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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.

11 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. 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
  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

  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.