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Why MYM.DotA Left : Hyhy Breaks The Silence

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Both Hyhy and MYM have announced the termination of Scythe’s contract, and it seems to have sparked off some news posts and discussion about MYM’s (failed) foray(s) into Asia.
Although Hyhy has rejected other interviews, I managed to squeeze him for a few precious replies, and I hope this sheds some light on the situation, or at least, the team’s point of view on the whole matter.

MYM and Scythe
Scythe caught MYM’s eye after their 3rd place finish at the International 2011, and the team were promised salaries as part of their contract.
Because the members were conscripted following that, the team’s roster was unstable, and no one saw them taking part in any competitions in their original line up.

GG.net spoke about the initial line up falling apart. Could you give us some insight into why this happened?
Hy: There have been no instances of our initial lineup falling apart. When MYM approached my team (Scythe.sg) back in September 2011, I did inform them thatt 3 of the core members would be inactive for 2-3 months because of national service. (In Singapore, males above the age of 16 are conscripted for 2 years.) We also made it known to MYM that if they wished to sign us, the members who are unable to participate in competitions because they have to serve national service would be substituted.
Our former sponsor was also expressing interests in continuing sponsorship, so we weren’t exactly desperate for the partnership with MYM to go through. However, MYM’s offer was attractive enough and of course it was great to play under such an established name, so we joined

Falli mentions that MYM was told to remove the tag, the team just kept playing with it. Any reasons why?

Hy: Falli has been in direct contact with me the past few months, I think if he did ask us to remove the tag, I would have known, and would not have hesitated to remove the tag immediately. There wouldn’t have been any need for Falli to even insist on it. Besides, MYM has its own website, social media sites and media contacts to inform the public should they have had the intention to announce they wanted to end the cooperation with the team, so there is really no logical reason why the team would insist on playing with their tag, if they were told not to.

Is your split with MYM an amiable one? What is the relationship with the organisation now?
Hy: I confronted Falli after I saw his post on gosugamers, where he stated in a MYM vs EVO gosubet thread, that this MYM team is NOT MYM. It was only then that he told me MYM cannot continue sponsoring the team, especially when there were many other teams out there asking for less. 
Of course I was aware that the team wasn’t exactly performing, the reason was largely due to the fact that my boys had to go for national service.
All said, even though we now have a strong and ready lineup, I did not want to compromise what our team is worth by re-negotiating a partnership with MYM because of a few things:
1. MYM has not issued a single month of salary since I signed with them even though they promised that salaries would be paid out in a timely fashion. Falli himself gave me his word on this.

2. I have heard that my team was not the only entity to whom MYM owed salaries to.

3. I did not like the way MYM “ended” things with the team. I felt they could be more open and direct about it.
Do note that I’m not directing accusations at MYM, and that if any offence is taken, it is not my intention. I am only sharing what I know of the matter, and how I experienced it.

Team Zenith
In what some call a slap on MYM’s face, Hyhy teams up with iceiceice, xy, Chuan (from iG fame) and xfreedom, and take the first place in joinDOTA’s Masters IV cup right after they announced their departure from MYM.
The new team takes on the name of Singapore’s most successful DotA team, Team Zenith, which at one point in time went undefeated for 6 months straight.
The starting 5 of Team Zenith consisted of ToFuboi-, GPS, Ant-, iceiceice and LuX. The line up eventually changed, and among the subsequent players who joined and left was hyhy.
Here’s an old team page http://www.teamzenith.net/?page_id=2 

Team Zenith wins ESWC 2009 http://www.gosugamers.net/dota/news/8851-zenith-crowned-eswc-dota-champions

Team Zenith is currently actively seeking sponsors who believe in them and who will follow them through to world domination.
Please email team.zenith@ymail.com if you have any enquiries.

The current Team Zenith DotA2 line up consists of :
“hyhy” Han Yong Benedict Lim
“iceiceice” Daryl Koh
“xfreedom” Nicholas Lim
“xy” Toh Wai Hong
“ChuaN” Wong Hock Chuan

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I Love LANs

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[thoughts of a half-asleep half high fish]

i’ve had my fair share of traavelling and experiences, but there’s just something about a LAN event, experience which just cannot be replaced. and it can be experienced in so many different ways.
allow me to elaborate.

attending a lan event as a competitive team
this is a good mix of fun and not fun. its definitely an attention fest, but there are always lots of obligations to fulfil, and disagreements with the team, about when to sleep, when to wake, how to play, how to sit, what to wear, where to eat… the list goes on, but in general when you have 5 different opinions, and only one decision, its gonna be difficult.

attending a lan event as a sponsor
this is actually probably the most interesting of all, to me at least. i get the authority to do lots of things, and the access to all the different off limit areas of the competition area, as well as all the rights to talk to whichever player i want to.
its a very abusable position, especially when i attend as a sponsor and as a competitive gamer. if anyone offends me, i can always take that into consideration when i review their sponsorship! not that i’m being biased, but its all about the experience of the gamer, and how they relate to the sponsor. so if the experience isnt good, who better to evaluate than the gamer her/himself/ =p
in all serious-ness though, there are standards to adhere to, and most of the time, if anything goes wrong, its your fault for not spotting it early, and you have to fix it. so that’s the stress, and not so fun bit.

attending a lan event as a normal visitor
one of the more boring things to do… you don’t really have an agenda, and probably will get bored very fast. a visit to a lan event is probably just one of those things to d oone a saturday, as opposed to actually being the main feature of your weekend.

attending a lan event as a gf
this can be kinda fun, but it will suck if your bf isnt some gosu player who can get you access everywhere, so that means you’re stuck outside the competition areas, maybe holding all his personal effects, like keyboard bag, wallet, watch, and straining your eyes and neck trying to figure out what his pixels are doing on the screen, together with tother people’s pixels.
going as a gosu player’s gf, however, is a different story, and this is the fun kind cos you get to pull lots of strings, act manager and basically experience the lan event as a successful competitior,  albeit vicariously.

my recent few events have been fantastic experiences, mostly of the sponsor/competitor genre though.
share your experience with me?

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My SMM 2011 Experience

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i’ve had a few people asking me about my SMM experience, and i guess i should just do a blog post so that i can refer them here rather than telling them individually.
on the whole, it was a pretty good trip, for the team. our group for the competition had Nirvana.cn, Neolution (runner up at ESTC 2011 Winter), and a local malaysian team who qualified (sorry but i can’t remember the team name right now).
we secured sponsors for our air tickets up to KL and back, and for our hotel room for 3 nights.
we also picked up jinny from MiTH-TRY to be our last for the event, which was really fortunate because our last, Von, was hospitalised two and a half hours before we left for the airport.
we lost all the games as expected, but i do believe we made a decent showing of ourselves, despite having just lost our commander and drafter, huayan.
lots to improve on, especially for me, and i think that smm is a good new start for everything for us. if we manage to keep up the momentum.
glad to meet up with quite a few people –
the banleong malaysia guys who i haven’t seen since i changed department;
tobi and moritz whom i havent seen since… forever;
MiTH-Trust and idealz whom i spent 1 week with at WDC;
and… everyone who came up to me/us for photos, autographs… =)

the games weren’t comparable to those which i watched at WDC. i can’t help but compare SMM with WDC, because WDC was the last LAN tourney i attended prior to SMM. both events have kok up marshalls, computer problems… which i guess is standard in the gaming world… but WDC had better games, and nicer play.

we hardly had time to relax because we spent most of our time waiting, waiting for opponents to appear, waiting for instructions, waiting for coms to be fixed, waiting for the connection to be restored…
just… waiting.
the only bit of amusement we had was on thursday after we reported, and before the opening ceremony, when we watched you are the apple of my eye.

i think that people in the position of power shouldn’t abuse their position.
and that even if they wanted to, they should choose who they abuse. carefully.
the worst experience i had was with Underminer, whom i previously held a decent amount of regard for – not that i agreed with the things he did, or the way he went about doing things, but at least i understood that he had a passion for the gaming scene – perhaps part of it was for personal achievement, but regardless, i believe he played a part in growing the malaysian gaming scene.
my team was against neolution i think, and eliza just saved up enough for a dagger on her es and was walking back to the fountain to buy it for our final engage. the opponent pushed in 2 sides and we more or less just wanted to finish in style.
so she trots back to the fountain and her entire screen goes black the instant she clicks on the dagger in the shop.
we know we’ve lost the game, but we pause anyway and wait for instructions as to what to do next. whilst waiting, we ff-ed and gged, and no one can find a marshall to tell us what to do.
it seems that there are either 10 marshalls behind us or none at all, and one can never be found when you need one. i learnt later that underminer asked one of the media standing behind us where our marshall was. wudd… why would someone from the media know.
so after waiting for a while and trying to find out what to do, (do we sign off? where’s the paper to sign off on? do we resume and let them down throne? do we wait at our seats for the next match? if yes, who is coming to fix eliza’s com?) i get a little irate and start asking a random marshall what’s going on. he doesn’t know anything, and underminer, presumably overhearing us, trots over, tells us that “SHIT HAPPENS, SO PACK UP AND GET OUT NOW!”
granted the staff are under a lot of stress because of the pc and network problems, but hi, it’s not our fault that things aren’t going well for you all, and we at least expect some instructions on what to do. delivered politely, preferably.
i’m not a rebellious teen, i’m close to 30 and i’ve seen many events and competitions. i can deal with reason, and i expect to be treated properly. you don’t have to give me preferential treatment, just be decent.
perhaps i shouldn’t have bankai-ed him infront of all the players and marshalls, i have a reputation for doing that when i’m riled, but it was one of the final straws after
1. not being told any details about when to report
2. not having access to any of the rules for the competition
3. waiting 7 hours for our first match to start

we never got an apology, btw.

anyhow, SMM is over, and i guess that’s the last of the DotA competitions that we’ll get to attend.
it was, in general, as i said, a good experience for my team, but a bad event.

moment worth remembering : 7 pcs blue screening on the main stage in the middle of a casted game
phrase worth remembering : “SHIT HAPPENS, SO PACK UP AND GET OUT NOW!”

i’ve spent the past 2 days recovering from the lack of sleep over the weekend (and indeed over the last 3 months), and i’m not sure if i’ve fully recovered, but i’m feeling good from my 4 hour nap right now.
it seems that no matter how much i sleep though, i’m still quite incoherent.

SO, to make up for my bad writing, here are some good photos.

my ipad provides endless hours of fun at every event we go to!
photo bombing is fun!
fun with polaroids! jinny and I.
at the Changi Terminal 2 airport toilet! lol… full length mirrors ftw!
breakfast at Macs!
eliza and i watching stage match!
aloy and i watching stage match!
drafting ! photo credits : ah weii!
someon who asked to take a photo with us!
tobi and i infront of the Razer booth. credits to joinDOTA.com
stage match vs nirvana.cn. no idea what i’m yelling at! but sitting in the middle means i have to put my legs up, cos the table legs are in the way. photo credits to joinDOTA.com
concentration 110% ! stage match vs Nirvana.cn. photo credits joinDOTA.com
from gosugamers.net best of SMM day 2 photo album. =D
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WDC 2011

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hi world!
in case you’ve been wondering why i’ve been MIA for the longest time, it’s cos i’ve been doing some secret training for upcoming competitions.
i’m not sure if they secret training worked, or if it was effective… but oh well, the time has come for it all to be put to the test.
i’m off to china, wuhan for WDC from the 8th to the 14th november, playing as last for MiTH-TRY, the female team from Thailand.
wish us luck!

and if i die before i get back, i love you all!

it’s all in Thai, but well, let the pictures do the talking:
http://mithesports.com/?p=4012
http://www.online-station.net/league/e-sports/600
http://esport.compgamer.com/?p=3545
http://www.thaiesports.com/news.php?id=489

wdc post that’s outdated:
http://wdc.stnts.com/webindex/News/show/?id=46