Little late, but I wanted to get my facts straight.

Hello everyone, my name is Tim but most people know me as ATR. First, I would like to say "thank you" to all the players, community, and Hirez for letting me be a part of your world. I love helping people and an ORG allows me to do just that. This is going to get long, but I want everything to be as clear as possible. I'm writing this to try and clear up some confusion about what is going on with EGR. I have seen a lot questions on reddit, twitch, and twitter with very little answers. I hope that this will answer those questions. We will also be doing a podcast that might help as well. I would like to begin by giving some background into my past and how I become part of EGR.



In 2006, I graduated college with a Bachelors Degree in Business Administration. I started my first company when I was 25 and have owned 3 total companies over the years. I current own a garage door business that has been open for about 3 years now. When I started this company, I had a business partner, but he didn't stick around long. He ended up depleting the line of credit and leaving me no choice but to sue him. Around this time, I was watching Lassiz play Smite and decided to head to ATL to watch my first gaming lan ever The season 1 Smite NA regionals. This is where I fell in love with Smite and all the people surrounding the game. Lassiz and Zap were still under the DIG tag at the time, so I had a chance to get to know them before EGR. Shortly after, Zap decided he was going to start his own ORG and that's when EGRworld LLC, was born. There was very little capitol to start the org, so my wheels were turning with ideas, so I thought "why not have an in house store. No one else was doing it. So after a few weeks teameagerstore.com was in business and bam, I had a position within the org.



Skip ahead to Jan 2017, I was considered the CFO and COO. My duties were as followed; I ran and managed the online store, teams- outside of the PC smite team, the website, emails, twitter, bills, sponsors, contracts, sponsorship decks, jerseys, videos, emotes, all while trying to grow the brand, so pretty much everything under the sun that people saw EGR do, I was behind it. I poured my heart in soul into a company that the owner (Zap) didn't have anything to do with other than take money, spend money, and file taxes at the end of the year. I did my best to steer the ship in the right direction, but with no captain, no operating budget, and no enthusiasm this boat was sinking fast.



So right after worlds, Me and Zap had a talk about the future of EGR. We just had 3 teams attend worlds, PC Smite, Xbox Smite that won worlds, and Paladins team. Sponsor contracts were ending and if we were going to try and get our first paid for sponsor, it was going to be now or never. If we couldn't get anything Zap was going to start looking at other option. Options were; Sell the org, join with another org, find an investor, or just drop the brand. Zap was hoping that Smite would blow up and EGR would by proxy be a massive org, but that didn't happen and "we" just like every other business had to fight to keep the doors open. I wrote Zap this message in Jan https://gyazo.com/2b4a07b899cd4ffe50a70280ef86eec6 because I didn't want to give up, so I started talking to sponsors and Gfuel was going to be our first paid for sponsor. They even had a figure ready to present to us, but then they came back and told us that they couldn't offer us anything. Fact is, EGR never sold 1 tub of Gfuel the entire time we were sponsored, so why on earth would they give us money. This was a result of a bigger problem because we didn't have contracts with the Smite PC team nor did EGR pay them a salary ever, so we couldn't get them to do anything. I just agreed with the guy from Gfuel and kept on looking. I got another sponsor interested, so we made them a fancy sponsorship deck, but we just didn't offer enough. At this point, time was running out and Zap started to distance himself from me and the org. He stopped retweeting anything EGR and changed all his branding to his own instead of EGR. If we couldn't get anything Zap was going to start looking at other option. Options were; Sell the org, join with another org, find an investor, or just drop the brand.



So during my time with EGR I saw so many things that were very disturbing to me that I figured people should know about. Tonight Zap did an AMA and a lot was said, so I will cover as much of it as possible. First, he said that he wanted to use the skin money to invest into his company, but then pulls out over $20,000 in a week $10,000 in cash for himself, and over $9,000 for a student loan. https://gyazo.com/6b9715578485dea80578d3545a401bfc If you reinvest into your company you don't take over $20,000 out of your company that can cripple your growth and it did.



There were no contracts with the PC Smite team and Zap said that in his AMA tonight. I have a fundamental problem with this. Contracts are there to serve as protection for both the player and the ORG. Without contracts, players had no obligations to try and promote the brand. This so called growth can never happen if your most popular players don't represent the ORG in a way that helps it grow.



There were also no salaries for any player ever under the ORG. No player ever got paid for skins other than Zap or salary ever. Now the players outside of the PC smite team had contracts, but they also didn't get salary. Being a new and small business, you do have to be careful with your money, but the second the owner starts taking money out that all goes to shit.



So in this clip Zap says that he didn't receive money from skins till after he already left the Florida house. https://clips.twitch.tv/SuspiciousEvilCormorantPJSugar But in this image https://gyazo.com/f32ff901f0f20965ef0c7ef6495715d4 the Skin money was in the bank for over a month before Super Regionals that year, so he did have a team just lied about it. https://gyazo.com/890295beb1414aca0fac8e4712a39e81 You had Omega, Lassiz, DaretoCare, PBM, Zapman all popular at the time and deserving of a potion of the sales from skins. Not to mention the Xbox team that actually made worlds that year. They never saw a dime either. The Xbox team then won the following worlds which granted EGR another Skin, the EGR rat skin. Xbox players that earned that skin will sadly never see a portion of that either.



I was one of the only paid employees of EGR, We agreed upon an amount to get the store going, I made the site, I got 3 shirts made and paid for most of it personally cause I didn't have access to the EGR account at that time, but I was reimbursed for this. You will see this in the first payment. https://gyazo.com/a59bbb6d288c525c48bc6afeae57fa82 After our initial deal, we agreed upon 50/50 profits from there on out. I went the first 9 months without seeing a dime from store sales. This is what we did in sales the first 9 months in business. https://gyazo.com/a3c579b1dd1e843baa73d690faa4cebd As you can see in my payments, I didn't receive a dime for this, but there was some profit in this. The $1,000 was a reimbursement for me taking $1,000 of my own money and handing it to the Xbox guys the first worlds. Now people say why didn't you pay yourself since you could just write a check? At first I couldn't write myself a check that didn't come until early 2016. When I did get access, the company was going month to month trying not to hit $0.00. The Xbox team had lans that Hirez didn't pay for travel, so that drained the ORG. I was fine with this cause we were growing and I have my own company to supplement my own income at the time till EGR got on it's feet.



I started seeing irregularities on the account. I saw this transaction https://gyazo.com/f955d836b96602653e4ea1a950b3ee0a and was like why would EGR have anything to do with a reality company. So I asked about it and tried to figure it out. This was the first of many transactions that had nothing to do with the org. His personal student loan of $9,332.53 https://gyazo.com/6b9715578485dea80578d3545a401bfc that I showed earlier. Then there was his dads or brothers company that wanted shirts made. We paid for them from EGR, but EGR never got paid back. After asking for a while, I just gave up on getting reimbursed. Shirts cost $490.25 and print cost $722.00. https://gyazo.com/ad02650939d4540590a7b68bdb33a34a Needless to say, everything felt shady and I had a really hard time running this ORG.



I wasn't allowed to add team or renew contracts towards the end and Zap got very distant and started to ignore me and my messages or just give vague comments. I figured that sooner or later Zap is just going to pull the plug. Instead of him coming to me and telling me what was going on. I had to find out through other people that he was taking a break. I spent the last two years fighting to keep this org afloat and Zap doesn't even have the decency to tell me beforehand. I started to see people say that nothing is official until they see something from the EGR twitter, but I was the only person with access to the twitter and even I didn't know what was going on. I never got a statement or a sorry "I killed the ORG" or anything. So I was upset that I spent all this time working with someone that didn't seem to have any respect for my time or my effort into his project. After about a week, I asked him if he was going to sell the ORG, he said right now that he wasn't interested in sell. So, I told him that our business is done and that is that.



I feel like there is more to talk about so I may need to do a follow up, but till then, I would just like to leave with a few of my personal thoughts and feelings. I normally wouldn't do this or cause any drama. I would just leave and let things be, but I had a lot of people from all over wanting to speak out about this stuff. Whoever steps forward and shares their stories is up to them. With that said, I feel like Zapman isn't a good person and has a lot of work to do moving forward to grow as a person. I was told in the past to be very careful around him and to lookout for myself and that statement holds up. Zapman owned EGR and was free to do whatever he wanted with it except spending the money on personal debt that alone can get you in trouble. He puts his company at risk of losing his LLC. But outside of that everything else falls under ethical grey area because he isn't doing anything illegal, but people may feel he was in the wrong by doing what he did. I felt like 50% of the skin money should have went to the players. Players should have signed contracts to protect both parties. Players should have gotten a salary. If you want to run a business and you want to run it right, you have to take a risk. If you have to take a big loan to get things off the ground then so be it, but don't half ass your business and tell people you can't pay them cause the company has no money. I felt like the "I am Zapman so you will play with me for free" was starting to wear thin with players. He said that I was emotionally invested into EGR, NO, I was emotionally invested in helping people and growing something that people could be proud of. The ORG was just a platform on which I got to help people feel like they belonged to something. No matter how shitty peoples lives are. They could always come into twitch or discord and talk to people that cared that is what I was attached too. So that is it for me, hope this cleared some things up and if anyone has questions please ask away.



Thanks,

ATR

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