Word has been released from the UKGT camp this morning about them taking an unscheduled two-week break from their timetable. This is mostly due to a clash with the UK Masters qualifiers, and teams voicing their desire to play in these.
In a statement Ben released earlier today, he mentions that they do have a 5 point penalty point system in place for teams who don’t show up to their games. If fewer teams wanted to play the UK Masters qualifiers, then it sounds like these rules were ready to be enforced.
The delay is caused due to a number of teams wanting to participate in the UK masters qualifiers over the next two weeks. As our rulebook suggests if a team does not turn up to their fixture they will get a 5 point deduction with so many teams wanting to participate we have gone with the 2 week break. Obviously from a business POV we are not happy with needed to this, however we completely understand that the UK masters is the premier event here in the UK. – Ben Bagg
This two-week delay does mean there will be a two-week overlap with the main UK Masters season which is unavoidable. However, as the UKGT schedule is already planned, Ben has provided this information to Multiplay to prevent any clashes during those overlaps.
The last two weeks of our season (already known to clash slightly) will be played at the same time as UK masters. We have our fixtures all ready as you all have them, we have given these fixtures to UK masters to avoid any problems, we hope they will co-operate to ensure there fixtures don’t overlap. – Ben Bagg
Also mentioned in this email was a topic that there has been a lot of concern and confusion over, the servers. While it is no secret the that Var and SV values of the servers were a little on the extreme side, the reasons behind this didn’t cause performance issues on the server like a smoke grenade failing to put out a Molotov. The cause of these fluctuating values was identified in week 1. A combination of traffic shaping and eBot were the main cause behind this, along with the server being located in France. Because of this, we have now moved the servers we provide UKGT to a UK based server from a provider we’ve tried and tested before.
We’ve had a rocky start to our first event, with the qualifiers being messy and some server issues on our front. I would first like to state all issues have now been resolved on the server side, which was fixed ready for today’s fixtures, we will give them extensive testing over the two weeks to ensure there is 100% no issues going forward. – Ben Bagg
Despite this delay, all UKGT fixtures will remain the same and will be back on the 14th of February with Impulse Gaming vs Endpoint.
