Fatal overload
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26 Sep 2010, 12:25
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Journals
r.i.p. Overload Gaming
2004 - 2010
2004 - 2010
Where my story begins
The year is 2007, I am in my last year of high school. For the past few years I had been applying high school economics on running a pretty successful multigaming clan called suXus eSports. It worked decently, until the very end when our head sponsor decided to step out. Considering the stake that sponsor had in suXus, I had no choice but to jump ship. So with one of the best FIFA teams of Europe, a very decent CS:S team and a W:ET team, we opened the door for offers from various MGC's to take us in.
The FIFA team attracted plenty of attention. However, wanting to keep the teams together, I perhaps made the worst mistake in my "career" as leader of a multigaming clan (or eSports team, as I'd like to call us, and I was of course its manager, for that's how we all called ourselves). So I crossed out all the offers which did not include taking in all of our teams. In retrospect, this was a very foolish decision (but hey, I was sixteen back then), as it meant we would eventually settle with a MGC which offered less to all of these teams than some of the organizations offered to just the FIFA team.
That MGC we joined was Overload Gaming. Spearheaded by XajP (or killa as he famously used to call himself until he got busted), the clan was actually in quite a bad shape, having famously been represented by teams not void of cheaters and not having really played at the top in any game yet. But hey, at least they had XajP's chatter going for them, and I liked the clan's name (again in retrospect - people probably affiliate the name Overload with something getting very big and then exploding, so it might not have been the smartest name of an MGC after all).
Sweet Smell of Success
While our FIFA team had always had players performing at top level, its real success came while sporting the Overload flag. Various victories at LAN's and in competitions such as the ESL Major Series marked Overload's players as rising stars within the FIFA scene: At it's height, the team was able to make FIFA players of well regarded MGC's such as SK-Gaming cry, and Overload Gaming had its first and only player qualify for the grand finals of the World Cyber Games.
At the same time Overload welcomed our first (and in our entire existence only) Quake player Richard "Weird" Krooman.
However with success comes attention, which was one thing Overload was not prepared to handle.
Bitter Sweet taste of Defeat
There were a number of MGC's pulling on players such as Ackjerre, and the week after he managed to award Overload Gaming with it's first and only qualification for the World Cyber Games grand finals, a not so little Chinese MGC called wNv (part of the G7 and sponsored by Microsoft) ripped the team apart. So that was the end of Overload in FIFA.
A similar story happened with our Counter-Strike 1.6 team, which at some point was seen as the strongest team in The Netherlands by a large part of the Dutch scene. This time a much smaller MGC offered them all kinds of great things, and the team couldn't refuse. Not much longer than a month later, the team was dead. In the end I can't really blame them, wasn't I fooled in a similar way
Good eyes, bad vision
While running Overload I had this vision of becoming one of the top contenders while always having a majority of players coming from the Benelux. This was even reflected in our strategy of approaching sponsors: Benelux companies first. Marketing technically I would say this strategy would give Overload a unique selling point. Patriotism is a strong thing, I thought. Anyway, you could see this in the lineups of most of our Enemy Territory teams.
At the same time I was never afraid to take risks when picking up teams, and I think I wasn't terribly bad at seeing where potential lay (even though it often occurred that potential was wasted).
Benevolent Dictatorship
After the fiasco with the Belgian Dreamteam I decided it was time to make a big change in the way Overload was getting managed. Without any trust left for XajP, accused of supplying the Belgian players with the very hacks which brought them to their knees, I convinced him to throw in the towel, perhaps for a while, perhaps forever. And thus I became the one and only leader of Overload Gaming. It was of course naive to think things would get better with just me at the helm. However we did have our most successful W:ET team at that time: SNB. I have to admit though that their lineup, featuring just two players from the Benelux, was a controversial pick in my mind.
Sadly SNB was a one time affair for us, which resulted in perhaps the worst example of me combining risk and patriotism is taking in oceans6 for the Crossfire Intel Challenge 7. However with dAv1d not being as active as I hoped the team would eventually tank (in the negative sense) at the event we took them in for. Even so, in my opinion it had been worth it - as missing out on the CIC7 would mean missing out on the fifth Crossfire Challenge that Overload could be represented at in a row.
The reason why it ended
2010 brought various victories for Weird, he played in the Intel Extreme Masters and managed to beat both draven and Sc00T both online and at LAN. Perhaps you could say he shared the title of being the strongest Quake Live player from The Netherlands with those two.
The AEF was quite a controversial event for Overload Gaming as just a few weeks before the team went through major changes, kicking out vila and zet0 and taking in Jere and joop. While I was happy to see joop return (he is a long time acquaintance of both me and Overload) my motivation had reached an all time low.
I am a person who can almost run himself into the ground (more literally than figuratively) and I was feeling that this was exactly what I was doing with Overload during the last few months. After the AEF, Overload was once again left with just our long standing Quake player Weird and myself. Just yesterday I decided I am not interested in once again rebuilding Overload Gaming.
The future
It would be a shame to see a name like Overload (poor chosen as it might be) disappear, so if anyone is interested in becoming an eSports manager, I'm available for a chat so drop me a pm. At the same time I am sad to say that I have no interest left in managing an MGC.
tl;dr version: clan dies, former leader not happy.
Deadeye
Iratou
viol
anim
Wesbo
Meez
rasloV
what about this dream team?