There’s been a number of little episodes in eSports in recent weeks. Now in the competitive League of Legends scene, one rather bizarre and honestly worrying episode has come to public light. The team known as MeetYourMakers has been discovered to have been using some terrifying tactics to keep their midlaner Marcin “Kori” Wolski in the team after some disputes over back-pay he was owed. Basically the MCM manager, Sebastian “Falli” Rotterdam, threatened to seize Kori’s mother’s home if he left.

It seems that if Kori left the team he would be in “breach of contract” and because his mother signed his pro gaming contract the manager felt the need to make the threat about her losing the house. The entire episode began last season with a team known as Supa Hot Crew, which in some ways evolved into MeetYourMakers when it split as a lot of the management overlaps between the two. Kori played for Supa Hot Crew and it seems that towards the end the team stopped paying some of their players, because Kori claims to be owed months’ worth of pay from last season. MYM have said that the debt isn’t theirs to pay back though, its Supa Hot Crew’s. Not surprisingly, Kori has decided that if he isn’t going to get paid he wants to leave. That’s what triggered the manager’s bizarre threat against the house.

Unfortunately for Falli, Kori had been recording the conversation. He took the recording to the media, with a big article appearing in the Daily Dot, and a complaint having been filed with Riot eSports and the boss there Nick Allen. Although MYM have issued an apology, Riot have already begun an investigation into the incident with Allen tweeting out “We take the safety and well-being of players very seriously. We are, and have been, actively looking into the situation between Kori and MYM.”

It’s not the first time MYM have been called out for rumoured unsavory practices. A former MYM coach/manager has spoken about the team keeping money for themselves that was meant to go for coaching staff and former Fnatic top laner Paul “sOAZ” Boyer has tweeted out that he’s rather jump off a bridge than play for them.

Who says eSports isn’t like real sport? It’s just as dramatic sometimes it seems…

Valve have opened up the Steam Inventory for Steamworks developers to use, enabling them to use Valve’s tech to create and store items earned or bought within games. It also allows for players to use the Steam Marketplace to sell items to the rest of the community. Cool.

The inventory and marketplace have been around for a while, being the cornerstone of some of their most popular titles – most notably Team Fortress 2 and its huge collection of wearables/hats. Now it can be used for other games outside of Valve titles.

The announcement of the new service read: “With today’s Steamworks SDK update, we’ve released The Steam Inventory Service beta, a new feature available to developers with games or software on Steam. The Steam Inventory Service is a set of new Steamworks APIs and tools that allow a game to enable persistent items that have been purchase or unlocked by individual users without having to run special servers to keep track of these user’s inventory. With this service, a game can easily drop items to customers based on playtime or can grant items based on specific situations or actions within the game. These items can be marked as tradable through Steam or sellable via the Steam Marketplace. Developers can also configure recipes for crafting different combinations of items that result in more rare, unique, or valuable items.”

The investigation into the fixing of matches of pro-level Counter Strike: Global Offensive tournaments has netted more players in the web, and led the suspensions for another 19 players by Valve from the events they sponsor. It has led to three teams, Epsilon eSports, the former ESC Gaming, and WinneR, no longer being allowed to compete in the offline qualifiers for the upcoming ESL One Katowice 2015.

To solve this, ESL One have scheduled a “last-chance tournament” for today (Feb 8th) to determined which teams will be replacing Epsilon eSports and ESC Gaming in the tournament, while the two teams who had been scheduled to play a third-place match in the second of the European qualifiers, LGB eSports and 3DMAX, have automatically been allowed to advance to take WinneR’s position in the offline qualifiers.

Of the 19 players, 14 have been given indefiniate suspensions from events that won’t be reviewed prior to 2016:

• Kevin “Uzzziii” Vernel
• Joey “fxy0” Schlosser
• Robin “GMX” Stahmer
• Morgan “B1GGY” Madour
• Damian “DiAMon” Zarski
• Michal “bCK” Lis
• Jakub “kub” Pamula
• Mateusz “matty” Kolodziejczyk
• Michal “michi” Majkowski
• Karol “rallen” Rodowicz
• Mikolaj “mouz” Karolewski
• Grzegorz “SZPERO” Dziamalek
• Pawel “innocent” Mocek
• Jacek “minise” Jeziak

The other five have just been suspended from taking part in Katowice 2015 while Valve continue their investigation:

• Robin “r0bs3n” Stephan
• Tahsin “tahsiN” Sarikaya
• Koray “xall” Yaman
• Ammar “am0” Cakmak
• Antonin “TONI” Bernhardt

Valve have revised their rules now to make it so professional players, team managers and other people involved in teams found to be involved in match fixing or giving away informationf for the purposes of influencing betting will now be suspended from Valve sponsored and organised events.

After a betting scandal in the Counter Strike Global Offensive eSports scene exposed a web that touched a number of pro teams in the community, Valve have reinforced their policy regarding betting for professional players, team managers and event production staff.

Teams and all involved are not to be seen betting, associating with people involved with the betting or in any way aiding the use of “inside information” to bet against teams, and if you’re proven to have done so you face being banned for events Valve are involved with in some way, whether they’ve organised it or merely sponsored it. Valve have seen the CS:GO scene grow rapidly in recent times and with it the growth of betting for tournaments, including the third-party tournaments – some of which Valve sponsor.

On the Valve blog the new rules were spoken about, saying that fixed betting carried the risk of damaging the personal brands and identity of teams, and even reflected bad on the community as a whole.

“We frequently sponsor third-party events to add to their entertainment value for viewers and broaden the audience for competitive CS:GO. To be eligible to participate in a Valve-sponsored event, players are required to follow the rules provided by that event’s organizers. Professional players, teams, and anyone involved in the production of CS:GO events, should under no circumstances gamble on CS:GO matches, associate with high volume CS:GO gamblers, or deliver information to others that might influence their CS:GO bets.”

The failure to follow these rules will lead to a likely exclusion from future Valve events and ones they are involved with through sponsorship. “Performing before an audience of millions of fans, you are ambassadors for your game.”

The Sims 4 has been out a little while now, and although it released with nearly 90 things from previous games missing from the release version, some of that stuff has already been put back with some free updates. Now the career market for you little virtual people is about to expand out properly with the release of the first expansion for the game.

Titled “The Sims 4 Get to Work”, it will include a few more new career paths as well as the option to open up your own retail businesses. Among the added career paths are that of the Doctor, for the medically inclined; the Scientist, for discovery, silliness and science! and the Police path, so you can tackle crime if you want to rid the Sims streets of thieves and other criminals. Retail businesses can sell many different things and the shops can be designed like your typical Sims house, and I expect that to appeal to a number of fans of the game. Also, aliens are back. Not sure why they’re in a work expansion but I guess there must be some reason?

If you’re interested, Get to Work will appear in shops both real and virtual in April.