Players strike over Blast's recording practices

Let's start with the only simple thing in all of this: The players went on strike just before the start of Blast Premier Fall Finals, due to Blast's recording practices, which the players wanted to stop.

A unified statement by player reps for the teams attending Blast, protested that Blast had shared voice coms with analysts, aired segments of coms without prior knowledge and hadn't laid out processes for how recordings were handled and stored. Which seems fair, because our voice coms would probably get us fired.

So far so good, now let's get on to... nah hold on, we're not done yet.

While the players couldn't organize a strike, when half the teams were eliminated from ESL Pro League, this got them to take action? Or like fl0m would say "where the fuck was this action for players when you guys agreed to halve Pro League...".

Don't worry, chrisJ has the answer to that and if you believe him, they did their best. And meanwhile, Richard Lewis just wants a break.

The players went on strike, then what happened next?

You won't believe it, but they came back to play within a few hours. Shocking, we know. Or as ropz put it; with the right regulations, recordings and voice coms can be used.

But wait, there's more, because according to a concerted PR effort by the teams and Blast, the problems were resolved on the 23rd of November, which apparently, no one told the players in CSPPA.

So what are they REALLY fighting about? Well it's sort of complicated, but we'll try to give you both sides of the argument below.

We're not lawyers though, so we might just be spouting bullshit. But hey, if you're an avid reader you're used to that by now.