User blog:CSWooly/The TO Lockout - One Year On.

Alright, this is likely the final of the articles that I'm gonna make as the sort of "I'm coming clean on things" series.

So, I'd like to emphasise that this does not represent the Union as a whole, this is purely my statement on the matter because I just wanted to cover two main things about the lockout. The intention (on my end and why I supported it) and what specifically went wrong.

The Intention
So, I pretty heavily supported the lockout and I'm gonna give a bit of background as to why. I used to be a pretty notable TO in 9b. I've since moved all my TO stuff offline and I'm now looking at running Ultimate events purely offline. However, in my time running tournaments here, there was a pretty common theme - Insomnia. Being a UK resident, almost every tournament I had started hella early or I wasn't getting any sleep. And they over-ran a LOT. Heck, I actually started getting some pretty bad health issues for TOing which is why I stopped for the most part, but I still kept trying to push through because it was like the only thing that I really enjoyed doing a lot and I didn't want to stop.

Unfortunately, Beta happened. I got busier as I got older with coursework and other things, and I was only ever a main TO pretty infrequently. I did still TO a lot of events, including some other people's events, but there was one key difference. I absolutely hated it now. The entire community just became completely insufferable to deal with, it was constant pings, constant shit-flinging and honestly, it just felt like a bit of a gut punch because I felt like I was wasting my effort. I was giving up a lot of my time and likely the chance to sleep for the next couple of days almost entirely because my health shit was that bad, and in return, I was basically dealing with a bunch of people who were just making every single sleepless hour that much more worse to deal with.

So yeah, the intention for me behind the lockout was really simple. I didn't want to do this anymore. This was actually the main theme behind the lockout when we were planning it, and now that I've got MY stance out of the way, I'm going to tell you exactly what the lockout was supposed to be from our perspective.


 * The TO Union was not going to run anything for a month.

Yeah, that's literally it. This was never about killing the scene, but quite simply, the collective opinion of the Union was that we got really sick of running shit for the community and at that point we were just like "They can just run their own stuff if they wanna make it completely miserable for us." This was the main point of the lockout.

Fast forward about a year and most people really have the wrong idea of the lockout, so now I'm gonna talk about why the lockout went completely tits up.

What Went Wrong

 * We froze the Flash Collective Rankings. To be honest, this might have seriously screwed things up for the lockout to be just that, but Dark Ermac was also on board with this lockout and it was also entirely his decision to freeze the FCR based on the same message that we all agreed on as part of the lockout.
 * We colossally screwed up our PR, which led to a serious amount of misinterpretation. I think nearly all of us did a really bad job of making ourselves look solid when it came to that. Mew2ube's alt I think was revealed on the last pre-lockout tournament (that didn't help us), so some people such as FutureMac interpreted that as the reason behind the lockout and that led to a rather public argument between myself, FearZero and Mac, which made us look infinitely worse. Elsewhere, the fact that our actual statement only came about halfway into the lockout allowed the narrative behind "the Union are trying to kill the scene" to just grow and by the time our actual statement was released, the damage was already done.
 * The scene inadvertently died somewhat after the lockout. A mix of Ultimate being announced, a general bad sentiment towards us from the community, and also this fun little tidbit courtesy of one of the top players at the time, meant that we basically just had people outright refusing to enter the tournaments that did exist and were being regularly run by the union because as I said before, our PR screw up probably meant our reputations as a whole were toast. I can't say that we really ever recovered from that either reputation-wise, but the scene eventually recovered a smidge.

So yeah, I can honestly say that the lockout was a good idea in theory myself because it allowed me to sort my health issues out and recover a bit more, but due to bad preparations on our end and some of us (myself included) definitely not making things better, I don't think that the lockout ended up working the way we intended it to.

It's a shame, and I am sorry that it went the way it did. This was never the intention from the beginning. We just really needed a break.