MYM Issue Apology; Deflect Blame

Last week, the Meet Your Makers organisation released an article that made several serious allegations and criticisms towards the Star Ladder TV organisation regarding their business practices and conduct for and at the recent LAN finals for Season III of the Star Series in Kiev CyberSport Arena, Ukraine between the 18th and 21st of October.

In making these claims, several individuals and parties - including ourselves at joinDOTA - were quoted, referenced or unfairly labelled. By MYM's own admission, some of these quotes were misinterpreted in the article and some of their words were uncalled for, and it all caused notable controversy.

In response, we issued our own statement, as did most of the other parties involved; all of which can be found collected or linked here.

Today, MYM have issued an unreserved apology to several of the other parties concerned, for their misconduct and the ensuing controversy. An excerpt from this apology reads:
Last Monday we published an article that caused a lot of controversy in the DotA 2 community. The drama that resulted from the publication of that article is something we never intended for, and for that, we would like to apologize. Since the publication of the article, MeetYourMakers, Starladder and Cyberarena have been in contact to resolve the issues brought up in our post, and also to give closure to this drama. Our CEO Khaled Naim has been handling this matter privately with Vitalii "v1lat" Volochai ever since we published our article, and the two men have reached an understanding.

Hereby, MeetYourMakers would like to apologize to Starladder and Vitalii "v1lat" Volochai for some of the words we used in our article, as we admit they turned out to be inappropriate. We are sorry for any damage we may have caused to their image.

Even though we already apologized to Niklas 'Wagamama' Hogstrom in private, we would like to publicly apologize for the editorial error in our article which lead to believe he was confirming all of our claims, while he was in reality only confirming the money issue. This was a sincere mistake from us, and was corrected as fast as we noticed the issue. We never intended to twist his words and we already expressed this to him in private. He accepted our apology and there seems to be no hard feelings between both parties.

We understand a lot of the community feels we insulted Natus Vincere and JoinDotA with our article, but we would like to point out that we never attacked any of them in our article.

While we feel that we were needlessly mentioned and dragged into the controversy, and that our reputation may have been harmed as consequence, joinDOTA is happy to accept that it was not MYM's intention to do this.

However, in making their apology, MYM also singled out de Aladin 'Chen Zhen' Ben - Dota 2 Community Manager for the Electronic Sports League - for blame, claiming that:
We do take responsibility for the publication of the statement from Aladin 'Chen Zhen' Ben, which ultimately turned out to be partially false, and which lead to some wrong assumptions. The false statement has caused harm to both Starladder and MeetYourMakers, and we hope that with the release of this post, people will realize both MeetYourMakers and Starladder have been played by Aladin 'Chen Zhen' Ben.

These claims have been echoed by a statement in MYM's article attributed to SLTV Dota 2 commentator and tournament organiser Vitalii 'v1lat' Volochai, who said:
We appreciate the fact that Meet Your Makers managed to sort out such a difficult situation. We are miserably aware of the fact that we both have been manipulated by Aladin 'Chen Zhen' Ben. On behalf of Starladder.tv we wish the best of luck to the Dota 2 team of MeetYourMakers, who just started their way at SLTV Star Series season 4.

In light of these new allegations made against him, Chen Zhen has insisted that he has made no wrongdoings, saying, as part of a post written in his defence:
I feel so sorry for everyone who thinks it, but i have nothing to do with this drama.

The rest of Chen Zhen's post you can read in full on his blog.