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Cyber X Gaming Championships Degenerate To Disaster

Posted by simoniker on from the litany-of-problems dept.

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.

7 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Steam strikes again by alyandon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "the limited amount of bandwidth at the event was unable to support the required number of Steam sessions."

    Many people predicted that this very thing would become and issue and now we have seen it come to pass. So what is the solution now for tournaments? Rent a T3 for an external internet connection when a T1 used to suffice!?!?!? You can kiss low budget HL-based game tournaments goodbye until this problem is addressed.

    gg Valve

    1. Re:Steam strikes again by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Buy the lan center edition of Steam? Download a full cache to one machine and mirror it across the entire network? how about INSTALLING STEAM BEFORE EVERYONE GETS THERE?
      This wasn't in any way valves fault, cXg should of planned ahead, theres been an update every wednesday for months now, and they act as if it was some big suprise. Next time plan ahead and get everything installed and working, instead of getting up on the loud speaker asking for a Call of Duty cd because they don't even have it installed.

      --
      Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
    2. Re:Steam strikes again by n.wegner · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you're running an in-house tournament, why not just run a few steam servers on the 10/100 ethernet network you already have? Better yet, you can leave that for gaming bandwidth and just press some 20c cds with the latest drivers, patches, etc. and pass them around.

    3. Re:Steam strikes again by rhakka · · Score: 2, Insightful

      do your Low Budget HL based game tournaments usually have 80 teams of players trying to d/l at the same time?

      If they tried to run a LAN of this size without an ISP sponsor, they fucked up hard.

  2. Re:Amazing. by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 3, Insightful

    " Who's ever going to want to host a large Counterstrike lan party again if simply trying to run the game causes such horrific problems?"

    People that know what they're doing, I'd assume.
    A few weeks ago there was the CPL, easily twice as many CS players, lots more if you coun't the BYOC. CPL had no problems with steam, and everything ran smoothly. All you need to do is plan properly, maybe even plan your event so that valves top employees won't be busy at CES.

    --
    Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
  3. How can this happen... by Eluding+Reality · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... when they have this list of sponsors?

    Cashflow shouldn't have been a problem, so they should have been able to get a decent setup, staff etc, bet those sponsors are gonna be pissed anyway

  4. Re:Valve and Steam by xTown · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think you're ignoring the fact that if the patch had been available outside of Steam, there wouldn't have been a problem. Sure, okay, the cXg people should have set up a lot earlier. I can see your point. But under the old system, they could have generated a few dozen CDs with the patch on and updated each machine as needed, without flooding their connection. Steam is a solution in search of a problem; it fixes something that wasn't broken.