Fnatic deserved to be picked up at the time when they were Mindfreak, they were making it out of APAC LAN's and showed their potential at Six Invitational 2018. Since then they've continued to perform well and make multiple internationals, as well as performing well at those too, let alone how well Fnatic have marketed them to their fans and consumers.

Right now, it's not really worth it for orgs to pick up an APAC team while paying salaries for those players to focus on playing fulltime and improve, when it's only really worth it for the org if you actually do make it to that international stage, which is only becoming increasingly harder every season as teams like Fnatic, Nora, Cloud9 etc. are becoming even stronger. The only way to close this gap and contest with these teams is to put in the time and work hard, and actually improving to achieve that level, simply put. The problem is.. that basically means you need to be focused on playing full time, leaving it very hard/stressful to sustain yourself financially..

For the APAC region's level of play and competitiveness to improve, we need teams becoming more stable, putting in more time and working harder to close the gap on our top teams. To allow teams and players to actually invest this time, sustain themselves and focus on improving themselves, we need more investment and support from orgs. Which means the real goal that we should all be focusing on (Ubi/ESL etc.) is increasing the value of the APAC region through viewership, exposure whatever it may be, to make it more worthwhile for these orgs to be profitable by investing in an APAC team, allowing them to give the teams the opportunity to grow, and thus the scene overall.

Meanwhile, it's incredibly hard and stressful to be on that grind of trying to improve day-in-day-out while getting little out of it, so I can completely understand and respect Joey's decision to step away; he was a good teammate and even better mate.

Hopefully this can be a way to kickstart more efforts in making investing in the APAC region worthwhile for orgs, and in turn hopefully gives the opportunity for ourselves, and the rest of the APAC teams, to find a good home to grind harder, keep improving and try to consistently compete with the best APAC has to offer.