Damian "daps" Steele has decided to leave OpTic Gaming.

According to daps, the decision has been in the works for some time, and he says that he has discussed things with his team “for a while” before “it became clear that it would just be best to part ways rather then trying to stay with the team.” The Canadian rifler has been a part of the organization since Conquest was signed by OpTic Gaming in January 2016.

Parting ways with OpTic Gaming



Read: https://t.co/8Q3UOsII7X — Damian (@daps) September 27, 2016

OpTic Gaming's roster has been in flux recently as former Counter Logic Gaming player Tarik "Tarik" Celik came in the team to replace Peter "stanislaw" Jarguz on Aug. 20. However, Tarik was not able to attend Northern Arena Toronto on Sept. 1-4 and so stanislaw acted as a stand-in.

After Northern Arena, Tarik began to play for OpTic, but stanislaw was playing in daps' stead. This continued until now as daps has not played for the team since Northern Arena.

I won't be able to play in the matches today for the CyberPowerPC tournament. @OpTic_stanislaw will be playing in my place. GL to the team — Damian (@daps) August 28, 2016

On Sept. 14, it was revealed on OpTic Gaming's show Vision that daps was benched and that OpTic reverted their decision to drop stanislaw.

“We had to do another tough decision where we had to revert the decision and get stanislaw back and put daps on the bench,” said Hector Rodriguez, OpTic's CEO in the episode. “Daps has been very very helpful and instrumental to finding the right players and always being on the lookout. He found mixwell from Spain and we found tremendous success when he came on.”

In daps' TwitLonger post, he refers to his sometimes tense relationship with Peter "stanislaw" Jarguz, saying "I truly do respect him and his work ethic as that is hard to find with a lot of players."

“Stanislaw is a really good player, very smart and will do an excellent job leading the team in the future,” daps wrote in his TwitLonger.

daps says that he plans to put together a group of players to compete in the WESG Canadian qualifier but he isn’t sure that he’s looking for another professional team just yet.

"As for my future I am uncertain," he said. "There are many paths I can explore and maybe attempting to start from scratch for a 3rd time is a possibility but I am not going to jump into anything too fast."

During daps’ time with the team, the roster competed in several high profile events, but after securing their spot at ELEAGUE and winning the Americas Minor Championship in May they have been unable to convert that momentum into any larger results. They took 15th-16th in ELEAGUE and 13th-16th in ESL One: Cologne. More recently OpTic have had middling results, taking 5th-8th at Northern Arena in Toronto, plus 2nd in the iBUYPOWER Invitational, their last tournament together.

OpTic Gaming's CS:GO roster looks as follows:

Keith " NAF " Markovic

" Markovic Will " RUSH " Wierzba

" Wierzba Oscar " mixwell " Cañellas

" Cañellas Tarik " tarik " Celik

" Celik Peter "stanislaw" Jarguz

Annabelle "Abelle" Fischer is a writer for theScore esports with a love for Dota 2, birds and cheese. You can follow her on Twitter.