As an avid viewer of Counter-Strike, I have spent a lot of my time watching Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostylev. Currently, he is without a doubt the best player in the world by some margin. There’s enough material to put together a compelling argument that, at just twenty years old, he represents the highest individual level of ability we have seen in the current iteration of Counter-Strike; that he is a phenom akin to Filip “NEO” Kubski, Patrick “f0rest” Lindberg, Tommy “Potti” Ingemarsson or Yegor “markeloff” Markelov. When you are not just consistent but consistently amazing, that is a rare thing indeed.

Along with watching the human highlight reel comes the other part of the viewing experience. Social media is constantly digging up clips that I believe the kids would call “wholesome.” Footage of him embracing and applauding opponents that have beaten his team, tweets in support of players having a crisis of confidence, news that he is donating portions of his prize winnings to charity. How sickening it is that the best player in the world is also such a great person too, Counter-Strike’s very own Roger Federer, an inspiration to those who want to improve and a beacon of sportsmanship in a scene often criticized for its immaturity.

If you are new to Counter-Strike you’d be forgiven for being similarly nauseated at seeing such a perfect specimen ply their trade and yet you’d be wrong entirely. There was a time when Kostylev was the poster-boy for what is now universally referred to as “toxicity”, an individual who had been guilty of so many transgressions that professionals didn’t want to play with him despite his talent. Fans fallaciously blamed him for being detrimental to the teams he was a member. There was a time when he was despised publicly and perhaps not entirely without cause. Crucially, had he been a professional in League of Legends or Overwatch or one of the many new hermetically-sealed, developer controlled esports titles, we’d never have seen him get to this level as a player or a person. He’d have been permanently banned and instead of taking to the biggest stages in the world, he’d be wasting his talent streaming on Twitch.

I won’t dredge up his past transgressions for the purposes of this article. We live in the age of the hit piece, where journalists are so insecure and desperate to justify their existence that they spend their time pretending that ruining the careers of someone who said something unpalatable to a friend five years ago is somehow in the public interest. Raise $500,000 for homeless people via your platform? Doesn’t matter if you used the word “gay” to describe a computer operating system.

Yes, it is a depressing time to be a journalist. Too many glamour-seekers having turned a job title I once wore with pride into a label that, rightfully, brings disgust and distrust. So, no. I won’t list the specifics lest one of these esports tourists regurgitate my words as research in a bid for some quick outrage clicks. Just know that Kostylev has said some bad words, been involved in scams, and has done and said things as a teenager he regrets as an adult.

If I have been mercifully discreet you can be assured that the new wave of esports developers will not be. Years of watching independent companies run tournaments and create an entire subculture around THEIR games has driven them mad with thoughts of avarice and authority. Now, you no longer purchase games, you lease them. For that lease to remain active you must behave the way they developers dictate, it seems both in and out of game if the Overwatch Strike Team is the state of things to come.

This begins with how you play the game, with multiple examples of developers now coming out and banning “one-tricks” or people who play an unconventional style, to making it an open secret that it is preferable that you have personal politics that align with that of the developers. Showing support for Donald Trump in your username? That’s a paddling.

And now a history lesson.

“Toxicity” was quite a smart term that rose to prominence when endlessly promoted by Jeffrey “Lyte” Lin of Riot Games. It described how a player having a bad game or a bad day would behave negatively in that game and how that “toxic” influence would spread to players around them making them behave in a similar fashion. Thus, he theorized, if you could limit that one person’s ability to negatively impact those around them in-game you would stifle the spread of toxicity and create a better gaming environment. The theory made him a darling with the mainstream games media who, after becoming overpopulated by college dropouts who had wanted to be political or entertainment journalists, already had a healthy contempt towards gamers. He wanted to ban gamers from games they spent money on if they said bad words, while stating that using a mute button was too much of an indignity for good people to have to go through.

The press told Lin he was a genius and it seemed he had become a deranged, ego-freak. He started to profess that his methods could make the internet and the world a better place. He talked about rehabilitating gamers and making them good people, often publicly turning up on League of Legends official forums to humiliate players who said they didn’t know why they were banned. And the games press kept writing about how great this all was, to the point where every developer felt they must include some sort of anti-toxicity measures in their game.

Moving on with your life because someone ruined 30 minutes of gaming? Unthinkable. We need tribunals and algorithms that measure your self-worth and creepy mental health surveys that probably broke laws. Then it came out that several of Lin’s ex-partners had said he was controlling, abusive, and a cheater. And what did the games press have to say about these revelations when they came to light? Nothing. Who could have seen that coming?

The lasting legacy of Lin’s is that “toxicity” simply became a word used to describe any behavior that you don’t like. Games developers started to put gameplay and balance as secondary concerns to eradicating trash talk. Riot Games will actually ban you for typing “GG EZ” after winning a match because taunting opponents is wrong. Blizzard had to publicly admit that development of their game was slowing down because they were spending too much time hunting down naughty players. This has become such a big part of developers’ identities that esports players are routinely made examples of as a lesson to their broader player base.

Yes, woe betide you’re good enough to become an esports professional in the game they control. You’ll suddenly find yourself signing forms that mean you are now governed in bizarre ways, all facets of your behavior now subject to rigorous scrutiny, the developer able to use your image and voice any way they please even to the point of manipulation to suit their purposes. Want to practice in a sealed off environment? Don’t be stupid. Instead you must go out there into the wilds of ranked play, brushing shoulders with players well below the professional standard and now with a big target on your back for the bitter trolls. Don’t react though or that’ll be a suspension. Feel like this is a really stupid way for the pros to have to live? Unlucky. You are forbidden from publicly criticizing this setup or the game itself. Oh, and this also applies to the people who made it and anyone who sponsors it regardless of their ethical transgressions.

This will net you an often paltry salary and a chance to have people endlessly tell you how lucky you are to make that salary playing video games for a living. To maintain this, you must become simultaneously a flawless person and a mouthpiece for the developer’s marketing department, a tightrope that you will walk while being permanently in the public eye. So what if you’re tired, got to keep those contracted streaming hours up and don’t forget to practice twelve hours a day because your owners want to win more games to attract more sponsors. Is there a union? Go fuck yourself. This is what these developer controlled franchised leagues look like for players.

The devs will tell you this is just like real sports, yet in almost every sport a comprehensive global ban would be completely unenforceable except in the most extreme of circumstances and players would always have an opportunity to earn a living somewhere else. No football player would be permanently banned from competing in the one league that exists for saying “I hate football, it’s a terrible game.” Yet this is a penalty that new developers explicitly place front and center in the Faustian contracts they push upon players. To call it draconian would be downplaying it. To put it in context the footballer Luis Suarez, one of the most reviled figures in world sports, bit three opponents on three separate occasions during matches. The first two incidents earned him a total of 17 matches missed. The third, which took part during the world cup, resulted in a four-month ban from all football related activities. He couldn’t even enter a stadium. This move was unprecedented in football. Despite how keen they are to use their ability to reform trouble players as a selling point games developers hand these types of bans out with alarming frequency by comparison, usually with no grounds for appeal.

Think this is an exaggeration? Riot Games routinely prevented the development of some of the best talent in their game due to their clandestine “player behavior checks” that seem to encompass not just in-game chat logs but also social media output from a time before being professional was even a possibility. In 2013 they banned Nicolaj “Jensen” Jensen, now of Cloud9, indefinitely because other players accused him of DDOSing them. The supplementary evidence? A screenshot of him posting another player’s IP in an after-game chat lobby. After two and a half years and a lot of lobbying, he was given a final chance to compete. Blizzard effectively ended the career of one of their most popular and talented players, Félix “xQc” Lengyel, because he used a Twitch emote. They wasted no time in publicly smearing him as a racist a result despite no evidence to substantiate that claim. I know stories, as of now untold publicly, about players who received lengthy suspensions for saying things at an after-party that a staff member of a games company didn’t like. As of writing this my inbox is filled with evidence that a developer of a new esports title has been telling its aspiring professionals that if they criticize the game at this crucial stage in its development they will face a ban from tournaments for the rest of the year. Kneel before your god.

Such are the times I have to insert some sort of disclaimer to avoid being subject to yet another attack on my own character. Fortunately for me my lawyer is sleeping off a hangover on my couch. He told me to type that I am in no way advocating for people who run leagues to turn a blind-eye to bad behavior. Nor am I throwing my hand in to defend disgusting sex predators who rightly have no place anywhere near an environment that attracts young people. That would be an absurd allegation to aim at someone who has made a career exposing match-fixers, cheaters and the worst people who have passed through esports down the years. End statement.

I am all for proper penalties, but I also think these public crucifixions are a severe solution to what are very often growing pains that are part of transitioning from youth to adulthood. We have grown less and less interested in redemption arcs. Recreational outrage seems to be our current cure for boredom. Every time someone new discovers the transgression they will demand that you atone for it again. No apology is permanent, no personal improvement possible. No, you must be made to pay for it again and again and again until you satisfy everyone, which you never will. You will be publicly flogged forever.

Despite this, I do not despise the mob that call themselves “fans” when the inevitable witch-hunts come rolling around. Honestly, what else do you expect them to do? It’s a tale as old as time that if you cannot be someone the next closest thing is to spend all your energy trying to destroy them. Social media has made it too easy to give every loser and crank the illusion of actually mattering and it’d be viciously cruel to deprive them of that. No, let them have their hashtag activism and misguided belief they are actually talking to celebrities when they tweet at them. What I truly loathe are the companies and influential individuals that fuel that activity by actively rewarding it.

That’s a rant for another time. The point of all this? Just another day I am grateful that I get to be part of one of the few true esports out there, games that were created by companies who were happy to let scenes, ladders, leagues and elite competition organically grow and who only intervene in the most extreme of circumstances. Sports where there is room for its stars to develop at a sensible pace rather than an expectation to be a dull cookie-cutter model pro by the time the ink has dried on your contract. An environment free from the attitude that all talent is on a conveyor belt and it doesn’t matter if a few defective units get thrown in the trash. I don’t believe players like Kostylev are easily replaceable. I also believe the game is lucky to have them rather than the other way around as developers say in secret.

“Old s1mple” may well have been an asshole but Old s1mple was young s1mple. “New s1mple” is the best player in the world and a great ambassador for the sport. We’d have never have gotten to that point without his troubled, formative years. Just imagine what and who he’d be if he’d been completely ostracized indefinitely. What a terrible loss it would be for everyone. His improvement is a reminder that sometimes it does indeed take more than second and third chances, that great things can sprout where you least expect them; a reminder that fuck-ups and seeing the repercussions of being negative are far more valuable lessons than those handed out in sermons. And it’s not just players that can learn a lesson or two.

First lesson of being a god? Just because you can smite somebody doesn’t mean you should.