During last year's World Championships, Weldon Green was assigned as the Sports Psychology trainer for TSM. An incident occurred during the boot camp in Korea regarding Korean teams scrimmaging with TSM. Weldon commented about the scrimmaging scene in Korea with with rather strong words. This occurrence was later posted on Reddit and Koreans did not respond well to the matter.

Going into Worlds again, the memory of what happened and said by Weldon rekindled in the minds of the Koreans. It was to an extent that Korean people would comment, “We will not welcome TSM to boot camp”. Being the current assistant coach for G2 and formerly for TSM, Weldon asked Inven Global for an interview to explain the whole matter. The following interview is based on what Weldon Green wanted to portray to the people and what he said.

[Full text of interveiw]

Hi, my name is Weldon Green and I’m a sports psychology trainer, and I work mostly in professional League of Legends.

I started taking a serious look at esports in 2012, and in 2014, I started coaching more teams, and more of League of Legends. Of course, first I coached myself, and tried to climb as high as I could, and then I started coaching teams, and I got really lucky with the first 3 teams- the teams  I was able to work with were CLG, TSM, G2 Esports.

Q: I believe you know how Korean fans reacted to your statement, right?

After we lost in the Group Stage last year, I noticed that there was drama on the front page of Reddit, and I was reading some of it. But I didn't really have a chance to dive into it because I was focusing on my family at the time. Because we had been gone for four weeks of training, I withdrew from the scene, so I missed almost everything. When I came back, I only heard about them months afterwards. So I was really excited that when this year's Worlds rolled around, the topic came back up and I have the chance to talk about it.

Q: Could you explain why you made those comments? And if you want to clarify some things again, please do.

So essentially, the thing that is really frustrating for me is that I really wish that the Korean fan base or Inven or, in particular, you know, the other teams, would blame me instead of TSM players for the hack that occurred between the SKT T1-TSM group. I believe that in traditional sport, it's always the coach that is responsible for the security of the team. So I think that, in esports, it should be the same; it should be the coach's responsibility, even if there's a tech person who is doing the security.  It should be their fault if something is leaked or something is hacked or when something goes wrong. And we, the coaching staff of TSM, very much took responsibility for the hack, and then when I left the team, that was because of the leak that happened on my watch, essentially.

When TSM came to Korea last year to start our training camp, it was with a lot of optimism and hope because we had very good relationships between the players in TSM and the Korean players, and that's always where the basis for diplomacy starts.

Because of our reputation in 2016, we were able to get really good scrimmages right away. We didn't have to do the normal thing where you work yourself up to the top teams; we were able to get really good scrimmages right way, and everything was looking great. Then after the scrimmage, we found out that we had had a hacker. Of course, TSM has many enemies, and there was a hacker who had access to our system, we don't know, for many months. They were waiting for the best opportunity to hurt us, and, of course, they chose those scrimmages because they thought it would be most damaging for us and our relationships.

So afterwards, we told the players this was our fault, we should have been more secure, and we took responsibility for it to them. And of course, it hurt our scrimmages, which is expected, and it should. That, I thought, was the end of that for the time being.

And luckily, we were able to work with Riot. So this year, actually, the problem that we had, which was of course, that there were distance analysts, or a distance coach we couldn't afford to bring with us to korea. They were able to give out more accounts to all the teams universally, so that anybody with distance coaches can work in secure settings instead of insecure settings. So Riot was able to fix the problem. But the biggest frustration was that people were attaching this problem to TSM players when they had nothing to do with it. It was the fault of the coaching staff and, of course, me, who should be responsible and be held responsible for it, not TSM.

Q: We understand that leaks can happen, that there can be security problems, and that Riot has fixed this so it doesn’t happen this year. But the reason Koreans were upset about this leak was your statement on reddit and social media afterwards. So could you explain more about why you made those comments?

I think that there are 3 things I saw in the Inven post that were like 3 different, separate issues, and I think separating those will be the best way to talk about it.

 

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The first comment was the one about the play-doh therapy that SKT did in response to the leak, and of course, SKT fans and TSM fans both were worried about the state of the teams. On the TSM reddit, one of the fans asked, "Is the team okay," and unfortunately, I responded with sarcasm, and I really shouldn't have; I said, "Yes, of course we are training more and SKT is using play-doh." and underneath that statement I said I'm really proud of SKT for addressing this and for using therapy. I was actually really excited that the SKT team had learned from MSI 2016 and had gone and done like a vacation before their boot camp and came in very prepared, without any burnout, and they were treating the leak seriously, and they did this content piece and the therapy with their players.

I was just very in awe of kkOma and the way that they had adapted just in one failure; after MSI, they learned everything and they did it properly at Worlds. To me, that spoke of a great jump forward for how League of Legends treats athletes.

So I am really sad that I used sarcasm. Even though I did explain it afterwards, that part was not translated to Inven, unfortunately. Even so, I shouldn't have made the comment the way I did because my field is sports psychology training; that's my focus. And I was really excited to see how fast and quickly they had developed after their MSI experience.

The second easiest thing to deal with is probably the comments I made about Koreans being "psycho-nationalistic". I am very sorry that I used those words, and there's really no excuse at all; I shouldn’t have used that word and I shouldn't have used it on the internet, and I certainly shouldn't have used it in such an ambiguous way and I am very sorry.

I would like to give you the context of the conversation so that you can understand why I said them, so that you can accept the apology, or not accept it, you don't have to. But essentially, in the comment thread of the video that I put out, which we will talk about in a minute, I entered a discussion about my time living in Japan, and my experiences traveling in Korea, traveling in East Asia. The conversation went on for a long time, maybe 29 or 30 different conversations.

At the end, I was talking about World War II- we were talking about Japan, and World War II, and the Korean war, and North Korea. Of course, my comment was in reference to the Japanese colonialism of World War II and the thing that happened when North Korea became North Korea.

I have learned a lot about making those statements; first of all, it's very dangerous to talk about history on the internet, and to talk about them in a comment section. I should have been really careful with the words I used, and those words should have never been used in the first place, although they are very accurate. I don't think anybody would disagree that North Korea is very psycho-nationalistic. I don't think anybody would disagree that the Japanese in World War II were very religious about their government and very psycho-nationalistic. But that is true of many different countries in history, and the comments I made were maybe not in the right place and in the right time for that. I certainly didn't mean it towards the South Korean people at any time, and certainly not towards the South Korean people in modern times.

And the third and most important thing I wanted to talk about was the video I made titled ‘Information Warfare in League of Legends’. This is because I think it is a good topic of conversation for us to talk about, for the future of League of Legends. So, in the video I essentially said that we had proof of leaks of our picks from scrimmages to other teams. And I shouldn’t have said that, because I have no intention of showing you the proof of those leaks; I’m not going to show you the skype log from players I received, even if it was a Korean player or even if it was a Chinese player, because it would impact the player. They might lose their job, and I think that’s wrong. As a coach, it’s my job to look out for any player, every player, not just my own. So, I think that I should just not have said those accusations.

But, that doesn’t stop the problem from existing, which is that players are friends with players on other teams, and they talk about their role with their friends. And that’s just kind of how it works in League of Legends, because you want to talk to other supports or other top laners or other mid laners about what’s happening in your role and what you’re scrimmaging against. In those conversations, the things that you’re scrimmaging and scrimmaging against get talked about, and that’s the way that information travels around and the meta is formed. Of course, you want to be at the front of that meta. So as a coach, every single coach - including Korean ones - is very careful about which teams they have as Training partners and which teams they have as Testing partners, and which picks they use for each of them. I think that’s very smart and that every coach should be doing it. I believe that your coaches are taking care of your teams very well.

I think that it shouldn’t have to be this way; there should be some system or way of training [in] League of Legends. For example, like how Korea invented sister teams back in 2013/14, where you can train securely. Maybe it’s a tech solution, maybe it’s a League structure solution, maybe it’s an agreement between teams of some sort. But I think that there should be some way to make it so that at the Worlds tournament, that the meta is more secret, and we’re able to train with better information security. Maybe it’s not possible, but I think that if we all think together, maybe we can come up with solutions.

So one of the other controversies was a comment that I made about SKT pawning off western teams to lower-tier Korean teams. I think that maybe Korean fans thought that I was attacking SKT, when actually I was admiring them. I don’t say that this is a bad or a good thing; I’m trying to just actually explain how the system has evolved and talk about what it looks like so that we can talk about the future.

If you think about League of Legends scrimmaging, in any world, it makes the most sense for the number 1 team to scrim the number two team, and the number 3 team to scrim the number 4 team, and to make lower teams prove themselves and work themselves up, before they get to scrimmage top teams. That’s just the way it is because this is the way that it works. Of course, as a team that maybe loses, I have envy towards SKT and Longzhu this year, or maybe towards SKT and ROX and Samsung Galaxy last year.

But I don’t think that there’s any fault here, or that they’re doing anything wrong. But rather, the way that the system is now: usually when a western team arrives in Korea - and it happened to every team I’ve been on - they get offered many many many scrims against lower-tier teams. And of course, I think that if you think about it, you can realize that players on these teams are also friends with players on top teams, and that the conversation goes back and forth.

So, some western teams choose to do these scrims, and they’re very careful about the picks that they choose, but of course, when you’re training against Korean teams, you wanna play your best games. So there’s a balance there. Then of course, some teams choose not to, and hold their fingers and cross their fingers and say maybe SKT or Longzhu or - last year - SKT or ROX or SSG will come to us first.

And it depends on the reputation you come into the system with. So I don't think this is a good thing or a bad thing, like I said before. I think that this is what’s going to happen no matter what in the strongest region in the world. Right now, that’s Korea - hopefully for your guys it will be the strongest region for a long time. But who knows what will happen? I think that if SKT lost Worlds to EDG this year, and then you guys as fans found out that they never scrimmed EDG, that you’d be very upset. Because it kind of looks bad; it looks almost disrespectful.

However, I think that essentially, there are two groups of teams that you train against. There’s your Training partners: the ones that you train against all the time and that you train everything with maybe. And then there’s your, uh, I would say Testing partners: where you scrim every team to get a feel for them or a taste for them. I think that in the LCK season and in the LCS season, ya know, teams have regular training partners. In Worlds, teams will develop the same thing; they’ll develop really good Training partners, and the other teams will be ones that they test against. That’s kind of how the system works, and I think that there may be a better version in the future. Maybe something technology can fix, maybe we go back to something like LCK had in 2013/2014 with sisters teams, which was a way you could scrimmage privately and secretly and always have really high-quality scrims. Or maybe something in the future changes culturally and some other region jumps up and we realize that this system just transported itself to that region, and maybe that’s a problem. I don’t have the solution, but I think it’s good to talk about the way things are, so that we can think about the way things should be.

Q: As you know, the Korean fans had problems with your individual statements as well. One of them said - this was on the head coaches interview with SKT, ROX, and Samsung - “I’m just saying that they’re not scrimming foreign teams, and they haven’t been scrimming foreign teams for the last 5 years in native boot camps.” And as you’ve just said, teams do cross their fingers, so that they can maybe scrim against SKT.

Yeah, so this is in regards to Training partner versus Testing partner.

Q: Yeah, so could you explain more about what you said?

So, one of the comments that was brought up about my reddit comments was one where I said “Korean teams have not been scrimmaging foreign teams, and they haven’t for a number of years in boot camps.” So basically, I’m talking here about the difference between Training partner and Testing partner. So, obviously - and I didn’t say this was wrong - the training partner for the number 1 team, they want to have the number 2 team. And the same with the number 2 and number 3. And I think that that’s only natural. When I say scrimmages, what I’m talking about is having a Training partner, the one that you train with, ya know, 4 or 5 days in a row. And you have double blocks of, and you test all your champion pool against, and [they’re] the one you’re very secure with.

I don’t believe that, aside from maybe Samsung White, that any team in Korea has chosen to have a western Training partner during Worlds, and that’s not a bad thing, because you get to train against the best teams, which are Korean, up to this point. And you get to train with security of your information, and that’s really only a good thing. I’m just saying that this is the case. As a Korean fan, you should probably be rather happy about this as long as you’re winning, because it means that your coaches are choosing correctly, choosing the correct Training partners. As a coach from the west, my job is to make my team so good that we are better than a number 3, 4, 2 team in Korea, so that we can maybe be a Training partner for one of the top teams.

But that’s not liable to happen until one of our teams from the EU LCS or one of our teams from the NA LCS proves ourselves at Worlds. And that’s not an attack; I’m not attacking Korea for this. I’m just explaining that this is the way that the system is. If western teams want to train against Korean teams, as Training partners, then they need to be better than the alternative. And as Korean fans, you should understand that this is the case, that Korean teams are doing the correct thing and they’re testing everybody. And at the same time they’re making sure that they’re training against the best possible team.

Q: So, we have all of our questions answered. Hopefully everything is cleared up. Up until this point, it will be published in both Korean and English and; this part will be only published in Korean. If you have something you want to say to Korean League of LEgends fans, here’s your chance to say it.

So, the biggest frustration that came out of this for me was the impact it had on TSM. Like I said, I really hope that all of you direct everything kind of towards me in your comments about this; the scrim leakage, and all the commentary. And of course, I left TSM for that reason, to divorce them from the responsibility for what happened at Worlds. And at the same time, the other frustrating thing that happened was that you guys did not understand how much respect and honor I look at the Korean coaches with.

I think that Korea really pioneered coaching in League of Legends; I think that Choi and kkOma are some of the people that all of us look up to the most, and we admire the systems they make, and we admire the way they do scrimmages, and we admire that they handle their teams. Many of my comments were kind of picked and given a color that [made it seem like] you think that I don’t respect and try to copy them and emulate them. And that makes me very sad, because the opposite is the truth. I really really think that Korean League of Legends is at a pinnacle, and we all aspire to kind of copy the systems and the coaching and styles that are emulated here.

And I want you all to know that we have respect for the way that you do things here, even as we’re looking for ways to work around it and attack it, in a way to make our team the best. We have to understand the system in order to try to break it. There’s nothing wrong with us trying to break the system and attack it and trying to become the world champions. It doesn’t mean that we don’t think that it’s amazing.

And as always, thank you for the fans who are watching League of Legends. I wouldn’t have a job if League of Legends was not as large as it is in Korea and all over the world. I hope that for you guys, Korea does well at the Worlds tournament; I’m sure that you have nothing to worry about, and I hope that you cheer us on as well. 감사합니다(Thank you).