Gonzo Awards: Worst Event Of The Year

Despite esports events all having roughly the same blueprint and twenty years of experience to draw upon people still consistently fail at what should be by now standard procedure

Previous Winners

🥇 2010: Gamersject

🥇 2011: ESWC

🥇 2012: Northcon

🥇 2013: HoN World Tour Finals

🥇 2014: ESWC

🥇 2015: Gaming Paradise

🥇 2016: Shanghai Major / Nanyang Cruise Cup

And the winner is… The CS:GO RMRs

The Counter-Strike Majors are right up there with the best tournaments the world of esports has to offer… Provided they’re not hosted in Brazil of course. Despite this their qualifiers have always been among some of the most slipshod, hastily put together garbage

BLAST, very often the darlings of CS broadcasts, were very clearly out of their depth with the scale of the operation and outsourced a lot of the work to the type of incompetent bottom-feeders that are typical of lower tier tournament operators. The results weren’t just predictably bad but actually went so far as to subvert integrity to the point the only reasonable resolution would be a do-over. To achieve this across multiple regions, truly geography spanning ineptitude, might actually be a first in the space.

The Asian RMR, the one you might want to pay particular attention to given the rampant match-fixing in several of the continent’s key regions, was played out with competitors having access to the internet. This is, of course, against Valve’s specific rules on set-up but nothing was addressed until a competitor themselves requested it be turned off. Even after that Steam friends communications were explicitly left open allowing communication with people outside of the tournament that could be used for anything from typing “good luck” to “make sure you take a dive in the fifth.”

In addition to that several coaches also violated stage rules via making physical contact and communicating with players during the match, something Valve specifically clamped down on after the cheating scandal involving several high profile coaches that tarnished the totality of the pandemic driven online era. BLAST’s response was to plead ignorance that it had ever happened and pledge to conduct an investigation despite there being multiple photographs taken by HLTV showing the problematic conduct. BLAST never did get to the bottom of it.

And what would a shit tournament be without huge “tech pauses,” especially problematic considering the above integrity lapses, that caused players to be competing into the small hours. In one instance Rare Atom and TyLoo, in a game that would decide tournament survival, ran until 3am with six hours taken from start to finish. The prospect of having to play beyond midnight was of such importance to professionals that it was one of the Counter-Strike Player’s Association’s demands. Now tournament operators, even the mighty ESL, are back to the philosophy of shrugging their shoulders and saying “well, the games have got to get played so what you gonna do?”

Over in the Americas RMR a power cut delayed the start of the competition by two hours. Then behind the scenes a worker’s strike in Germany caused the tournament to have to forego their usual soundproof headsets as they couldn’t be shipped in time. Although BLAST made changes to the playing area to account for this it’s not clear how much impact this had on the proceedings. This improvised set-up led to a cascading series of problems that meant coaches couldn’t communicate with their teams and instead had to use other player mics in freeze time, essentially forcing them to break Valve rules by coming into the player area just to pass on in-game adjustments.

Worse than that the microphone issue impacted directly on game momentum as coaches couldn’t communicate with their team at all. One instance saw an admin intervene during a timeout to tell the coach he wasn’t allowed to talk to his team as it was for technical issues when it wasn’t. The set-up also made it possible that coaches could have been talking to their team the entire game and not just in the designated periods but there’s simply no way to know and no-one was really paying attention.

It seems like the admins weren’t on the ball about anything as individuals who weren’t even officially registered as coaches were allowed to stand behind teams and operate as a coach on at least two occasions. Add in then standard tech pauses to this cascading collapse of integrity and you’re essentially left with two qualifiers that are compromised to the point of being invalidated.

But hey, this is esports, so no-one really cares about integrity anyway. It’s too expensive and requires genuine effort and what does it matter when we’re building a scene where gambling companies can run their own tournaments solely for the purpose of giving their sponsored teams ranking points, or a world where behind the scenes the Saudia Arabian state money-spigot is funding organisations to pick up teams to enter into their tournaments?

The European RMR, run by the core BLAST team, managed to scrape through with only a day of complaints making it a stellar event by comparison but ultimately their handling of the major was extremely poor and so they can have this award. It’s not that there wasn’t worse events in 2023 from a technical stanbdpoint. Of course there were. Rather given the expectations and the standards we should expect for a Counter-Strike World Championship the qualifiers what was produced instead was an utter embarrassment to professional tournaments across the globe.