IceNine Gaming placed 3rd at the CPL, and is currently ranked 5th in CEVO pro, the team online seems to be on the rebound after a small slump in TWL invite and a 2-3 record in CEVO. The call to remove Dale came during the CPL were a number of members voiced concerns over his activity level, and the fact that he was expecting to play matches on the fly.

Personally, I've met protag on LAN and he was a great guy, laid back, and loved to bring his own fan chair across the country, but I can at the same time understand the frustrations of an inactive team. If i9 wants to take it to another next level as a team, and as an organization and see removing protagonist as the way to do that, then I wish them nothing but luck.

Manager and out of game leader Jon "Karnifex" Holt had this to say about his teams move.

We decided to remove protagonist from the roster after many months of discussion and seeing that he just does not care about moving forward with the team. The guy is an amazing shot, and has stuck with IceNine for around 2 years, but no longer cares about the teamwork that a team must have in order to compete at a professional level.

In the meantime, we lost scubasteve, laz, and bigballa for reasons not relating to the release of protagonist, so we are looking to really tighten our roster to the starting 5-6 and get that cohesion back that wins matches. Basically half of our team was going to leave to reform ki, and when I sat down with them and asked what we could do to prevent it, protagonist's name was the first thing out of each of the members mouth.

Kevin (banana gun), Greg (row) and myself discussed the situation at CPL. Before that, there had been some question as to whether or not protagonist was willing to stop pubbing and start actively practicing with the team. We thought after he got 100% on the new maps on tracker he would come back, but then he just started playing xbox360. He was a match captain, so it started problems when people would scrim, and then he would show and expect to play while others had already prepared and new their positions in the specific strats. - i9.karnifex

The New IceNine Gaming
Kevin "banana gun" Lowe
Brian "cmythunder" Jellum
Kieran "dark" Frost
Nick "haunter" Thomas
Jon "karnifex" Holt
Adam "Store" Gervasio
Greg "Row" Rowberg