Stellar Lotus disbands. Players determined to #FreeWiz

Youtuber and Stellar Lotus owner, Jesse Cox announced Monday that the team would be disbanding.

"I am going to be canceling, shutting down and postponing Stellar Lotus." He said in the video, "I feel like I gave my word of a one-year commitment to my team, and I told them this a month ago. But I just don’t have the money to do it. If I’m going to go on this crazy adventure of running a channel by myself and dealing with all the stress that comes with that I definitely can’t do anything with an esports team."

The team hasn’t competed since the Heroes Rising online qualifiers in December.

A pretty hefty amount of pro-players have come through the Stellar Lotus roster such as Iakona, Srey, and erho, all who are now in well-established top teams.

Along with Cox no longer being able to support the team financially, one player, Wiz, lives in Korea. While he plays on North American servers, Blizzard has strict region-locking rules requiring players to live in the country they’re representing for at least 6 months prior to competing. Wiz decided to stay with the team and continue playing on the North American server, even after countless amounts of other team offers. Now the question comes to whether or not this region locking rule is relevant for Heroes esports.

Wiz put out a statement on reddit, pleading that the community help him and bring awareness about this issue to Blizzard.

While playing in the NA server, what I felt the most was that the people here are very open-minded, kind, nice, and every single one of them treated me like family. While learning new things here, my attitude towards NA region changed drastically. Now, my dream and my goal is to grow and play with the people in NA region. I really want to fulfill my dream with my family in the NA server, and play as a professional player in NA region.”
Wiz also mentioned that they have been trying to get in contact with Blizzard but they have not yet heard a ruling yet.

Blizzard esports coordinator Matt "CyaSteve" MacNeil responded to the post.
I totally understand your frustrations. Now I'm not a lawyer so I can't speak directly to the reasons why the 6 month rule has been in place since before I was at this company, but I can say that I'm looking into it.”

It's very possible that if the rules get changed we could see Stellar Lotus again and possibly changes to other teams as well.

Cox did mention about "maybe one day bringing it back" but that it just wasn't the right time right now.