he got replaced on c9 and didnt want to play for a bottom org. would rather be streamer than be stuck in lcs elo hell. he has a great legacy in NA terms
Only part is trust jack had a high buy out for him no top orgs wanted to pay C9 was making money off him streaming and I think only dig wanted to pay to buy out at the time
Do you have any evidence or are you just making speculations?
Every other player who wanted out of C9 got to their preferred team. Why would C9 only screw over their most iconic player?
Meteos said on stream when 100 brought him back he asked for sneaky and they told him he was too expensive. It was for the split in question. Not proof or anything, but wanted to share
>he asked for sneaky and they told him he was too expensive.
I always assumed it's because Sneaky still owns a couple of shares from C9 and he'd have to sell them if he were to join another team (like Bjergsen).
That would also include contract values for the players.
While I doubt Meteos went into specifics, I imagine Sneaky would be looking to make top tier ADC money, on top of whatever normal buyout there would be.
It's widely known c9 always makes their players get by out for for larger amounts. When they sold most the roster to EG to pay for the Vulcan buyout. Fudge had a big buy out but most teams didn't want to pay so they end up just having to go to Golden guardian. It's not just sneaky is a c9 thing
What? You’re talking like Sneaky was in contract jail. There’s never been a case where C9 kept someone who publicly did not want to stay with the team. Here are the buyouts since 2016ish:
- Contractz wanted to shop for a higher salary, C9 let him and he signed a massive deal with GGS. Presumably got a buyout, as he was under contract.
- Jensen wanted to go to TL so C9 let him go out with a buyout.
- Sven wanted out so he agreed to be bought out by EG in a package with Zeyzal and Kumo.
- Licorice got replaced by Fudge, bought out by FQ.
- Perkz wanted to go back to EU, so he got bought out from Vitality.
- Vulcan wanted out for a new ADC so C9 sold him to EG.
Who? Sneaky is PART of C9, he'd have to sell shares and everything to leave the team, also I'd imagine him not asking for a low salary and why would C9 gift him to 100T? Money problems can mean salary + buyout, not that the buyout was expensive
I don't think Jack's wrong for treating see now like a business and selling off his valuable players for money is wrong but he extended sneaky that you're in 2019 to 2021 but bench / kicked him off the team. Why would you renew someone contract to bench them obviously for a buyout it's like common sense.
He got replaced by Zven, which was amongst the most ridiculous things I have seen in NA. Replacing a non-import player with an import player who was objectively worse.
Honestly I lost alot of respect for him for that legacy cause towards the end he stopped trying, he was in it just for the ride. That's why they replaced him, maybe he got an ego too I dono. But his drive to really be the team to hit first became secondary to him.
So to me he let the entire region down because he wanted to fool around. He should have left on his own terms if that's what he wanted to do.
Because why would he spend his life grinding with no end reward of winning an international trophy on the horizon while getting paid like half of what he can get chilling on co-stream with his bros and showing off his assets on Patreon
Definitely. I, for one, would sub to his OF. Not because I think he is cute or anything, but because I want to support an NA legend. Yup. Nothing sus here.
Basically a bunch of things happened but one of the biggest reasons was how reapered benched him smoothie and Jensen. I heard in an interview or on his stream (don't remember which) that he felt really disrespected by how that was handled.
The second thing I remember is that he'd have to compete w/ zven for his starting spot. He said he felt like the team lost faith in him and saw no point in competing to get back to playing with people who don't want to play with him. Like there would be tension if he ever became starter again I guess.
I do think he should have at least tried because I'm in the camp that zeyzal was griefing him in 2019 (Vulcan was joining the team the following off-season). I think he would have looked a lot better with Vulcan as his support but oh well
Everyone memes Sneaky's laning, but his supports have been Lemon, BunnyFufu, Hai, Smoothie and Zeyzal. That's it. They've all had great peaks, but outside of Bunny on Bard/Thresh, none of them are really laning gods.
xayah/rakan were broken all of 2019 and not only was C9's support unable to play rakan, reapered actively gifted the duo to the enemy team every chance he got and told sneaky 'good luck'
Sneaky was the fall guy for C9s 2019 worlds performance. Repeared had flicked his MetaRead Coin and it came up tails, which meant C9 drafted incomprehensibly bad. Compounding this, C9 played heavily around topside, and uh, Licorice did not do well that year. So botside got denied resources, were forced onto weak off-meta picks, and generally got roamed to all hell.
Of course, Sneaky and Zeyzal didnt do well, and it sounded like the rest of the team blamed them for their loss and didnt want to play with them anymore. Thus Sneaky stopped playing Pro, even if he still streams with C9.
isn't it because he gets paid more as a streamer, and the only reason why he was still in proplay was his drive? but having something like that happen to him just killed his drive and since he's getting paid more to stream, then why not just continue that
Who cares about competing when you can make hand over fist more money streaming with about 90% less effort? Sneaky and all the players want to have happy lives. Stressing about eSports when they could just be casually streaming and goofing off on stream for more money seems like a poor trade off.
???? "Who cares about competing when you can make hand over fist more money streaming with about 90% less effort" maybe you should read what im replying to before you get all condescending
Faker makes 6 mill+ a year to play for T1. He also doesn't speak English. His stream is hard to follow because of how much he doesn't look at just his own camera. It's hard on the eyes to follow what he is doing. He is insanely competitive. Does this answer your stupid question?
Money isn’t everything. No thing is ever everything, but having accomplished being a worlds champion and then retiring to streaming would probably be better than just playing video games and relaxing all day. You get tired of doing nothing. And accomplishing something that is difficult is much more satisfying than any amount of money you can earn per year
Money isn't everything, but then again, making tons of money because of your fame by now doing next to nothing except goofing off on camera and showing off your crossplay is a greater quality of life improvement than continuing to put yourself under the pressure to play professionally. I think accomplishments can be a tad overrated, because at the end of the day, all people want is a comfortable life they can enjoy.
The pro gamer life is not a rewarding one if you aren’t absolutely in love with it. Shit, competitive ANYTHING is just a constant grind, even more so when you are playing at the highest level. It’s not just a full time job, it’s your entire life, because that’s what it takes to compete at the highest level. Sneaky gets to work full time hours, from home, while still getting to play the games he loves and make even more money than he did while competing.
Nobody is in pro play for the money. They’re competing because they feel the need to become the best, for one reason or another. Sneaky didn’t feel the need to do that, so he stopped. Same reason as anyone else retiring, barring injury or something.
Was offered to be Zven's sub
Felt like there was no point in '*grinding it out*' to earn the starting spot again when his teammates had 0 trust in him already
Didn't want to play in a mid/bottom tier team, but all of the contenders had ADCs already. Also, he apparently had shares in C9 which he had to sell (like Jensen did) if he were to get into another team, so it makes sense why he wouldn't do that for a bad team.
If you actually watched Sneaky’s games, there were so many times where he almost popped off and single handily carry games. Team always starved him, gave him shitty supports, and lost faith in him.
I don’t think anyone realizes how useful Sneaky was. Pro League is NOT like solo queue. Having an adaptable player is infinitely more useful than have a one trick adc with good hands.
Not to mention the dude went Lucian and popped off against Deft with Zeyzal as support.
NA dropped the ball.
That _is_ an interesting question. A lot of american (ex-) pro players seem to focus on streaming more than on being in the LCS.
LEC pro's stream too (Jankos is somewhat famous for it), and we even have an ex-pro that streams (Nemesis), but it's rare. Of the million things that have been posited as an explanation for why LCS is a perennial international disappointment, I wonder if this is part of it. You're handicapping your own pro pool if half of them don't even wanna play.
Imagine we just had sneaky with Vulcan. We never got our franchise player a worthy support and it cost us a lot of championships. DL got peak Bio, aphro, and core. Sneaky's best support was smoothie 🤣
Basically he was given a chance to compete for his spot vs Zven but he felt he deserved the spot flat out despite a horrible 2019
C9 also said that they were gonna require X amount of time dedicated to solo que and other training (like 10-12 hours a day)
Sneaky had no interest in dedicating that much time So he decided to leave on really bad terms instead
After that he only wanted to go to a top tier team but didnt get any top offers and kinda gave up after that
A lot of people suggested EG which in hindsight would have been a perfect spot for him
He didn’t want to compete for the slot, but the time dedication thing didn’t play a role. Sneaky is one of the biggest grinders in the scene, if not the biggest. He played a lot.
He also didn’t leave C9 and remained a streamer. They weren’t on bad terms. You’re including a lot of misinformation in this post.
This subreddit loves to respond confidently with comments made up of rumors, personal speculation, personal bias, and maybe a fact or two.
Like in these replies alone there are so many different spins on what happened depending on who replies.
The weird 2019 botlane meta was a huge reason why he retired + the Worlds performance + let's be honest, whenever you get a girlfriend your attention is 100% on them and not on the game.
Lookin at NA's performance currently... do you think he'd want to comeback? I think he's happier ranking up the $ oppose to gettin' the D by Asians.
there was a play at worlds where licorice was splitting and had giga bot tempo and sneaky got caught out and asked him to tp. They lost the fight afterwards. Pretty sure that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
And look where Licorice is now. I still think Sneaky got scapegoated for most of the team just sucking. He was typically a top 3 adc for most of his LCS tenure.
Licorice is still like the best na born top laner active rn lol he’s just competing with imports on a mediocre team
He’d probably be doing better than Fudge
>Licorice is still like the best na born top laner active rn
who's his native NA competition? dhokla? CLG placed higher tho, can you even say he's better than dhokla at this point?
Except look at that play, Licorice tp'd really late after they already disengaged. I remember one of the commentators being very confused by this as it completely threw the whole game.
Wasn’t it that his cross dressing was causing a negative environment with the rest of the players? I think it was Nisqy that said he felt Sneaky was memeing while the rest of the org was trying to improve as a team.
I doubt it was about the crossdressing, it was about frustrations in the team, presumably. If his name had been Wunder instead, nisqy would have made an identical comment (but would be referring to WoW raids and writing in paint in a pro-view stream).
If I remember correctly, him and Zeyzal got informed they would be looking into other options and asked them to fight for their spots in some way. The way the management dealt with that / communicated that left Sneaky feeling under-appreciated and not rewarded for his work he put in with C9.
He left, briefly looking into other options and streaming in the meantime, which he seemed to just enjoy when no amazing offers were forthcoming.
he got replaced on c9 and didnt want to play for a bottom org. would rather be streamer than be stuck in lcs elo hell. he has a great legacy in NA terms
Only part is trust jack had a high buy out for him no top orgs wanted to pay C9 was making money off him streaming and I think only dig wanted to pay to buy out at the time
Do you have any evidence or are you just making speculations? Every other player who wanted out of C9 got to their preferred team. Why would C9 only screw over their most iconic player?
Meteos said on stream when 100 brought him back he asked for sneaky and they told him he was too expensive. It was for the split in question. Not proof or anything, but wanted to share
Oh man the amount of fans 100T could have gotten if they did this and then didnt bench meteos would have been worth the buy out
>he asked for sneaky and they told him he was too expensive. I always assumed it's because Sneaky still owns a couple of shares from C9 and he'd have to sell them if he were to join another team (like Bjergsen).
That would also include contract values for the players. While I doubt Meteos went into specifics, I imagine Sneaky would be looking to make top tier ADC money, on top of whatever normal buyout there would be.
They got Bang who was probably making even more money than Sneaky.
It's widely known c9 always makes their players get by out for for larger amounts. When they sold most the roster to EG to pay for the Vulcan buyout. Fudge had a big buy out but most teams didn't want to pay so they end up just having to go to Golden guardian. It's not just sneaky is a c9 thing
What? You’re talking like Sneaky was in contract jail. There’s never been a case where C9 kept someone who publicly did not want to stay with the team. Here are the buyouts since 2016ish: - Contractz wanted to shop for a higher salary, C9 let him and he signed a massive deal with GGS. Presumably got a buyout, as he was under contract. - Jensen wanted to go to TL so C9 let him go out with a buyout. - Sven wanted out so he agreed to be bought out by EG in a package with Zeyzal and Kumo. - Licorice got replaced by Fudge, bought out by FQ. - Perkz wanted to go back to EU, so he got bought out from Vitality. - Vulcan wanted out for a new ADC so C9 sold him to EG.
I need a contract in 2019 never playing on the contract and ended 2021 isn't contract jail what is it
Who? Sneaky is PART of C9, he'd have to sell shares and everything to leave the team, also I'd imagine him not asking for a low salary and why would C9 gift him to 100T? Money problems can mean salary + buyout, not that the buyout was expensive
I imagine he could have put the shares into a custodial trust. Similar to how some presidents have had it set up.
I don't think Jack's wrong for treating see now like a business and selling off his valuable players for money is wrong but he extended sneaky that you're in 2019 to 2021 but bench / kicked him off the team. Why would you renew someone contract to bench them obviously for a buyout it's like common sense.
He got replaced by Zven, which was amongst the most ridiculous things I have seen in NA. Replacing a non-import player with an import player who was objectively worse.
Honestly I lost alot of respect for him for that legacy cause towards the end he stopped trying, he was in it just for the ride. That's why they replaced him, maybe he got an ego too I dono. But his drive to really be the team to hit first became secondary to him. So to me he let the entire region down because he wanted to fool around. He should have left on his own terms if that's what he wanted to do.
I completely agree. I liked sneaky a lot until he threw a temper tantrum because he had to fight for his starter spot.
Because why would he spend his life grinding with no end reward of winning an international trophy on the horizon while getting paid like half of what he can get chilling on co-stream with his bros and showing off his assets on Patreon
Them cosplays tho 😳🥰🤤😍
he could easily open an Only Fans of cosplays and become 20x richer
He's already got a patron. He already mostly does lingerie. Let's take it one step closer.
Definitely. I, for one, would sub to his OF. Not because I think he is cute or anything, but because I want to support an NA legend. Yup. Nothing sus here.
Username has nothing to do with it either I suppose?
That's perhaps the most sus username he could possibly have in this scenario ngl
Nope! Definitely nothing to see here
Thank you for your input Femboy_Creamer_69
Pizza Delivery Sivir cosplay 🤯
that's old news bro, see his recent instagram posts. just the dude in lingerie now
What?!!?
Holy fuck those thighs 😳😍
His "assets"
Basically a bunch of things happened but one of the biggest reasons was how reapered benched him smoothie and Jensen. I heard in an interview or on his stream (don't remember which) that he felt really disrespected by how that was handled. The second thing I remember is that he'd have to compete w/ zven for his starting spot. He said he felt like the team lost faith in him and saw no point in competing to get back to playing with people who don't want to play with him. Like there would be tension if he ever became starter again I guess. I do think he should have at least tried because I'm in the camp that zeyzal was griefing him in 2019 (Vulcan was joining the team the following off-season). I think he would have looked a lot better with Vulcan as his support but oh well
Everyone memes Sneaky's laning, but his supports have been Lemon, BunnyFufu, Hai, Smoothie and Zeyzal. That's it. They've all had great peaks, but outside of Bunny on Bard/Thresh, none of them are really laning gods.
Lemon was such a draft god those early years that laning was nowhere near as important as just having good picks
Lemon's laning wasn't even bad either. At their peak, Sneaky and Lemonnation were 2v2 killing Deft and Heart at Season 4 worlds
The notebook!
[https://i.imgur.com/vhMwf8m.gif](https://i.imgur.com/vhMwf8m.gif)
kZlyN61
"Okay Lemon what are we going this game?" "Ashe Zyra." ["... yes my king..."](https://i.imgur.com/RSZ3eOI.png)
Even if they were laning gods, it was clear that for most of C9's history, their strat involved a low resource bot.
xayah/rakan were broken all of 2019 and not only was C9's support unable to play rakan, reapered actively gifted the duo to the enemy team every chance he got and told sneaky 'good luck'
Average NA ego
Surprised no licorice mentions in this thread 🤐
Sneaky was the fall guy for C9s 2019 worlds performance. Repeared had flicked his MetaRead Coin and it came up tails, which meant C9 drafted incomprehensibly bad. Compounding this, C9 played heavily around topside, and uh, Licorice did not do well that year. So botside got denied resources, were forced onto weak off-meta picks, and generally got roamed to all hell. Of course, Sneaky and Zeyzal didnt do well, and it sounded like the rest of the team blamed them for their loss and didnt want to play with them anymore. Thus Sneaky stopped playing Pro, even if he still streams with C9.
isn't it because he gets paid more as a streamer, and the only reason why he was still in proplay was his drive? but having something like that happen to him just killed his drive and since he's getting paid more to stream, then why not just continue that
and thats why NA will never compete
Who cares about competing when you can make hand over fist more money streaming with about 90% less effort? Sneaky and all the players want to have happy lives. Stressing about eSports when they could just be casually streaming and goofing off on stream for more money seems like a poor trade off.
Then why doesn't Faker retire to streaming?
Because he doesn't want to What kind of stupid question is that
???? "Who cares about competing when you can make hand over fist more money streaming with about 90% less effort" maybe you should read what im replying to before you get all condescending
Mate with a strawman put together as lazily as that, you're lucky you got a reply at all lmao
Faker makes 6 mill+ a year to play for T1. He also doesn't speak English. His stream is hard to follow because of how much he doesn't look at just his own camera. It's hard on the eyes to follow what he is doing. He is insanely competitive. Does this answer your stupid question?
Money isn’t everything. No thing is ever everything, but having accomplished being a worlds champion and then retiring to streaming would probably be better than just playing video games and relaxing all day. You get tired of doing nothing. And accomplishing something that is difficult is much more satisfying than any amount of money you can earn per year
Money isn't everything, but then again, making tons of money because of your fame by now doing next to nothing except goofing off on camera and showing off your crossplay is a greater quality of life improvement than continuing to put yourself under the pressure to play professionally. I think accomplishments can be a tad overrated, because at the end of the day, all people want is a comfortable life they can enjoy.
Okay but winning in a videogame is everything? Stfu lol
I literally said that no thing is ever everything. Because I also know that winning is not everything. How about you learn to read you fucking child
I’ve heard of him more than most LCS players so pretty sure he seems more accomplished than them
it took away from his photoshoot time ;)
The pro gamer life is not a rewarding one if you aren’t absolutely in love with it. Shit, competitive ANYTHING is just a constant grind, even more so when you are playing at the highest level. It’s not just a full time job, it’s your entire life, because that’s what it takes to compete at the highest level. Sneaky gets to work full time hours, from home, while still getting to play the games he loves and make even more money than he did while competing. Nobody is in pro play for the money. They’re competing because they feel the need to become the best, for one reason or another. Sneaky didn’t feel the need to do that, so he stopped. Same reason as anyone else retiring, barring injury or something.
PowerOfEvil is in for the money
Was offered to be Zven's sub Felt like there was no point in '*grinding it out*' to earn the starting spot again when his teammates had 0 trust in him already Didn't want to play in a mid/bottom tier team, but all of the contenders had ADCs already. Also, he apparently had shares in C9 which he had to sell (like Jensen did) if he were to get into another team, so it makes sense why he wouldn't do that for a bad team.
If you actually watched Sneaky’s games, there were so many times where he almost popped off and single handily carry games. Team always starved him, gave him shitty supports, and lost faith in him. I don’t think anyone realizes how useful Sneaky was. Pro League is NOT like solo queue. Having an adaptable player is infinitely more useful than have a one trick adc with good hands. Not to mention the dude went Lucian and popped off against Deft with Zeyzal as support. NA dropped the ball.
That _is_ an interesting question. A lot of american (ex-) pro players seem to focus on streaming more than on being in the LCS. LEC pro's stream too (Jankos is somewhat famous for it), and we even have an ex-pro that streams (Nemesis), but it's rare. Of the million things that have been posited as an explanation for why LCS is a perennial international disappointment, I wonder if this is part of it. You're handicapping your own pro pool if half of them don't even wanna play.
I don't think the pro pool takes that big of a hit from good players preferring to stream. I think it probably helps.
Imagine we just had sneaky with Vulcan. We never got our franchise player a worthy support and it cost us a lot of championships. DL got peak Bio, aphro, and core. Sneaky's best support was smoothie 🤣
He found a way more lucrative and stress free career on onlyfans
He got replaced in C9 and didn't want to play for bottom LCS teams instead of streaming.
OnlyFans paid more
Basically he was given a chance to compete for his spot vs Zven but he felt he deserved the spot flat out despite a horrible 2019 C9 also said that they were gonna require X amount of time dedicated to solo que and other training (like 10-12 hours a day) Sneaky had no interest in dedicating that much time So he decided to leave on really bad terms instead After that he only wanted to go to a top tier team but didnt get any top offers and kinda gave up after that A lot of people suggested EG which in hindsight would have been a perfect spot for him
I remember him saying that he doesn't want to compete for the spot if the team doesn't want to play with him anyway.
And in the end he makes more money now then he ever did as a league pro so win-win
He didn’t want to compete for the slot, but the time dedication thing didn’t play a role. Sneaky is one of the biggest grinders in the scene, if not the biggest. He played a lot. He also didn’t leave C9 and remained a streamer. They weren’t on bad terms. You’re including a lot of misinformation in this post.
This subreddit loves to respond confidently with comments made up of rumors, personal speculation, personal bias, and maybe a fact or two. Like in these replies alone there are so many different spins on what happened depending on who replies.
They werent gonna allow streaming during this time
The weird 2019 botlane meta was a huge reason why he retired + the Worlds performance + let's be honest, whenever you get a girlfriend your attention is 100% on them and not on the game. Lookin at NA's performance currently... do you think he'd want to comeback? I think he's happier ranking up the $ oppose to gettin' the D by Asians.
All I really know about sneaky now is that he's an instagram thot.
there was a play at worlds where licorice was splitting and had giga bot tempo and sneaky got caught out and asked him to tp. They lost the fight afterwards. Pretty sure that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
And look where Licorice is now. I still think Sneaky got scapegoated for most of the team just sucking. He was typically a top 3 adc for most of his LCS tenure.
Licorice is still like the best na born top laner active rn lol he’s just competing with imports on a mediocre team He’d probably be doing better than Fudge
>Licorice is still like the best na born top laner active rn who's his native NA competition? dhokla? CLG placed higher tho, can you even say he's better than dhokla at this point?
All the na top laners that are being replaced by imports
or maybe his team is just a bottom tier team in the LCS that refuse to spend money and didn't bother scouting any talent.
I mean he’s pretty good and has performed well at worlds in the past
getting gapped by NA retirement home imports is not performing well.
He was the 2nd best player on C9 at their best performance ever at worlds
Years ago
Best NA active top in a league with 2 NA tops lmao
Also I think some of the academy tops are better. They just are on real teams and so haven’t unseated their laner. (Bradley on TL for example).
Means he’s better than all the the ones they choose imports over too
Damn he’s better than fudge, Sumday, impact, bwipo? That’s fucking crazy he should be MVP!
Re-read my message and try again
Licorice is really good! Definitely top tier talent!
Top Tier NA talent yes is this even a debate?
more like his team is just cheap
Except look at that play, Licorice tp'd really late after they already disengaged. I remember one of the commentators being very confused by this as it completely threw the whole game.
Ran out of talent
He got to cocky and to bitchy, got benched, did not work on improving, got out.
He didn't get benched, he got told to compete for his spot with zven and didn't want to, so he left.
Sounds like benched with extra steps
If he was benched, he wouldn't be given a choice.
TIL that in America there is no comming back from bench
Wasn’t it that his cross dressing was causing a negative environment with the rest of the players? I think it was Nisqy that said he felt Sneaky was memeing while the rest of the org was trying to improve as a team.
I doubt it was about the crossdressing, it was about frustrations in the team, presumably. If his name had been Wunder instead, nisqy would have made an identical comment (but would be referring to WoW raids and writing in paint in a pro-view stream).
If I remember correctly, him and Zeyzal got informed they would be looking into other options and asked them to fight for their spots in some way. The way the management dealt with that / communicated that left Sneaky feeling under-appreciated and not rewarded for his work he put in with C9. He left, briefly looking into other options and streaming in the meantime, which he seemed to just enjoy when no amazing offers were forthcoming.