We recently announced that insomnia was ditching their archaic tournament system, Clanforge, which had finally been retired since iSeries had become invested in tournaments, dating all the way back to the early i-10’s (if not earlier, I’m not that old-school though).
We at UKCSGO, believed this change would bring new fortunes to iSeries, as they had suffered from numerous issues from Clanforge, from breaking the system itself when trying to create new tournaments whilst other tournaments are running, to broken brackets, to the login issues that always seemed to occur at every LAN. It became an annoyance and frustrating for players and admins alike (I would know).
This brought in a brand new change to iSeries, as they finally went ahead and done something that they should have done five years ago and ditched Clanforge in favour of a brand new system that would help them overcome several of the previous issues. They went and bought a tournament system from Gaming Grids, we unfortunately don’t know how much for, but we can assume by it being fully customize-able that it would be a smallish sum of money.
However there were some pre-event issues that were ironed out with problems around players and teams trying to sign up. This soon went south when head admin Jon “ViciousHorizion” Kelly, was told prior to the event that when brackets go live, they can’t be edited at all, which meant that despite bracket issues being a major concern for the CS community over the years, issues could still potentially happen with the bracket.
Delays can be frustrating….. (Source: Multiplay Flickr)
Today however, things got seemingly worse for iSeries as they had to ditch the new tournament system and go back to the old fashioned technique of admin work which is with Excel spreadsheets (or the computer version of pen and paper). This is believed to be down to the fact that they hadn’t been able to test the group stages prior to LAN and didn’t see the potential issues that groups throw up (especially when you have odd numbered groups or mixed groups of 6/7 teams). Suffice to say it’s not been a great day at the admin desk as stress levels seem to be higher than ever when you are thrown back into the deep end as teams become frustrated that they cannot play at the scheduled time.
The question will now be whether iSeries can fix these issues for their future LAN events, but surely questions should be asked on why no dry runs prior to LAN were done on a group stage which is a staple of what iSeries tournaments run on. They found out the bracket problem prior to LAN through their testing of the brackets when they did some qualifiers in HearthStone, so why was nobody doing something similar with a group stage? We are unsure whether the tournament will stay on spreadsheet or will revert back to their system for the bracket part of the tournament.
The best way to follow any scores is to press on the hyperlink I provided to the Excel Spreadsheets earlier, we will try and keep you up to date of any potential upsets throughout the day.
