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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.

21 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.

    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.

  2. The first time I read this: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    an epic GEEK tragedy

  3. 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
  4. 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.

    1. Re:Valve and Steam by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 4, Informative

      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
    2. 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.

  5. 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

    1. Re:How can this happen... by SuperMo0 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Because they had to set aside money for all of these prizes.

  6. Pong by AtariAmarok · · Score: 4, Funny

    Same goes if you all played Pong. You would not have these problems with that game, either.

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
  7. Articles about CXG by waaka! · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Yup by waaka! · · Score: 3, Funny

    The Q3 tournament at CXG was cancelled too, you know. (The only tournament that actually finished besides WC3 was Unreal Tournament 2K3.)

  9. 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?

    3. Re:The *real reason* by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 2, Funny

      Everything in gaming is now blamed on steam.
      my fps is bad, steam sucks.
      my ping is high, steam sucks.
      my aim is bad, steam sucks.
      my arm hurts, steam sucks.

      --
      Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
  10. Re:Amazing. by fireduck · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  11. Undisclosed advents at CXG. by aldridge · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.