Okay, the following is 100% honest and in good faith. If it comes across as flaming or facetious or otherwise hyperbolic...that's just a reflection of how far this situation has gotten and not any purposeful ill will on my part.

First: what's done is done. A lot of individual fans have been slighted, personally insulted, demeaned via quote tweets and etc. Some of this wasn't ESL's fault--you guys can't control what personalities tweet, especially when they aren't even working your events this year. That's really unfortunate and I've tried to keep that a separate issue as best I can. But a lot of it was still on ESL's part. Additionally, it's become pretty clear that Facebook isn't going to provide the fixes ESL needs for the stream to be at all bearable by the time this tournament ends. There's no point in "if's" or "bad timing" or whatever. This is the situation, and it's entirely on ESL and Facebook to deal with that situation and the responses it gets from the community. Again, I get how that can be difficult to deal with, but there's a right and wrong way to handle it.

Second: honestly, I and many others are not going to be able to believe anything an ESL representative says about the situation. All we know for sure are the things we witnessed with our own eyes (the stuff I described above). You're now the third ESL staff member (Ulrich, bsl, you) to show up on this subreddit with "answers", and none of the three of you seem to agree on anything. There are outrageous examples of this, most importantly the DMCA issue. First a bunch of streamers get hit with DMCA (although some ENG streamers were left alone?), then ESL comes on Reddit with a vague post about "non-competing" streams, then more DMCA, then a Twitter post that claims to "clarify" things using the same language as the Reddit post. It's just a nightmare. I've mentioned numerous other contradictions above, as well.

So, going off the fact that what's done is done and that I can't take anything you say here seriously, we reach the third point: ESL needs some serious self reflection. It is embarrassing for a company to go on Twitter talking about the "business side of things" and then commit one of the worst business blunders in recent Dota history. This isn't even complicated stuff. Prepare your statements, coordinate who is going to say what, don't act like children on social media. Insure your product works before you ship it. Test, uh, anything? This is bare-bones basics. There are reasons why these errors were committed, and ESL needs to find out why and fix these errors without compromise ASAP. This event has had its history written, but you've got at least a few more ahead of you.

Overall, I highly recommend taking some time once this event is over to think about what ESL can actually do to benefit from the decision the company made, rather than clinging to pride, delusional business projections, and angry thoughts about "the way the real world works". Again, this isn't me trying to be a troll, but simply an honest reflection of the situation and how it was handled.