The Turkish AWP star, Özgür ‘woxic’ Eke has just recently been announced as replaced on the roster of mousesports, where he comfortably resided for roughly a year and a half (March 2019 to August 2020) and people are spinning attempting to figure out why the staple of the mousesports roster was dropped.
Rumors circled about Özgür Eke being a toxic teammate that was difficult to practice with, and allegations did what they typically do: fly around ceaselessly until someone in the know puts a stop to it.
We didn’t have to wait long: Chris ‘chrisJ’ de Jong recently took to Twitter to defend the rumors surrounding his teammate Özgür Eke, along with mourning that they won’t be actively playing together.
The rumors about him being toxic is just complete nonsense, this guy puts so much positive energy in the game. ❤️🙏🏻(2/2)
— Chris de Jong (@chrisJcsgo) August 29, 2020
So precisely why Özgür was removed from the active roster is still a bit of a mystery, with rumors of travel difficulty now taking the place of the toxicity allegations as the currently popular reason.
https://twitter.com/CS_andyj/status/1299769081940160514
Travel restrictions have recently been a mass guillotine for many esport teams and players.
With Counter-Strike’s ESL One Cologne 2020 Online noticeably struggling to figure out the logistics of holding an offline LAN, to NYXL temporarily backing out of the Overwatch League as they couldn’t play matches in their New York City apartments on WiFi instead of ethernet; an obstacle presented by the team existing within New York City itself.
This may be one of the first players, however, that is entirely cut due to travel restrictions that COVID-19 has presented to an internationally-sourced team; one of the first that we can readily source, at the very least.
If it does come down to travel restrictions, then Özgür is finding himself in a difficult spot; there are no T1 teams entirely within Turkey: 9INE disbanded the majority of their roster in early 2020 after the split roster between Sweden and Turkey, and has signed new blood in as recently as July; they have multiple T3 wins under their belt as recently as August 8 in the ESN League Season 7.
This could explain why Özgür is looking at picking up the streaming mantle again for the interim until travel restrictions allow him to rejoin the top-tier of professional Counter-Strike.
For some, this is a sign of hope for the future of Özgür within professional Counter-Strike; a star AWPer that is still more than young enough to continue competing at the highest level of Counter-Strike for quite some time. We just need the pandemic to chill out a little bit to give the guy an AWPortunity.
