as of today (aug 24th 2026), i have officially left the mcsr ranked team. this is because of management issues and public hate towards me specifically about things i cannot control.
this document is not meant to be a drama post. i am not intending to cause any drama. this is just to defend myself, as many people have said to me that me leaving will make me look like a dick without context.
over the past few months - gradually getting worse and worse, i have been receiving hate publicly because of the lack of updates, features, management issues, production issues, etc. putting me personally in a bad light, even to friends of friends.
realistically though - my departure was imminent without said hate, because of the management and communication issues present in every area of the team.
internal (and even public) communication at ranked has never been good. from every angle, development to production. i think you all saw this peek out with the MSS (mid-season showdown) this season. there have been many talks about this, across the last few months. and i have given enough chances for it to change and i have pushed enough for it to change.
in reality, i am most of the time left alone to make decisions by myself instead of communicating or planning anything with anyone (other then another developer), as people just won't respond to me for months on end
the thing that kind of broke me personally was this tweet
the important detail in this tweet mentioned is the "complete infrastructure redesign". and how they say it was going to be done in "2-3 months". i was the main developer working on this infrastructure redesign/rewrite and i was never asked if this was possible to hit. it is not, and will never be.
i was not informed of this tweet's existence until i got told by a third party community partner that it existed. at that point, i went to our internal chats and asked why this was set and how it was impossible to hit.
the response i got was asking if there was any chance if they could make it hit in any way, hiring new devs, etc.
the reality is - no. you can't. the mcsr ranked server has no documentation and it has very very specific intracecies that have to be replicated exact, which would take a while to do. yet alone, the migration to a new database which we have to do along with this. would take a while to do.
the only part of the infrastructure redesign that was semi-finished, was some of the core services and match logic, nothing else. including how we were going to deploy said infrastructure.
that is - obviously not going to work. burning milions in anthropic tokens would probably get you something that works. but that doesn't mean it'd be good, scalable, or secure. the mcsr ranked redesign needs clear design that is scalable, not a "rewrite this to make this more performant", as a lot of the issues are core problems buried into our infrastructure, rather than code problems.
i don't know. my code (that is rather more of a prototype then anything complete) will be in their possesion. they can choose to continue it or not, i personally will not be working on it any further.
the new anticheat of mcsr ranked isn't exactly meant for mcsr ranked specifically. anticipating this was going to happen (and because draftout needed an anticheat aswell), i made it modular and easily integratable into anything mcsr ranked or draftout-like. i plan to continue developing that in my free time. i do not know if i will give it to mcsr ranked (i probably will not because the communication will be a hassle)
the deadline for the infrastructure rewrite they set on me is approaching, and i think the hate will only get worse when that gets obviously missed. i do not want to deal with that. along with pushes to work on said rewrite while ignoring everything else i say.
i don't know. i think i will continue working on draftout and a bit of gridlock. i like interesting challenges and scaling things to extremes, that's my thing - infrastructure has always been my thing (obviously security aswell).
i would quite like to get the aformentioned anticheat finished and out on at least draftout, and then improve it further as time goes on.
i did definitely also communicate poorly a bit during my time @ ranked, but that is mostly because it was someone who shouldn't deal with this problem dealing with the problem. i wanted a specific person to answer me - not someone else who was doing perfectly fine.
so i am definitely not completely out of the blame for this.
mcsr ranked has an awesome community, but it has been degrading and getting worse and more toxic over time as it grows. and i joined pretty late! but it was still not as bad as this.
i am a bit tired of getting pinged or seeing another developer getting pinged in the suggestions channel asking if we can implement something, the reality is - usually we want to and we cannot at the moment.
i value my discord pings/notifications a lot. and there is no way to mute direct user mentions for a specific server. i have expressed this after another developer publicly complained about the suggestions channel and the pings, gave alternatives (feedback site/forum, where people can upvote, we can have a roadmap, etc) but was told that that'd be "too much friction for users" and "reduce interaction".
and then was sent a big paragraph about what we need to do in the infrastructure rewrite in terms of new features along with the already extremely big task of doing it with existing feature parity. with a bold BIG UPDATE GOALS header.
i know that they all mean well but i am tired of explaining myself over and over again and getting the same responses.
i had a wonderful time doing stuff with ranked, it was a lot of learning about MCSR from a bunch of people and i enjoyed it all. brainstorming about the challenges of scaling ranked was fun aswell (there was about 2 iterations of the infrastructure rewrite until i settled on a plan i was extremely happy with)
i have receipts of everything said in this document. i intend no hate, do not send hate to anyone. there are intentionally no mentions of names or specific people.
honestly smart