Most of you have probably heard, but coL is suing one of their sponsors, Velocity Servers, for a breach of contract. For those of you that haven’t seen it yet, I’m glad to see you’ve come out from your cave to once again interact with the world. Welcome!
The GotFrag post is really straightforward, as is the official complaint. There’s a little legalese there, but not enough to make the document confusing. The only thing we don’t have any specific details on is the contract itself. All we know is that Velocity was supposed to pay coL $6,000 a month plus provide them with an unspecified amount of servers worth $10,600 (the time period is unspecified – that could be a yearly total or just the worth of servers they’ve failed to provide thus far).
In the end it doesn’t really matter (from the public’s point of view) what’s in the contract, for one simple reason. Jason Lake is a lawyer, and if he didn’t have a case, he wouldn’t have bothered with the lawsuit. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out whether that contract was breached or not, especially considering the portion that’s being disputed. coL clearly didn’t get the stipulated money – at least, not yet. I have a sneaking suspicion that won’t be the case much longer.
I mean, could Velocity have possibly picked a worse organization to piss off? coL is arguably the highest profile, most stable team in America, and they might have the best financial backing. (3D is the other team in the running.) And on top of all that, their owner is a lawyer. Let’s face it, that’s about as bad as it could get. As an encore, I they might as well pick a fight outside a dojo, whine about luck to Phil Hellmuth, and brag to Hugh Hefner about their sexual partners.
Joking aside, I just don’t see this being a long, drawn-out story. They either breached the contract or they didn’t. It’d be surprising if Velocity has enough of a defense for the claim to actually see the inside of a courtroom.
I do think it’ll be a good thing for eSports that this happened, though. The big server providers (Velocity, Hi-Def, Nuclear Fallout, etc) are all established, credible companies. Outside of the recent dispute, there haven’t been any big stories about them doing bad business.
But for every big GSP, there are three or four small ones, and I’ve seen plenty of stories about them ripping people off. Servers get shut down before the paid time is up, people aren’t refunded for any money they might be owed upon cancellation, and sometimes customer service is more like a self-checkout grocery line than a department within a company. (I’ve seen some logs and screenshots of conversations with some of the bad companies. Let’s just say it reflects poorly if your customer service rep says something like, “dude, wtf r u stupid? we’re not gunna give u $$$ we don’t owe u. fkin retard.”)
The list of complaints against some of the small GSPs could go on – let’s just say it gets even worse when sponsorships are involved. Hopefully this will open some eyes not only for GSPs, but for their customers as well. Up until now, word-of-mouth and self-policing have been the most popular options for the community. After a server company has ripped off a couple people, somebody gets angry enough to make a forum post about it and ten more horror stories flood in. The lack of any real action come out of ignorance, I think – most of the people buying the servers don’t know enough about the law or contracts to feel confident taking any legal action. If you throw that in with the company having just enough knowledge to bully them and the prospect of legal fees, you get an effective deterrent (especially considering a lot of people renting servers couldn’t afford to pay for their own legal advice/action).
Don’t get me wrong, I think self-policing is good for the community. It helps limit the damage a company can do, but it only happens after a certain number of people get screwed (kind of like the “morning after” pill). Even with that, I’ve heard of companies changing names but keeping the same shady business scruples, and an Enron by any other name would smell as crappy. It’d be a lot better if the disease is cured (holding server companies responsible for bad business practices) instead of just treating the symptoms (warning other potential customers). So hopefully this adventure helps the community realize what companies can and can’t legally do both legally and practically. If a $16,000 dispute doesn’t get to court, the threat of legal action on an $80 refund doesn’t hold much weight. And good luck to Velocity with keeping the sponsorship. Something tells me they’re gonna need it.
