Well, another summer of events has passed, and it's back to school for the majority of E-Sports enthusiasts.  With this transition comes lots of problems for amateur teams and volunteer organizations.  Their formerly plentiful stock of staffpeople now have curfews and have to be in school for 30 hours a week.  A less obvious problem, however, that somehow plagues the entire E-Sports community - professional or not - is the 'high school' attitude.  Everyone has seen it, and most likely been affected by it more often then not.  If you haven't guessed by now, I am talking about the social hierarchy that has undoubtedly become as established in E-Sports as it is in every high school on the planet.

When you finished high school, you probably thought to yourself that the era of talking behind people's backs and total fake facades was over.  Well, you were wrong - dead wrong.  In E-Sports its' just the same: players will trash talk other players online or behind their backs but when face-to-face with them they act like angels.  It's sort of sad to see how this works; it is sad in the sense that much-needed honesty is now frowned upon , but the people surrounding any sort of controversy seem to wish to be led by the hand and have the wool pulled over their eyes.  I have seen it happen all too often, online and offline, in both amateur and professional arenas, and every time I just think to myself that honesty would have solved all of these problems if these people weren't so worried about their own reputations and status within the scene.

The situation is sort of ironic, though, when you think about it.  People lie to others to protect themselves, yet the lie is itself what hurts them.  It's like many people in E-Sports are somehow masochistic  and wish to cause their own suffering.  Just as in high school you would have the popular clique and half the time all the members of said clique didn't even like each other  (in fact they hated each other), yet because of the fact people were too scared to admit that they weren't who they were made out to be, they kept up the charade and only ended up fooling themselves.  The same goes in E-Sports: substitute "team" for "clique" and it's the same thing.  The entire scene knows that the teammates hate each other yet the team itself is oblivious to its own hypocrisy.

Another similarity to the pettiness found in high school that is vastly apparent in E-Sports is the phenomenon of the 'angel face'.  Different from the aforementioned unknown hatred, in this case two people know they dislike each other, and frequently point it out to each other whilst online.  However at offline events they act like friends for the duration of the event.  Then when said event comes to an end they would be back at each other's throats more so than ever before.  It begs the question: why not just try and settle your differences offline while in person and get over whatever petty feud it was you were having in the first place instead of lying to yourselves and everyone else?

With that being said, we get to the topic of honesty.  Honesty is a very rare quality in E-Sports, let alone the rest of the world.  However, in E-Sports if you undervalue honesty, it ends up hurting you more than you could have thought possible.  Even small 'white lies' can come back to bite you in the ass, and they always do.  However, if you had just spoken the truth in the first place, any problems could have been resolved, or even sometimes avoided.  Many kids establish themselves in the E-Sports scene with lies and end up falling to a place lower of that when which they started when their dishonesty is discovered.  Not only did they lie about everything, but now no one will believe them even if they are telling the truth because they burnt their bridges and themselves and are now permanently stigmatized.

Being branded as something when you are trying to start over or even when you are starting out for the very first time makes things much harder, no matter what the brand is.  As in school, if you had a sibling who had already been through the school, the teachers would grade you based upon his or her achievements and not your own.  For some reason however, in E-Sports people want to be branded.  They think, for better or for worse, that entering a field which their friends and siblings are already involved in is helpful to their reputation.  This is definitely not the case.  You need to work up to the level of that which you desire.  You cannot just ride the coattails of friends and family to get somewhere, because once you are there and the people you tried so hard to hide your fake façade from find out that your abilities are less than what they appeared to be, your so-called career is over.

So, the next time someone asks you a question and you instinctively want to spout off the first impressive-sounding half-truth that comes to you, just remember that that person will remember your honesty before they ever remember your cleverly-planned fake remarks.  You can act like a star all you want, but when it comes down to it, honesty rules.