Gfinity CS:GO Spring Masters 2 Event Review

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Recently over the weekend I attended the 3 day Gfinity CSGO Spring Masters 2 event held in London, with my goal to review and provide an indepth look into this LAN from a spectator’s perspective. It was a moderately mixed bag with an overall positive outcome.

So I’ll begin where I started, on the tube. I’ll say right now that the venue has a great travel link, Gfinity gives the rough estimate that the venue is less than 5 minutes walk from the tube station, and they weren’t lying. The tube station is literally inside the mini shopping centre/food court where the arena is located. After stepping out of the turnstiles for the tube I was greeted by a few decently sized signs and banners informing me that the Gfinity arena was just up the escalators.

The arena itself is pretty interesting, it’s situated inside 3 screens of an old VUE cinema, this includes having massive cinema quality projectors and sound that was capable of literally shaking my seat, but more on that later. The snacks and food section of the cinema you’d usually grab your popcorn at is still up and running with no changes whatsoever, it wasn’t uncommon to see people sitting down to watch the game with a large popcorn and Pepsi in hand, the massive price inflation of cinema food is also still in place sadly, that’s the price you pay for convenience I suppose.

 

 

Anyway, that’s enough about food, let’s get to the meat of the event. Sorry I had to. After getting my (fancy yellow press-pass) wristband for the event, which allowed me to wander in and out of the venue as I pleased along with everyone else, I strolled towards the main stage. Inside the venue there is currently a Main Stage, a Challenger Stage and a press room. Inside the Main Stage I was greeted by a pretty impressive set-up, all the cinema seats were still in place and laid out really well as you’d expect and were as comfy as ever, not at one point throughout the probably 20+ hours I was in those seats did I experience any discomfort which was definitely appreciated, no plastic fold out chairs here. The £250,000 projectors were still in place and put to good use too, all the games on both stages were shown using these monsters, with pretty stunning picture quality you could easily see the action from almost anywhere in the room. There wasn’t really a bad seat in the house, which is good seeing as seats weren’t specified in the ticket. The only issue was if you were in the front 4-5 rows, the very bottom of the screen was cut off by the top of the booths, which meant you couldn’t see the ammo, HP or what weapon skin the players were using. It wasn’t a huge deal but was a bit annoying. This could be avoided in the future by slanting the ceiling of the booths so maybe they’ll fix that for the next one. From what I’ve seen Gfinity have taken a lot of feedback and made some changes accordingly which is really great to hear.

The upside to this however was that the booths also featured individual screens showing play perspective footage which really kept things interesting, the option to sit in the front row and watch the entire game through a couple of player’s perspective was definitely appreciated. I took the chance to do this during the VOX Vs. Fnatic game and noticed in the Challenger Stage’s screens were a little closer to the seats as opposed to the main stage where they were just a tad too far away in my opinion.

Now the sound in the venue was absolutely amazing, the voice quality of the commentators was top notch and the balance between game audio and commentary volume was great, there wasn’t much to say about the sound besides the fact that it was just great. Some of the dubstep they played during the intermission wubbed so hard I could feel it. As a side note the lighting in the venue was also really interesting, it was used to a pretty good effect with some nice presets like spotlights onto the trophy etc.

Now to talk about the event itself more so than the venue, I have to say it was a mixed bag. The worst thing about the event was the Challenger Stage by far. Instead of having someone just spectate the game and stream that, they for some reason unbeknownst to me, on the matches I watched, decided to play the MLG stream of the match on the screen which meant that the booth screens were about a minute ahead of the one projected so to anyone sat in the front 4-5 rows the casting was just annoying white noise. The video quality of the stream was also abysmal, in my opinion the Challenger Stage wasn’t worth the time at all, the Main Screen was just of infinitely better quality.

During the group stages everything went pretty smoothly aside from the usual technical issues, n0thing’s mouse stopped working for about 20 minutes at one point. However aside from that it was decent for avoiding huge technical issues, any issues that were present were a lot easier to understand when you’re actually there as you can tell pretty much exactly what is going on. So along with the filler from the analysis desk and the ability to wander across to the other screen or just go to the bathroom, there weren’t really any long term issues that affected the overall experience too much. The place felt pretty cold but I know I get cold easily and for a venue it’s better to be too cold than too hot. The free-cam camera man, who I’m sure all of you who watched the stream would know of, remained a constant distraction throughout the group stages to me whenever I sat in the front 3-4 rows. He routinely wandered aimlessly back and forth in front of the booth screens pointing his camera at nothing in particular before sitting back down, the camera work also wasn’t really that impressive, the technical staff often switched to it when he had it sat on his knee pointing at the floor or the shot composition in general was questionable. And sadly during the first two days the venue was pretty empty, a couple of times I’d find one of the screens with at max about 2 rows full and that was it, which was understandable but It definitely would have been nice to see some more people around.

However of course the final day is what really mattered to most and the final day was definitely mostly positive. My first of my few major issues with the final day was the removal of the booth screens which I felt really made the event stand out from simply watching the Twitch stream, I overheard something about ‘black bars’ making the screens unusable however they’d had them on for all teams over the proceeding days so needless to say I was disappointed. To follow up on this, the front row was eventually cordoned off due to an excessive amount of photographers randomly wandering into frame of the booth cameras which is a nightmare from the organiser’s perspective but also harmed the audience, especially considering that during the final match the entire venue was absolutely packed, I even had my seat stolen at one point, forcing me pretty far back. The games came quick and fast with minimal downtime when it wasn’t needed. The only considerable break that some could have found to be too much was the 25 minute break after the VP Vs. Na’Vi game, I however used it to grab some food off site.

The crowd was pretty great too, towards the end of the day everyone was excited and cheering along to many of the high tension moments, I personally had a couple of issues with people talking very loudly and constantly right behind me but due to the great sound quality it wasn’t ever an issue. It was definitely a very engaging experience and during the final moments of the last map I completely tuned out of the review mindset and just got caught up in the game.

To conclude I have to say while the event was great it seemed moderately obvious that the focus was on the livestream, with things like poor attention to the screen that wasn’t being streamed, removal of one of the few audience exclusive features like the booth screens and little to do outside of simply watching the games, really displayed their desire to make the Twitch stream as good as possible as opposed to putting the event and it’s spectators first. I do sometimes worry that the popularity of streaming could potentially remove the need or desire to host events like these in the future, with more and more people watching online it’s tempting not to bother with live events at all.