My take on public salaries from a managerial standpoint

• *I want to start off by prefacing this by saying that these opinions don’t reflect that of the Elemental organization or of Team Ember as an entity*

Introduction:

Hello! My name is Mason Long. Many of you guys are not going to know who I am, and that’s for good reason. I’m not a player, I am a manager and a coach for professional League of Legends teams. I’v been around for a little over 2 years now, and the year of 2015 has been pretty eventful for me in terms of the projects I have gotten to be a part of in the LoL scene. I’v worked with CLG.Black as a coach for a brief period of time at the beginning of the year, worked with Chris Badawi to build the Misfits organization from the ground up, had the chance to work with Winterfox very briefly, and worked with C9 to help build and facilitate the C9 Challenger team that played in the HTC Ascension tournament a few months back. I currently work with Ember as League Operations Coordinator, which I’ll get into the logistics of a little later on. I will warn you, this may get a little long because I want to address as many sides I can to each argument.

The process of making player salaries public:

I joined Ember relatively early into its indoctrination, and I’v had the pleasure of discussing with Bao Lam and Jonathan Pan, our GM and CEO respectively, about how things should be handled internally. One of my favorite things about this org is that everyone is open to discussing anything and everything and is open to criticism, which is imperative to growth. We said from the very beginning that our players would know each other salaries, whether that be shared publicly or internally was undetermined (although I think we always aired on the side of public). A few days ago, several people said that they believed that player salaries needed to be public, and we figured “why not be the first?” since we were considering it already. Now, to address a few questions regarding if we did this to attract new talent. We made sure our players were ok with us announcing their salaries publicly before making the public announcement, and everyone was on board. I’v seen several people say that this was purely for our benefit as an organization because we’re offering “inflated” salaries. There’s been responses to those statements that say ‘why not both’. That’s absolutely correct. why not both? because ultimately the organization and the players ARE the same. The players need an org who can give them the resources they need to succeed, and the org needs players to brand themselves in order to have those resources. It’s not one being dependent on the other. It’s a purely amicable relationship between both parties. We’re reliant on one another and that’s exactly how I feel it should be. The team is staffed pretty heavily with ex-Rioters, which if you guys haven't gone through the hiring process at Riot… it’s not easy and they ONLY accept the very best. So obviously the strategic side of this announcement has been thought about and analysed heavily in terms of what we get out of this vs what we lose.

The underlying issues that encouraged our decision:

Here’s where things get interesting. Public salaries serve 2 roles: A) they provide other players the resources they need to make proper decisions based on confirmed information and B) it provides transparency for the scene. The latter being a long term commitment that is required from several points within the scene to make a difference. I think public salaries are important for scene growth and is something that is required for long term. Someone needed to make the first step. But I do think there are things we need to approach NOW and can’t wait any longer on. The primary being the system that is used to approach players who are contracted that you are interested in. Lets set up and example here. Let’s say org A is interested in a player whose name is ‘Hat’. Hat is contracted by org B and has approached org A’s players about being interested in making a change. Org A really wants Hat but has to go through org B in order to reach Hat by Riots ruleset, which is totally understandable. The problem is org B has ZERO requirement to tell Hat that he has an offer from org A, and declines to pass this information along because Hat is their best player. Org B is protected in all situations here. Now an argument can be made that org A should just wait until Hat’s contract is up to approach him. But there’s another underlying issue. Org B has Hat’s contract until Dec 1st 2016 and has agreed to continue paying them to that date. If Org A approaches Hat on Dec 2nd, Org B is STILL protected and it’s still considered poaching. While contracts have an end date, the poaching protection doesn’t and is transferred from organization to organization regardless of actual contracts. Poaching protection is NOT contract related. It’s basically until org B decides they don’t want Hat. and that’s a HUGE problem. Org B has absolute power in this situation, and is entirely unfair to both org A and Hat. These rules are extremely archaic and NEED to be updated. Another thing that needs to change, is that players need to advocate for the teams that contract them to include a clause that states ALL offers need to be passed to the player regardless of timeline. It’s an obligation we have as managers of these players to give them that information and morally we absolutely should, but there are several teams that don’t share offers with players and it’s a huge problem.

How do we fix things?:

we have a few options to fix things: A) Management of organizations need to have player interests in mind and share all offers that come their way. B) Players can advocate for a players union to handle these issues for them, although I strongly believe if more Organization management operated under more moral ground we wouldn’t need a union, but there’s no requirements for that and Org’s will always look out for themselves over their players until there are requirements for it. C) Riot needs to update poaching/tampering rules and there needs to be a standard “draft” period where contracts end and players enter a public state for orgs to approach. D) we need to be willing to be more public with certain things. Players need to be given the information required to make educated decisions. If dec 2nd rolls around and Hat is no longer contracted by org B but cant be approached by anyone else, then org B has the power to threaten Hat with no job to take even more advantage of someone who is inexperienced and vulnerable.

I strongly believe we need a player union. Issues arise when it comes to funding. There are orgs that want to help fund a union, but then those orgs inherently have more power than those that don’t help fund. So that isn’t really an option.

Players need advocates. They are young, they are vulnerable, they are inexperienced. and that’s not their fault. It should be our responsibility as staff of these organizations that bring these players on to help them develop themselves professionally. Other orgs are inevitably going to disagree and they have every right. I just think without player trust, we as orgs are nothing. Longevity is important and it’s something too many people over look.

Thanks for reading! I’m honestly just glad that we’re getting the chance to talk about these subjects. It’s time we fix things that are broken and stop being complacent with hurting our players futures.