Last week we kicked off our weekly fun tournaments. Come the night, we had a full house, with nineteen teams waiting to check-in to claim a spot in our sixteen team tournament. With all we learnt, and the tweaks we put in place after the benchmark tournament, we were hoping for a smooth night…That dream soon came crashing down.
Right from the word “go” we were having reports of a cheater in the tournament. Sadly the first game they played was on the only server where GOTV didn’t automatically enable so we were unable to get demo footage from the game. Because of this, we are adding the requirement of POVs to our rules.
Their next game was recorded by GOTV and, like their first game, more reports came in about suspicious play. We were able to download the demo, inspect it, and came to a unanimous decision between the admins that something didn’t look quite right. We took action and disqualified the team. We can only apologise to the team they faced first that GOTV wasn’t recording, but what would a one night cup be without a technical hiccup of two…
Speaking of technical hiccups, sadly they didn’t end with just one GOTV playing up. Yet again we battled with the stability of eBot all night which caused a few minor delays to the start of games, but more importantly, our servers started killing themselves towards the end of the night. Luckily this happened right at the end of the night when there was just the finals left to play. Troubleshooting servers at midnight is never a fun game, especially you have viewers on stream, teams, casters, production team and admins waiting for the game to start. In what seemed like a blink of an eye, 40 minutes had past and we made the call to delay the finals. You will be glad to know that under the light of a new day, and rested eyes, it was clear what was going wrong. A setting change in the config, which I made mid-tournament and subsequently forgot all about, caused all servers to crash after 3-5 minutes of being up. Lesson learnt people – don’t touch configs mid-tournament! At least we had our one-man production team, Misty – aka DJ Misty, banging out tunes during the delay keeping spirits high and the stream chat pumping. Also I would like to extend a big shoutout to Luke from CRISPsrv, who was scratching his head along side me trying to work out what was going on.
Ending on a high note, congratulations to Team Penguin Overlords who won this tournament in a thrilling final that went to all three maps against Royals.UK. All the VODs of the tournament should be up by the end of today, just need to finish off cropping them and pushing them to our Youtube channel.
The next tournament is open for signups and will be taking place this Thursday. We are still working on ironing out some of the issues faced this week, but we are also working on something very big behind the scenes which we hope to be announcing towards the end of this month.
