Everyone knows NA is the ‘Florida Man’ of the CS world, but this latest stunt takes the cake. Honestly, we couldn’t have made this up if we tried.

But before we dive into the juicy stuff, here’s a bit of background.

ESL hosts a competition called ESL Challenger League (ECL) across various regions, representing the highest ESEA division. A team named Perseverance, consisting of mds, CoJoMo, Gabe, shutout, and xaler, competed in NA’s ECL.

Well, to say they “competed” would be generous – they were pretty much crushed by every team they faced.

Naturally, the team wasn’t happy with their results and wanted to replace xaler with nooz. However, they had a game scheduled for July 18th, and nooz was unavailable by that date. So, the team attempted to reschedule the match to ensure they could play with their new addition instead of the unwanted piece. The problem is that rescheduling a match because you don't want to play with a certain player isn't exactly a valid reason.

So, the team took the obvious route and decided to fabricate fake weather reports and multiple texts from shutout’s supposed ‘power company’, trying to convince ESL that the player was dealing with a power outage due to weather conditions.

Unfortunately for them, their deceiving skills were pretty much on par with the level of their performances.

Firstly, the texts were littered with grammatical errors, the most glaring being the misspelling of 'experience' as 'expierence’.

Secondly, these so-called alerts were sent from Gabe’s personal phone number – the same one he used to deal with CS-related matters before.

As expected, the whole gimmick fooled no one, and ESL promptly disqualified Perseverance from ECL, issuing them a 2-month ban from their competitions. Most recently, the Canadian org has announced that they are parting ways with the roster.

In the end, it’s almost poetic that a team called Perseverance would opt to lie and evade their responsibilities at the slightest hint of adversity.

If only they’d put as much effort into actually playing the game…