Tournament Organisers Under Fire After Counter-Strike Game Is Restarted On Match Point

Any time you’re hit with a delay, pause or — at worst — a restart in a tournament, it’s always a frustrating thing. Tensions are often running high and it’s annoying for everyone involved — players, spectators and admins.

But when the score reads 15-11 in a CSGO event — especially one that players have paid money for via a subscription service — it’s doubly aggravating. And when the admin decides that the round your team just won didn’t count, and you go on the lose the game … well, you can imagine the reaction.

The match was a qualifier for this year’s Intel Challenge Katowice, a female-only Counter-Strike: Global Offensive event for 30,000 euros. Eight teams will compete on the IEM Expo stage in Katowice, but only two slots were on offer through ESEA’s European online qualifiers.

During those qualifiers, Unikrn found themselves 15-11 up on de_cache against their opponents Revival before the server went down. Here’s a screenshot from Lalita, one of the Unikrn players.


Replicating the money situation would be tricky, but you’d think the situation would be fairly straightforward. It’s match point to Unikrn: just get one person in the server, change the start money to something reasonable, get all the players back in while the game is paused (or modify the start money for both teams if you have to) and carry on.

But that wasn’t the case, according to ESEA. After attention was drawn to the situation by Richard “shox” Papillion, a statement was issued by an admin through a Twitlonger message that was later deleted.

It didn’t do much to quell the outrage.

Earlier today during the Intel Challenge Katowice Women’s Qualifier, some servers crashed in the middle of matches that led us to begin the process to medic the matches. Due to the servers crashing in the middle of a round, we were only able to medic to the start of the previous round, as is standard for all matches. Since we cannot restart a round in the middle of it, it must be played from the start of the round.
 
We treat these qualifiers the same as the all other qualifiers, regardless of anyone’s gender. We hope to provide the most competitive matches played for any event that is hosting a qualifier through ESEA, with teams earning the chance to compete on a bigger stage should they win.

The problem seems to be one of timing: while at least one of the clients clearly recorded Kinguin winning, that clearly wasn’t recorded by the server logs due to the restart. There was enough time for the in-game bot to record the score as 15-11, however, as another Unikrn member pointed out.


According to the ESEA bracket at the time of writing, Revival were able to win their next match and move on to the next stage of the qualifiers (along with YouPorn’s female CSGO team).

It’s an astonishing state of affairs considering the available information, which isn’t helped after another Unikrn member posted a screenshot of a brief conversation with one of the admins.

Another statement hasn’t been issued at the time of writing, but it seems like the kind of scenario where — at the very least — the match should be replayed, if not from the original position. As someone who spent far too many weekends administrating matches myself, which included admitting fault and correcting issues whenever I’d made a mistake, the whole episode looks atrocious for ESEA.


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