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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.

6 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Amazing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

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

    Wow. Tell me again why product activation is a good idea? 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?

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

    According to the Inquirer, Valve released a patch in the middle of the event, and BAM! You can kiss all that bandwidth goodbye.

  3. The *real reason* by fluor2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Source: http://www.steampowered.com/index.php?area=news

    "For about 4 hours Thursday night, Steam service was interrupted. After that time, service continued to be slow until about 11:00 am PST today (Friday). These problems were caused by device failure on our network following a power outage. [...]"

    This power outage caused the main login-server to go off-line, thus nobody could authenticate to Steam. We all thought the loginserver was DoS'ed, but it turns out that they actually had a power-outage. Single-point-of-failure, eh, Valve?

    Anyways, Valve SHOULD have released a LAN-only option for Steam. I cannot believe that they trust the internet for big compos like this.

    As for now, I would like to say that any organizers that require Steam for their compos, should really consider downloading a hacked version of Steam that make LAN possible. It is available.

    1. Re:The *real reason* by simoniker · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I know this post is getting modded up, but the gotFrag report says:

      "By 8AM PST on Saturday, all of the goals set at 1:30AM late the previous night were accomplished... As the first Counter-Strike teams were called in and began to set-up, things were working smoothly. As more players filtered in, a problem with running Steam became more and more apparent."

      So sounds like the biggest Steam problems came after this outage was fixed?

    2. Re:The *real reason* by fireduck · · Score: 2, Interesting

      regardless of whether steam was or wasn't a problem (or even should have been a problem given the suggestions of other posters in this topic):

      How in the world does Steam affect tournaments for all of the other non-steam games (q3, CoD, RtCW, ET, AA). One fubared game should not take down the rest of the event...

      From what I've read in the various linked articles, this event was run about as poorly as possible. brackets weren't even established for most of the tournaments and that's somehow to be blamed on steam?

  4. Re:Steam strikes again by SavannahLion · · Score: 2, Interesting
    "why not just run a few steam servers on the 10/100 ethernet network you already have?"

    Simply because Valve hasn't released any Steam servers for us to publicly use.