To fill the holes in the player roster, NRG brought on Andrew "Verno" Maust and Adam "mada" Pampuch to pair with FNS, s0m, and Ethan.

While these moves were being made official, NRG’s new coach Malkolm "bonkar" Rench went on the team’s Offscript podcast and started things hot:

Now context is important here. Podcast host and gold medal instigator Andrej "babybay" Francisty explicitly asked bonkar why he would would be a better coach than Chet “Chet” Singh. Later in the episode, both FNS and s0m speak about why having a former player as a coach can be a boon, as player perspectives and ideas can be more easily communicated to a coach that’s been there before.

What bonkar said wasn’t too incendiary, but the way he says it can be misconstrued as a knock on Chet. And uh, yeah I think that’s what Chet thinks too. After telling bonkar to “enjoy his chicken nugget salary,” whatever that means, Chet takes a dig at bonkar not qualifying for any LANs while and downplaying his world championship in hero shooter Paladins: Champions of the Realm.

My first thoughts after seeing this was that Chet, who didn’t qualify for any LANs last year with one of the most talented and accomplished rosters in all of VCT, probably shouldn’t be talking. And it turns out someone on X had a similar thought, replying to him and saying “you failed to lead ur super team to a single LAN.” That led to the real heat from Chet:

And in the days that followed this tweet, the real source of the issues emerged: Jimmy "Marved" Nguyen. On his stream, Marved laid it all out there: he didn’t vibe with Demon1 or Ethan, he was upset at NRG for not paying for vacation flights and furniture and only paying half of his rent after Sentinels went above and beyond, and he didn’t like the sponsored mice. He also admitted that he could have tried harder, but at least he gave it 100 percent in official matches.

🧊 Saying that you at least gave 100 percent in official matches, like that’s something to brag about, is one of the wildest things I think I’ve ever seen. It’s like admitting that you’re only trying as long as someone else is watching. As cool as Sentinels are for going so far above and beyond, Marved complaining that NRG only paid for half his rent comes across as super entitled.

🎧 The Marved stuff does take some heat off Chet; there’s only so much you can do with and say to someone with that attitude. But at the end of the day, the head coach still bears a lot of responsibility. Between Ethan’s struggles as an IGL, the lack of adaptation when things weren’t working, and the weird Demon1 role changes, Chet has to take some of the blame for NRG’s lackluster 2024.

🔨 If bonkar did mean to slight Chet with how he worded his answer to babybay, I kinda like it. Bringing banter in with you gets fans more invested: your supporters have reason to get excited, and fans on the other side will be watching and waiting the whole way. It’s really boring if only the people who have already won something are the ones talking shit.

🚨Wow okay, so as I was finalizing today’s Spike Drop, Chet just got banned for six months by Riot for broadcasting unauthorized VODs without permission from Riot, NRG, or the other teams involved. He is suspended until March 3, 2025, or the end of Masters Bangkok.

BLEED out

Earlier this month, Riot Games kicked BLEED Esports out of VCT Pacific, citing “failure to comply with critical reporting requirements and other key obligations under the Team Participation Agreement.” Specifically, Riot noted “persistent operational failures of the team.”

I wrote at dust2.us about these “failures” in the organization’s Counter-Strike division, where coach Aleksandar "kassad" Trifunović and the roster have cut ties with BLEED over hundreds of thousands allegedly owed in player salaries, prize pool distributions, and player transfer fees.

There’s more to dive into when it comes to BLEED’s VALORANT troubles, and yay of all people might be the one to really blow the whole lid off.

There’s quite the laundry list of issues with the organization to go over:

• Both BLEED’s CEO Mervyn Goh and one of BLEED’s biggest investors Lincoln Lim are both facing legal issues regarding the alleged assault of a woman at a nightclub in 2022. Lim has also been recently charged with trespassing and assault from an incident in February 2023. Lim is also the CEO of water purification company Hydroflux, which signed a partnership with BLEED back in 2021.

• Lim is also the nephew of Peter Lim, a Singaporean billionaire and owner of La Liga club Valencia. Peter Lim is being investigated for tax fraud and falsifying documents as of just a few weeks ago, just a week before Riot’s ruling.

• BLEED announced a massive $50M investment of Asian venture capital funding in 2021. However, no investment company was officially listed in this announcement, which was first shared by Caph IQ, a “new generation Blockchain Consulting Company.”

• Mervyn is also at the center of story regarding a missing $100K prize pool at a Southeast Asian tournament, as diligently reported by The Esports Advocate’s James Fudge. Mervyn reportedly had to pay out talent using crypto.

💰 I think something stinks about BLEED’s financials, in particular this mysterious $50 million in VC capital, and the timing of BLEED’s financial problems lining up with the investigation into Peter Lim. More on this in the future.

A reading assignment for you

For this last section, I don’t want you to read something I wrote. I want you to read the letter from the Americas VALORANT Players Association about the state of tier two.

Earlier this week, James Fudge reported on the imminent closing of Knights Arena, the organization running the NA Challengers League. This is just one result of the current state of tier two, and the AVPA’s letter does a better job than I could of telling you about the problems and the solutions.

If you’re still here after reading their letter, I do have some quick thoughts on the different solutions put forward:

💸 Revenue sharing seems like the most simple solution, since it would be the most appealing to organizations. Getting skins to work may require some Challengers consolidation though, given how many leagues are spread across the world.

📅 A year-round event calendar is good, but having events just for the sake of them like the upcoming split three for Challengers isn’t helping.

🏫 Integrating the collegiate system more might be my favorite idea. Colleges don’t have to operate on tight budgets like tier two orgs, and this would give tier two players both a path to tier one and a viable career path in place of or after pro VALORANT.

All in all, tier two will only sustain itself if Riot directly makes it more financially stable, or if they table the partnership model completely in favor of an open ecosystem. VALORANT still has a long road ahead, but tier two is still the foundation.