Toxic Team Members

Last year, 2014, I competed in the highest ranked Call of Duty tournaments in the world. Call of Duty is an fps(first person shooter) video game. The game is highly competitive and there are very high stakes. Tournaments are for thousands of dollars. Just this coming weekend there is a tournament for 1 million dollars being played in LA, California. Competing in these tournaments takes four players to a team and a lot of practice together. There are three different game modes played and it is either a best of 3 series or a best of 5 series. Teamwork is an extremely important facet to competing and it is important to find the RIGHT teammates for your team.

Here is the video trailer of the Call of Duty Championships 2015 being played for 1 million dollars:

I have been playing Call of Duty since 2003 when the first one was released. Video games are a big passion of mine and it has been very important in my life. I got picked up by my first big name team, Mutiny, in the December 2013 and competed with them during 2014. We were a very talented team individually but the most important thing about competing is the teamwork. One of my teammates, Lyle, was extremely toxic to our team. He had a terrible attitude and did not seem to care ever. He would always start arguments and cause trouble. The problem was that we were all friends in real life. We had all known each other since we were young and got along just fine outside the game. Lyle really was just too toxic to team with. He showed up late to every practice or meeting. He did not communicate in game or out of game well. He did not try during practice and over all just brought the moral of the team down.

Here is our team:

We tried multiple ways to get him to try. We really wanted this team to work out because we all really liked eachtoher but Lyle just made it impossible. WE had multiple tries and doing interventions. I cannot count how many times we went to our local steak n shake and ate and had 2 hour meetings trying to figure things out. We would tell Lyle what the problems were and he would eventually agree and say he would work on it and do better but he never did. It eventually got to much for me and i told them i could not team with Lyle anymore. I started looking for other teams and told our team captain, Andrew, that it was Lyle or me. My three teammates had been teaming for 3 years prior to me joining so they did not want to break up and i wanted to further my career, so i left. It was really hard to leave because Mutiny was such a great organization to be under and they helped us out with so much a supplied thousands of dollars worth of sponsors gear to us.

I ended up leaving and joined another team. Our team worked extremely well together and we became ranked as a top team within weeks. WE eventually played my old team and beat them bad in a big tournament. It felt really good because i put sop much effort into mutiny and worked hard to try and make it work but they chose the toxic team member. Lyle showed up hungover to that tournament as well and played awful. IT sucked for them but it was like a “I told you so” moment. But overall, having good team members  is extremely important in the work place, sports, and even video games. Sometimes interventions work and sometimes they don’t.