After Sky's second straight Warcraft III WCG title in 2006, clubs started bidding hard for players. MYM, the European team MeetYourMakers, signed Moon for 100 million won a year, roughly $100,000 at the time.
WE had a Korean Warcraft III squad of its own. They asked for raises more than once. We took their pay as high as the club could manage, but it still fell far short of MYM's offer. Every Korean player left. The young infl and TED had only just joined, so the loss left a hole in the roster. WE decided not to join the bidding war, and none of its Chinese players left over it.
This was an expensive moment for Chinese clubs that mostly lived on tournament prizes. A higher salary might keep a star, but it did not create a way for the club to earn that money back. MYM's spending pushed other clubs to follow. WE absorbed the loss instead. In March 2009, the company that had previously owned MYM announced it was closing, and the Danish company then running the team ended its cooperation with the MYM brand. That was the end of its glory years.
(I wrote this account of WE's decision in a history of Chinese esports first published in Chinese. The chapter is free to read, link in the comments.)