This has been humbling. First of all, thank you to the entire esports community for your feedback. We read through every response/retweet, and we were lucky enough to also engage in dialogue with some of y’all. We hear you. We have plenty to fix and much to iterate through.

Tl;dr We’re pausing all new signups for the certification exam and refunding all payments from test signups to date and study guide donations. Additionally, we’re going to rethink how we want to solve the problem of nepotism and bad hiring in esports

We started ECI in order to provide additional routes into the esports industry for those who need them. Over the past 10 years, we saw first hand how people would hire their friends over competence and alienate new talent from getting into esports. Nepotistic hiring is real

Just to reiterate, the goal of ECI has always been to help create additional paths to entry into esports, not to gate-keep. ECI was designed for entry level business roles, the finance, marketing, operations, etc. of the industry.

Specifically, it’s for those who need to showcase their esports knowledge but haven’t been able to do so. We can't emphasize enough just how hard it is to show esports industry knowledge. If you have just received a degree or work in another industry, it’s nearly impossible to do

Additionally, our intent was (and still is) to provide fee waivers and scholarships to all who have financial need and want to break into esports.

We also hoped that with this public benefit focused sponsorship/fee waiver model, we might be able to fund every person with financial need.

We messed up. We needed to communicate this model better.

That said, we’ve heard you loud and clear - the certification exam in its current form isn’t it.

We’re pausing and going back to the drawing board in order to retool everything we’ve done. For the many people who have signed up for the exam or paid for the study guide, we’ll be refunding your purchases immediately, though it may take a few days to return to your account.

We’re also here for you. We want to help you on your esports journey, so keep an eye out for an email from us. We want to help you achieve your goals in esports.

Our advisors got on board with us because they see the problems with hiring up close every day. Every single one of them has poured their heart and souls into esports. We’ve all been on the front lines together and we always want to do what’s best for it

While our advisory board members have been working to fix these challenges in their individual roles, we launched ECI with the belief that it could further promote professionalism and help remove implicit bias in hiring practices across the space.

We’re grateful to our advisors for their trust in us, but we missed the mark with this iteration.

It’s clear to us now that our current product doesn’t reflect the values both the advisory board and ECI hold. Thank you again to our advisors and to the community for this insight

We’ve made the decision to take the exam down because we want to help the industry and achieve our stated mission of fostering professionalism, promoting meritocracy, and increasing diversity and inclusion in the space.

It’s clear from dialogue with the community that we’re actually getting in the way of that. We know that esports is nothing without the fans, advocates, and industry leaders, and we want to respect what many people have given as feedback.

We hope that the conversation generated about hiring practices in esports continues to happen! We love esports to its core and want to wish best of luck to all the hard working talented people out there trying to break into the industry.