“Complete failure”, “terrible”: Players blast ESL One Frankfurt
Tournaments

“Complete failure”, “terrible”: Players blast ESL One Frankfurt

June 20th, 2015 Tournaments 2 comments

From a spectator’s stand-point, ESL One Frankfurt seems to have been an absolute success so far. Hundreds of people were lined up in front of the Commerzbank-Arena from the very early morning, the crowd has been ecstatic all throughout the first day and most of the reactions coming from the community have been positive. Unfortunately, players have had a different experience.

Complaints have been flooding in around the clock. Players are dissatisfied with the lack of soundproofing during the seeding matches, lousy hotel conditions, Internet issues and low temperatures at the venue.

Seeding brackets, standby flight tickets, lack of privacy

Jacky “Eternal Envy” Mao is infamous for voicing his complaints via social media. Although the manner in which he chooses to articulate his thoughts and feelings is considered to be rather unorthodox, he certainly does paint a clear picture of the issues that players face at various events.

Days before ESL One Frankfurt 2015, Eternal Envy tweeted that professional players were dissatisfied with the seeding brackets and wanted to boycott them. He later deleted the tweets.

Eternal Envy also complained about being booked a standby flight ticket. When a flight is boarding, passengers on the standby list must wait at the gate to be called. In case there aren’t any unclaimed or available seats, standby ticket owners are rolled into the standby list for the next flight. ESL staff blamed the entire situation on the airline.

Internet issues

Numerous reports of high Internet pings and terrible lags have been circulating since yesterday. It seems that when Armand “bOne7” Pittner attempted to address the issue, he was told by admins to ignore the ping numbers he was receiving in-game:

Lack of soundproof during the seeding matches, “terrible lack of professionalism”

Ilya “Illidan” Pivcaevhad took to Twitter and VK to discuss his frustrations:

To be honest, ESL One is a complete failure, so far: hotel WiFi is sh*t, the Internet in the practice area is lagging, not to mention the fact that we are playing outside, at +10-15 temperatures. So many talks about what should be done, but we can’t even do the elementary things. During the seeding tournament, teams heard EVERY word said by their opponents, despite the fact that the ESL studios have two rooms, so they could have put the teams into different rooms. They wake us up at 7, bring us to practice at 8, and then we have to wait until 10 for them to fix something they should have fixed in advance, the day before the tournament. Terrible lack of professionalism. They only good thing here is the food.

Low temperatures

Virtus.Pro PR manager Olga Dunaeva tweeted a photo of Artem “Fng” Barshak practicing outside, along with the text: “We are the only team to practice outside”. She later removed the tweet.

fng esl one frankfurt

Artem “Fng” Barshak chimed in as well about the conditions on his Twitter page:

In response to some of the complaints that made their way to a Reddit thread, ESL One staff member James “Kennigit” Lampkin stated:

Dota 2 ESL One Staff

Lack of attention to details

Another player otherwise rarely seen venting on social media, Saahil “Universe” Arora has also started to document his less than satisfying ESL One Frankfurt experience on Twitter. His name was misspelled on the “welcome” swag goodie bag:

universe esl one frankfurt

Hotel conditions

Peter “ppd” Dager posted about the sleeping arrangements for the teams, after the numerous reports from players about the hotel conditions had been flooding in on social media accounts.

He also complained about the lack of soundproofing during the seeding matches:

Redemption time

ESL One Frankfurt is halfway through. The organizers still have the chance to make the necessary adjustments.

Virtus.Pro’s problems were addressed for the time being:

Featured Image: D2RO

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2 Comments

  1. DD
    (1 comments) Reply ↓

    Sounds a lot like Starladder 12/Dreamhack Bucharest but I see no topic with the title “complete failure” “terrible” like in this post. Those were just rants from EE and also included V1lat’s version, this one does not have a version from ESL, you just post what’s on twitter, if ESL responds there good, otherwise it’s just a “complete failure” and “terrible” tournament. Biased more?

    June 21, 2015 at 4:34 am
    1. Andra Ciubotaru
      (64 comments) Reply ↓

      We don’t think players’ complaints should be neglected. Especially since there were at least six players who complained about certain things: Illidan, Fng, Universe, PPD, bOne7 and EE. Out of those six players, EE is the only one who has a “the boy who cried wolf” reputation (we wrote about his social media rants here). We simply reported the complaints. We also included ESL’s responses to Illidan’s complaint and to the standby ticket issue, and we made it clear right from the beginning that the community’s perception of the event has so far been positive. We also reported Cyborgmatt’s complaints about Starladder 12, on April 25. However, that was a slightly different situation, since there was only one person who complained, and Starladder’s response was instant and rather apologetic (V1lat admitted they were experiencing a lot of problems, because it was their first ever LAN organized somewhere else than Kiev).

      June 21, 2015 at 8:57 am

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