By Conor "Anima" Kinahan follow him on Twitter @Anima_082

ESEA had an already colorful history when it came to controversy. In 2013, they were accused of running an unauthorized botnet to mine cryptocurrency, a claim that would later be revealed by Eric “lpkane” Thunberg to be true. in a series of posts on ESEA’s private forums. Now almost two years later, ESEA are at it again, stirring up a number of new controversies in under a week.

On May 19th 2015, a late night update was made to the ESEA client that required the client to run constantly. “Like an antivirus,” as stated by ESEA Co-founder Eric “lpkane” Thunberg, this would grant the client administrative access to your PC and personal files, so that the ESEA clients anti-cheat could be on the constant look-out for cheats and hacks, It instantly gave users flashbacks to the NSA scandal of 2013/14, which was just as intrusive and could not be justified under the idea of national security. So what made lpkane think it would be justifiable in Competitive Counter-Strike?

ESEA was already well known for its intrusive behaviour after the earlier 2013 scandal, and this would only add deception to a company already known for its unethical and morally bankrupt business practices. In the case of the 2013 Botnet and the resulting legal case in a New Jersey court of law, ESEA agreed under Section 13 of the consent judgement issued to not “monitor the computer activities of any person without explicit authorization and without clear and conspicuous notification prior to such monitoring”. But was the user given any notification? The client would simply download, instructing you to restart your PC and that was it. No email notification of your now constantly monitored status, nothing telling you that if you disagree to uninstall and remove the client, lpkane simply published a forum post informing users of the now constantly watching status of the client. I see no translated equivalent of the post, what about those users who are not fluent in English? Should they simply accept unknowingly to this surveillance?, or expect someone to translate to them that they are now being watched.

It all comes down the age-old question of “What constitutes fair notification to the user?” Common sense, alongside a sense of decency, would dictate that an email or notification to the user upon launching the client would suffice. This practice has been used in a number of gaming clients, such as Blizzard’s battle.net launcher. Upon a change in the Terms of Service the user is asked for an opinion regarding the change.,giving the user the opportunity to opt out. One can also look at how a service like Paypal issues an email notification notifying the user that a policy has changed and that upon their next sign in to the service they will need to agree or disagree to these terms to either continue their usage of the service or withdraw from it.

With the issue of notification also comes the next question, “Is any of this secure? How safe are my files?” On ESEA’s forums, a user by the name of Kicker asked lpkane, "Can you tell us without a doubt that this new client is trustworthy and will in no way do any malicious activity with our private files?”, lpkane responded “The only certainty in life is death”, He also stated that “if you don’t trust me then I don’t want your money” and asked multiple times for users’ trust, but how can a user trust him with their money let alone their details when he cannot even assure them?  

Naturally, all of this had the community asking some serious questions about ESEA and its leadership over the last week, and are they not entitled to a voice? Are they not entitled to at least ask their questions and have professional replies in return? Well, lpkane certainly does not believe so, as I have enclosed an answer from him that speaks volumes about the character we are dealing with.  

For those that are unable to load the above image, it depicts an exchange between a forum user and ESEA CEO Ipkane. When confronted with the following question.

So can you tell us without a doubt this new client is trustworthy and will in no way do any malicious activity with our private files?  

Ipkane replied 

“No the only certainty in life is death”

After that spell of controversy that had users foaming at the mouth and cries to boycott ESEA being issued, you would think that no more controversial actions would follow from ESEA, right?

Yesterday delivered official PR material that went from being controversial to just down-right offensive, A video posted on official ESEA media used a Down syndrome individual as a visual metaphor for their competition. Gfinity Creative Director Robert Ohlen tweeted shortly after the video’s release “Using a guy with Down’s syndrome to say the competition is sub-standard. Is actually saying that the Down’s syndrome guy is sub-human.”, Had ESEA and the videos creators actually realised how offensive this video was? Did they even care? lpkane would later release the following statement

Quite how using down syndrome to mock the competition can be squared with LPK's assertion that he does not support disability being used to make negative comparisons is up to the reader to decipher, as it is beyond the reasoning skill of this writer. Of course, the far more logical conclusion is that the second statement may simply have been an attempt to back-pedal from a steaming pile of bad PR, but we'll never know for sure When lpkane claims that the highest level of CS is at ESEA, do we really want an organisation with such deplorable morals and business practices representing our Sport? While in my opinion, I believe that this should be the death-knell for ESEA , it is up to you, the reader, to be the judge, jury and should you see fit, executioner on such a sentence. if you feel ESEA and lpkane should be forgiven as you have in the past when they used your PC’s to mine bitcoins, then continue to throw your hard-earned cash at them, and remember what you are fueling. if however you desire to see ESEA finally suffer for the crimes they have committed, then I call upon you to cancel your subscriptions, boycott them until they are broke and refuse to support their future endeavours.

Only time will tell if a parasite on the ESports community such as ESEA will be allowed to continue to feast upon not only your wallet but also on your rights, leaving them as empty shells of what they once were, or if the rightful cleansing of them from our everyday usage will allow us to grow our sport further and use the lessons learned from such a company as guidance for the future

ESEA had an already colorful history when it came to controversy. In 2013, they were accused of running an unauthorized botnet to mine cryptocurrency, a claim that would later be revealed by Eric “lpkane” Thunberg to be true. in a series of posts on ESEA’s private forums. Now almost two years later, ESEA are at it again, stirring up a number of new controversies in under a week.

On May 19th 2015, a late night update was made to the ESEA client that required the client to run constantly. “Like an antivirus,” as stated by ESEA Co-founder Eric “lpkane” Thunberg, this would grant the client administrative access to your PC and personal files, so that the ESEA clients anti-cheat could be on the constant look-out for cheats and hacks, It instantly gave users flashbacks to the NSA scandal of 2013/14, which was just as intrusive and could not be justified under the idea of national security. So what made lpkane think it would be justifiable in Competitive Counter-Strike?

ESEA was already well known for its intrusive behaviour after the earlier 2013 scandal, and this would only add deception to a company already known for its unethical and morally bankrupt business practices. In the case of the 2013 Botnet and the resulting legal case in a New Jersey court of law, ESEA agreed under Section 13 of the consent judgement issued to not “monitor the computer activities of any person without explicit authorization and without clear and conspicuous notification prior to such monitoring”. But was the user given any notification? The client would simply download, instructing you to restart your PC and that was it. No email notification of your now constantly monitored status, nothing telling you that if you disagree to uninstall and remove the client, lpkane simply published a forum post informing users of the now constantly watching status of the client. I see no translated equivalent of the post, what about those users who are not fluent in English? Should they simply accept unknowingly to this surveillance?, or expect someone to translate to them that they are now being watched.

It all comes down the age-old question of “What constitutes fair notification to the user?” Common sense, alongside a sense of decency, would dictate that an email or notification to the user upon launching the client would suffice. This practice has been used in a number of gaming clients, such as Blizzard’s battle.net launcher. Upon a change in the Terms of Service the user is asked for an opinion regarding the change.,giving the user the opportunity to opt out. One can also look at how a service like Paypal issues an email notification notifying the user that a policy has changed and that upon their next sign in to the service they will need to agree or disagree to these terms to either continue their usage of the service or withdraw from it.

With the issue of notification also comes the next question, “Is any of this secure? How safe are my files?” On ESEA’s forums, a user by the name of Kicker asked lpkane, "Can you tell us without a doubt that this new client is trustworthy and will in no way do any malicious activity with our private files?”, lpkane responded “The only certainty in life is death”, He also stated that “if you don’t trust me then I don’t want your money” and asked multiple times for users’ trust, but how can a user trust him with their money let alone their details when he cannot even assure them?  

Naturally, all of this had the community asking some serious questions about ESEA and its leadership over the last week, and are they not entitled to a voice? Are they not entitled to at least ask their questions and have professional replies in return? Well, lpkane certainly does not believe so, as I have enclosed a sample of his responses below that speak for themselves.  

After that spell of controversy that had users foaming at the mouth and cries to boycott ESEA being issued, you would think that no more controversial actions would follow from ESEA, right?

Yesterday delivered official PR material that went from being controversial to just down-right offensive, A video posted on official ESEA media used a Down syndrome individual as a visual metaphor for their competition. Gfinity Creative Director Robert Ohlen tweeted shortly after the video’s release “Using a guy with Down’s syndrome to say the competition is sub-standard. Is actually saying that the Down’s syndrome guy is sub-human.”, Had ESEA and the videos creators actually realised how offensive this video was? Did they even care? lpkane would later release the following statement

In this writer’s opinion I lack the mindset required to actually understand how using down syndrome, and those who live with, can be used to mock the competition, nor do I believe lpkanes assertion that he does not support the use of disability to make negative comparisons, it simply goes beyond my reasoning skill to try and figure out the rationale behind such comments. left me stunned, and leaves us as a community with a rather important question. When lpkane claims that the highest level of CS is at ESEA, do we really want an organisation with such deplorable morals and business practices representing our Sport? While in my opinion, I believe that this should be the death-knell for ESEA , it is up to you, the reader, to be the judge, jury and should you see fit, executioner on such a sentence. if you feel ESEA and lpkane should be forgiven as you have in the past when they used your PC’s to mine bitcoins, then continue to throw your hard-earned cash at them, and remember what you are fueling. if however you desire to see ESEA finally suffer for the crimes they have committed, then I call upon you to cancel your subscriptions, boycott them until they are broke and refuse to support their future endeavours.

Only time will tell if a parasite on the ESports community such as ESEA will be allowed to continue to feast upon not only your wallet but also on your rights, leaving them as empty shells of what they once were, or if the rightful cleansing of them from our everyday usage will allow us to grow our sport further and use the lessons learned from such a company as guidance for the future.