(Photo: Blizzard)

One of the longest running orgs in Heroes of the Storm, COGnitive Gaming, will be leaving the space after the current COG team announced via Twitter yesterday that they would no longer be playing under the brand.



The players were well compensated when they started competing for COGnitive nearly a year ago. However, the roster that was signed initially has been rotated out to a completely new group of five. Though they had one of the best deals in the game with salary, paid lodging, and other perks, the players assert this dream scenario deteriorated over the course of their stay with COG.

Rori “CauthonLuck” Bryant-Raible gave a lengthy statement to Yahoo Esports concerning the departure.

“We have had no personal disputes or problems with the COG org. The matter simply boils down to that the players represented COG to the best of their abilities for nearly 4 months and were paid for only 1 of those months. Due to COG having a good reputation for past payment and housing situations with the old 2015 roster, we were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt as the contract and housing situations were repeatedly pushed back by the org citing other pressing matters that needed to be dealt with first.” “While I don’t dispute that there were probably more important things to take care of than players, the details of the contract had long ago been worked out verbally and the players/manager were repeatedly promised that it would be ready by a specific time frame. At least a half dozen times, we were given a firm date by which contracts or payments would be given to us and each time those things were not provided and we were ignored by the org no matter how often we tried to make contact around those dates.” “There comes a point where such treatment becomes insulting to the players and management that have been doing their best to represent the org and work with them respectfully to resolve things. It was a very difficult decision for us as players, because we were giving up a “theoretically” great contract and probably saying goodbye to months of payment we felt we had earned, as that back pay was supposed to be provided as a signing bonus for the players when things were finalized. “However, due to one last effort to work things out with COG and being told that we were a very low priority and would be gotten to sometime down the line, we realized that unfortunately we had to make that difficult decision and move onto other potential opportunities.”

The team is not under contract and has not been since around the time of WCA in December. The players will play under a new temporary name, Brain Power, starting with the second NA regional in Burbank, California on June 4th.

Dylan Walker is on Twitter @dyluux.

