Former owner of Selfless and current head coach for the Atlanta Reign Sephy commented yesterday on the controversy surrounding the Dallas Fuel’s recent poor form and the absence of their star Overwatch player, Jang “Decay” Gui-un.
Sephy commented on a Reddit thread in which many Overwatch League fans were speculating as to why the Fuel’s coaching staff didn’t play their star DPS player, Decay, when he has consistently been the sole bright spot for an otherwise lackluster team.
The Reign head coach said the “rumor is that [Decay] benched himself and plays mostly VALORANT in his free time rn.” Further into the thread, Sephy responds to someone calling him out for creating bait by insisting that, “Baiting is not my thing, I was being serious.”
The response to this claim has seen other big figures within the OWL and the surrounding scene all weighing in.
One of Decay’s former coaches at the Los Angeles Gladiators said that he doesn’t “know whether it’s true but, there are a lot of Overwatch players who go straight into VALORANT right after scrim ends.” He went on to add that there’s most likely “going to be a lot of retirements at the end of the year.”
With a different takeaway from the Reddit post, current Guangzhou Charge support player Alberto “neptuNo” González said on Twitter that he didn’t expect to see “an OWL coach go into Reddit and spread rumors of other team/player that hurts their image out of nowhere.”
It seems that the early indications were accurate in that VALORANT may poach a lot of great talent from Overwatch to form a lot of the early pro teams in the game. Already, some of the very best talent that the OWL has to offer, like Corey and Sinatraa, retired mid-season to make the leap to Riot Games’ new tactical shooter.
If the OWL were to lose a player of Decay’s calibre to early retirement, it wouldn’t just hurt the Dallas Fuel, but the entire league. At this rate, Overwatch could be losing as many star players as it has been creating.
The Dallas Fuel play one match next week against the Toronto Defiant and will need to see Decay play for the team to find some semblance of hope that they can turn their season around.
