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Cyber X Gaming Championships Degenerate To Disaster
Thanks to gotFrag for their article summing up the problems at this weekend's Cyber X Gaming Championships in Las Vegas. The prize-festooned pro gaming event ended up degenerating into "an epic Greek tragedy", according to gotFrag, with "a lack of tournament preparation... no tournament schedule for every game except Warcraft III... and an understaffing at the event." Even after volunteers stepped in to ameliorate the chaos, the Counter-Strike tournament became uncompletable when "the limited amount of bandwidth at the event was unable to support the required number of Steam sessions." The tournament unceremoniously ended when "Power was turned off in all the outlets in the main area... [and] the entire event came to a screeching halt, including all ongoing games", and the majority of tournaments ended unfinished. Blue's News also has an article linking to several accounts of the problems.
Because the Inquirer is filled with vast gaming knowledge. The update was released on wednesday, like they have been for the past... 5 or so months now. cXg just never connected the gaming machines to the internet until the day of the event(friday) causing them all to have to pull the patch then.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
ESReality has a bunch of articles about CXG--not only commenting on how it degenerated into disaster, but also concerning how the tournaments were progressing up until the plug was pulled. Interesting reading, even if you don't know all the big names in the various games who attended the tournaments.
Because they had to set aside money for all of these prizes.
So if I dont have Steam on any of my PC's why do I care? 4 friends of mine were in the CoD competition and am sad that they got screwed by Valve's system. That's all.
how exactly did Steam ruin the CoD tournament, seeing as how Call of Duty was developed by Infinity Ward (i.e., not Valve) and does not use Steam?
Ripping on Steam for a failing of the tournament organizers is extremely shortsighted. A power outage can take out a whole event, sure. But certainly not an online service used by only 1 of the many games being played at the event.
I was going to go to CXG but due to a lack of planning on my end I could not make it there. Personally being involved in the cs gaming community and knowing some of the CXG staff members personally as well as some attendees there are a number of events that gotfrag either didn't know about or didn't want to post about. Everyone has been talking about bandwidth issues. Yes in fact it was planed to have a T3 for the event, delay after delay they instead ended up getting a business dsl line. Somehow this was just enough to support 20 players at the same time logged in. Valve's power outage didn't help the situation. One of the attendees pointed out to myself that recon getting up on stage asking for a COD cd so they can install a dedicated server shows just how well planned this advent was. All in all after the fact it turns out that Valve has a "LAN" specific version of cs 1.6 (for cyber cafes without internet and LAN parties) that doesn't use their steam technology, but no at CXG had known about this before the event or they just deemed it to be a non issue. The event had been in the planning for almost 2 years seeing as how different cs 1.5 and 1.6 are they might have not planed for this originally. GBL (Game Broadcasting Live www.GBLeSports.com) were the official radio broadcasters to cover all the CXG action. In fact because of the low amount of CXG staff that showed up they helped run the networking cables and setting up tables. There was a huge meeting at CXG early Saturday as gotfrag pointed out. Every single event sponsor was trying to do what ever they could to salvage this event. Looks like they weren't successful. In regards to cash flow problems. Believe it or not CXG even with all those sponsors were unable to pay (or at least as of this date) qualifier money to some of the teams. This is also apart of why only half the amount of teams they expected to show up did (transportation isn't free). I believe that this event has and will hurt the Counter-Strike community.