Pure on Save-: “He’s an interesting person to talk to with interesting opinions on many issues.”

I did something random just for fun—I did something crazy. As a result, it ended up getting the most comments I’ve ever received; I didn’t even get that many after a win... I’ve matured and started taking more responsibility for my actions.

[Did the organization try to handle it as a crisis?] From the outside, it looked like this: we had a problematic, toxic player with this issue, and we were getting rid of him. It was pretty strange on their part because they didn’t notify me of anything. I mean, after some time, I found out about it not even from them directly, but either from the coach or from someone on the team.

It was just a situation where I forgot to turn off my stream before the game. We were in some kind of super-long pause. At some point, I decided to just alt-tab and saw that my stream was still on. As soon as I saw that, I shut it off immediately—within a second or two.

I thought at the time that I might get in trouble for it, but the admins didn’t do anything. The organizers at that Bali Major were very strange. They didn’t even know how to run the tournament themselves. They also had a lot of shortcomings during the tournament itself. And when it came time to decide whether I could play and what the punishment would be, they initially imposed a penalty—a time penalty during the draft against the very next team we were scheduled to play.

But when Azure Ray started messaging the admins and saying that either we wouldn’t play or the decision would have to be changed, no one knows the details.

I consider Vitaly a smart person who didn’t have a lot of social skills at first, but he’s acquired them. And once he acquired them, he started communicating much better—both with his close friends and in society in general. Vitaly has transformed. He’s an interesting conversationalist with insightful opinions on many topics.