For League of Legends, a dispute has been raging for several months regarding Andy “Reginald” Dinh, the controversial boss of Team SoloMid. TSM is the largest team in North American LoL. Dinh has been accused of mistreating his staff. In an internal investigation, he has now been cleared of allegations made by former player Yilang “Doublelift” Peng. Doublelift is spewing venom on Twitter toward the former boss.
This is the situation:
- The boss of TSM, Reginald, was once a pro himself, shaping one of the largest e-sports organizations in the world from a LoL fan site over 12 years. However, many players and key executives have left TSM in recent months.
- One of his former players, Doublelift, accused Reginald in November 2021 of being solely responsible for TSM’s decline. Reginald is a tyrant, who has belittled and demeaned staff and players for years. Nowadays, no one wants to work for him.
- Due to these accusations and some other incidents, Riot Games and TSM themselves initiated an internal investigation against Reginald.
“Harsh and rough tone”, but allegations were not confirmed
This is the result of TSM’s investigation: The firm assigned to the investigation has now presented its findings. They spoke with 31 current or former employees of TSM and other companies associated with Dinh (via drive).
Essentially, Reginald is cleared of the accusations. It is said that while he often made comments in an “aggressive and rough” manner, most employees stated that it was related to work performance, not to the employees personally.
However, three witnesses testified that Reginald referred to employees as “stupid”, “garbage”, or “worthless”.
However, there were no sexist, racist remarks or other harassment.
Boss must uphold
What is the result now? Dinh is to participate in “mandatory leadership coaching”. Other senior executives are also to be coached. Additionally, a hotline is to be established through which employees can complain anonymously.
This is how Dinh responds: The boss of TSM has released a sort of “half-apology”. He says he got into a leadership role very early, worked with friends for a long time, and they joked around a lot.
He himself realizes that he cannot lead a large company in this way and wants to work on himself.
Dinh emphasizes that he never had bad intentions, and he highlights how far he has brought the company in recent years. Now he wants to face new challenges.
This is how Doublelift reacts: Under Reginald’s statement, his nemesis Doublelift posts a tweet:
“Terrible person + you investigated yourself + No friends + Ratio”
By Ratio, it is meant that people should like his tweet to show that they are dissatisfied with Reginald’s statement:
- Reginald’s statement received 1,340 likes
- Doublelift’s received 15,909 – more than ten times that.
The sympathies seem to be clearly distributed. While in the comments, some note that Reginald and Doublelift are probably much more similar than they would like to believe.
This is now a new twist, as it turns out that Reginald has gotten off relatively lightly in the internal investigation by TSM. Just at the beginning of May, the situation looked much darker after a major report. Ultimately, however, one must wait for the investigation by Riot Games:
LoL: Insider report paints a grim picture of a cool e-sport team and its egomaniacal boss
