After a massive showdown (182 comments!) between members of the competitive TF2 community and Cadred journalist Richard Lewis (aka. Dr Gonzo) yesterday, Cadred’s TF2 initiative is looking fragile. The site is said to be fed up with the community, and lead contributor of mentioned initiative Admirable has appearently laid his bottle of writing hand lotion onto the mantle. There are no official statements on the matter so far.
This comes after the news of Dougie getting stripped of his writer privileges due to differences that very falloff. Youngblood and Jimmy Breeze already ended their activity as writers for the site some weeks (/months) back.
I caught up with Admirable during a mix earlier and got to hear some thoughts from him. The impressions from the conversation were that he had been having a hard time motivating himself to write for a while. Writing scene coverage is a time consuming and ungrateful job. He was disappointed in what turned in to such a vicious flame war, which consequently killed the last of his writing joy as he decided to stop. He leaves on good terms with the news site.
Note that all of this is referred from an informal conversation and as such none are confirmed information. At the time of writing, both Admirable and Richard Lewis / Dr Gonzo appear to be offline.
Cause and Effect
While we serve a different purpose, we’re effectively a competing site and it’s not in our interest to discuss who’s in the wrong. Some of you may have noticed a published article on this site for a brief, but it was rapidly taken down due to mentioned reasons. This is Cadred’s business, not ours.
Serious or mundane, fact of the matter is if this recent course of events makes us the final front for the European competitive TF2 scene at large, things are deemed to have some sort of impact. And losing Admirable from the coverage steering wheel is going to be a big loss. -The main man to write in depth articles, to push the other writers to contribute, to collect match info and Top 10 submissions, to announce it all on the forums. -A personal hero of mine and a model citizen!
So my questions to you:
What would be the impact of Cadred TF2 closing for business? (and can we redeem the situation?)
How do we proceed?
How can we best motivate talented writers to start writing and to keep at it?
Expect more firm details about this case soon.
- Torden
Originally published on VanillaTV (vanillatf2.org) on 2010-11-13 by torden.
Recovered from the Internet Archive (archived copy) as part of tf2esports.com's preservation of VanillaTV's TF2 coverage. The original site is no longer online. All rights remain with the original author; reposted for historical reference.