To everyone impacted by recent events:

We, Team Ambush, the Harvard Heroes of the Dorm team, offer our deepest apologies.

After making it past the qualifying rounds, our team played with an unregistered substitute player in the first weekend of bracket play, which was clearly against the rules outlined by Tespa for this event. As individuals who should have been fully aware not only of the rules of the tournament but also of the moral implications of our actions and their effects on others, we recognize that we have committed a grave error and can only ask for forgiveness.

The integrity of eSports should not be any different from the integrity of sports, or any other form of competition. We realize that we risked the integrity of the competition through our actions, which hurts both the teams and the organizers, and eSport as a whole, for which we apologize.

We recognize that apologizing now, ex post facto, means very little but we, as a team, sincerely feel it is the least of what we owe to the community we hurt and the other parties we have negatively affected.

We apologize to Tespa and Blizzard — risking the tournament’s integrity after their hard work and effort in organizing such a great event was ungrateful and wrong. To the other teams, and especially to the teams we played against, we apologize as well, for hurting the event that all of us were fortunate to be a part of, which was selfish and short-sighted. To the fantastic players and coaches who helped our team improve during practice, we apologize for the unimaginable amount of disappointment our actions have brought after their sincere and generous efforts to help us improve. We apologize to Harvard, as our actions have come to hurt a great institution that has done so much for every member of the team, as it has done for every individual student; we also apologize to the Harvard College eSports Association, as our actions damaging the spirit of competition in eSports have undoubtedly shed a negative light on the association. We apologize to the Heroes community, and the larger eSports community, as our actions have impacted the game as a whole in a negative manner, and reflect poorly on eSports as a whole.

After the qualifiers, we found out that one of our team members would not be able to play during the first weekend in the Round of 64/32, which coincided with our spring break, as he would be on a boat without internet access; our sub could not make it either. During this period of time, we were uncertain about how to continue, since we really wanted to continue participating in this event and did not want to forfeit by not having enough players for the first weekend in bracket play, which we had worked hard to achieve. We apologize for our lack of consideration for the fact that other teams also worked hard for their spots in the tournament, and our self-centered viewpoint was unfair to them and took away from what they had achieved. We ultimately, and unfortunately, decided to play with an unregistered substitute player as our fifth. We fully recognize our actions, both as a team and individually, were wrong, hurtful to the other teams, and broke the rules, and that the correct course would have been to forfeit due to being unable to play within the bounds of the rules set by the organizer. We were blinded by our selfish desire to play out the tournament without resigning and egregiously broke the rules, for which we have now been rightly disqualified.

Once again, we apologize, and, while our words may have very little impact at this point in time, we wish to offer our deepest and most sincere apologies to all parties involved.

Team Ambush

- AllAmERICan

- SemprVeritas / yolofeed

- Lemma

- Sanakhte

- Sabato

- Kryptonite