For those of you that skipped watching the Heroes of the Storm America’s Championship last weekend, you missed an interesting match between Cognitive Gaming and Cloud9.
During the match between the two teams, the game was paused and the text box was entered by the observer and after a large amount of spaces, ‘323’ was added. Twitch chat lovingly helped to coin the term the 323 controversy. The 30 second pause then had the game resumed, the players got a little over one more minute of play.
And then the game paused again. This is when stage referees entered the mix, and told both Cognitive Gaming and Cloud 9 that this would be awhile and they had some technical difficulties to sort through.
Cognitive Gaming was playing a great early game, and were feeling very confident over their draft and the team they had selected. COG_Slime did point out that Cloud9 had a good Level 16 power strike coming up, and Cognitive gaming knew this.
COG_Slime explains they knew their next move, but they started discussing other possible plays. About 5 minutes into the break they started to lose focus. COG_Slime mentions how this was entirely his teams fault. “I don’t actually know how long the pause lasted, but I do know it was long enough for the adrenaline fueling our play to wear off, to some degree.”
Attempting to see it from Cloud 9’s side, COG_Slime takes time to talk about how a break in gameplay, although disruptive to both teams, is extremely advantageous to those behind in the game. He never claims that this is the reason why Cognitive Gaming proceeded to lose the game, and the match, against Cloud 9. “What happened after the pause was not a direct result of the pause. It was a chain of bad decisions on our part (with me leading the chain of throws with a poorly executed flank). Would it have happened without the pause? I don’t know. I do know that losing that game took an emotional toll on my entire team, and it showed in our game 2.”
COG_Slime commends Cloud 9 on their win, and even goes as far as to say he does not want this misconception of Cognitive Gaming to go on – the better team won.
“I hope I successfully cleared up some misconceptions about what may have happened on stage. Myself and my team are not upset about the outcome. In speaking with blizzard after the game, I believe this event has helped to establish more tight procedures should something similar happen in future events.”
As the top comment reads, a classy response from a classy team.
You can read the full post here.