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The rush is celebrating: Riot's big rollout in the Valorant tournament
Failed management and logistical problems: What caused the terrible disruptions in the tournament that was supposed to be the last chance for teams from the United States to qualify for the annual Valorant Championship?
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Gaming
Amit Begam
Wednesday, 20 October 2021, 13:25 Updated: 13:28
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(Photo: Official Website, Riot Games)
The LCQ series, (acronym for Last Chance Qualifier) is a series of tournaments in the game Valorant, organized by the game developer, Riot Games and runners all over the world.
In each such tournament, one team that finishes in first place will win a ticket to the CHAMPIONS tournament - the Valorant World Championship.
We will focus on a tournament that took place in the North American region, which if we have to describe in a simple way ... did not go well, to say the least.
So what actually happened?
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Some background
The tournament was held in Los Angeles and was supposed to host 10 teams: 8 from the US and 2 from Australia, and was planned to be a live LAN event. The teams that played in this tournament were not the strongest teams of the region, on the contrary.
These were the teams that failed to secure their place in the championship so far and in fact if they do not manage to win this tournament, they will have to wait until 2022 for the start of next season. The community was very happy after hearing that the event was planned to be a physical event. This is the last chance to prove who deserves to reach the championship! So far everything sounds good and like a crazy event right? So this is it, no.
So like I said before, the tournament was supposed to be a tournament for North American teams, but for no apparent reason Riot decided they would add the teams from Australia ORDE, and Chief's Espirts (which is a very small area relative to other areas of the game like Europe or Asia) to the American tournament and they They'll just be flown to Los Angeles, and everything's fine.
This is where Riot's first problem arose with the organization of this tournament.
The teams selected to play in the LQC tournament in Valorant (Photo: official website, liquipedia)
Problems getting to the Australian teams
To understand the full picture of what happened, one must first explain the laws that the Australian government introduced at the time because of the corona regarding movement out of the country and back to it. There were two problematic laws that disturbed the groups. The first is that they had to have a government business permit to leave the country, and there are limits on the amount of people you can leave with. The second is the limitation of return flights to Australia. This limitation is the most critical because what it means is that there are a limited number of people who can return to Australia and if the teams fail to get the necessary permits, they can find themselves stuck in Los Angeles for an unknown time… days, weeks, maybe even Months that will not be approved back to the country.
The problems started to emerge from the moment the Australian teams knew they had qualified for this tournament and had to play it a few months before it was supposed to take place. According to independent British correspondent George Gads, he spoke to some of the team members on these teams and said they had sent messages to Riot to get details on the tournament and how exactly they were supposed to arrive, but there was no response.
Basically what happened was that Riot started taking care of the team affairs about a week before the tournament started, and it seemed that no one there was even aware of the Australian Government's corona restrictions. Once Riot started working on the arrival of the teams they very quickly discovered that it would not happen without the teams having to stay in Los Angeles until at least mid-November, and we mention that the tournament was supposed to run for a week only.
The teams of course could not commit to such a thing, and Riot had to tell them they could not come.
It is not clear if the teams received any compensation but there is no doubt that the teams had to take a hard blow and Riot certainly did not handle the situation professionally.
What happened to the groups that did arrive in the end?
A tournament was held in Los Angeles at the LCS (American LOL League) studio in Riot that became a new studio ahead of this Valorant tournament, and overall in terms of design and visibility, the studio itself would have looked great. But the servers and computers were just awful, and the problems
Players reported low
levels of computing equipment from the very first moment.
200-300 frames per second for a game like VALORANT or CS: GO. Now that's not all, it turns out that the computers on the stage itself where the players are supposed to compete, were also at a very low level.
The computer problem is serious though, but it dwarfs what happened to the game servers and how the tournament was run at the ping and lag level.
As I mentioned, the tournament was advertised as a LAN tournament for everything.
All the teams, players, media people, etc. expected this.
Players expected to play with low ping, without bugs and blows and get the experience that every LAN tournament should give: that everyone plays under exactly the same conditions and that the game will run as smoothly as possible.
Riot releases announcement that the tournament will be held as a LAN tournament (Photo: official website, Riot Games)
What actually happened was that Riot did not even bother to bring servers to the site. There was no situation where the servers crashed sputtering or not working, they just weren't, and the players didn't know it! So basically the players arrived, and already on the first day they noticed that they are not playing on a LAN server but it feels like a regular ONLINE server that is very far from the studio itself. For those who ask: "Why is this so important ?!", we will explain: these games are decisive for the accuracy of individual pixels on the screen and sometimes also for the accuracy of milliseconds in the timing of a move, and every crash of the computer, or the smallest data loss on the Internet can result in loss of Hundreds of thousands of dollars, or in our case, the immigration to the annual championship.
Here Riot made a serious mistake: they just lied. The players came and asked if Riot what was going on and why it felt to them like a regular ONLINE server, and in society more or less ignored them, until at some point they declared that "because of the corona limitations and out of a desire to maintain the health and safety of players and staffThey decided to move to a remote server. "
According to unconfirmed rumors, what actually happened is that the server the game was supposed to run on (for some reason Riot refers to Pandora writing that no one should touch or duplicate) has remained stuck in customs since the previous tournament in Germany, and the company did not provide a good replacement or solution. So just turned it into an online tournament played on stage.It may sound delusional and silly, but that's what happened there.
From here it just gets more complicated: the players reported lags, BLACK SCREENS (when the computer crashes and the screen turns black) and simply complete disconnections from the server while playing. The famous CS: GO player Nitr0 who recently made the switch to VALORANT said in an interview that he discovered about these problems only as soon as he got to the studio and touched the computers.
The players quickly discovered that the internet connection in the studio itself is terrible, and in fact the connection to the servers from the players' hotels is better. Just a hallucination. In one of the games there were 4 breaks during the game due to technical problems, there were lags for the players, endless blows, disconnections and lots and lots of technical problems. It was just a terrible experience for the actors, the viewers, and I'm sure Riot themselves were not happy at all about what was happening. Here is a clip of another professional player ShahZam from the Sentinels team who watched the hallucinatory moment in the tournament in a 1v2 situation that will show you in what situations the players found themselves.
After a moment like this you would expect that maybe Riot will decide to play this round again or maybe postpone the game… but no.
Despite the problems that continued throughout the game, Riot did nothing and although they tried to fix the problem it continued throughout the game and it was not stopped at any stage.
Another terrible problem that has emerged is the corona testing problem.
For example, a player named Babybay from the FaZe team who was vaccinated, and came out negative in the three pre-event tests.
When he arrived at the tournament, he also had to perform a quick corona test on the spot - which turned out to be positive.
He was then required to do a PCR test in the lab - which came out negative.
This made him realize that this was a False Positive case, and he still had to go into isolation and play from somewhere else.
What actually happened is that some of the players played on the stage of the studio and some played elsewhere where they have higher level computers with a very fast internet connection.
This created a situation of inequality between the teams and Riot were forced to stop the games on 13 October.
(Photo: Official Website, Riot Games)
(Photo: Official Website, Riot Games)
Finally, on October 15 after Riot tried to reach an understanding with the teams and after the players expressed their dissatisfaction with the situation clearly created on social media, Riot were forced after failing to deal with the many problems created by the corona tests and server interest to stop the tournament and postpone it Until further notice.
Since then, we have not officially heard anything from Riot, but the players did talk in their streams and on Twitter about the tournament.
Opinions were divided, some said much of the blame was on the state of California and its laws regarding the isolation and limitations of the Corona, and that Riot was actually handcuffed and could not do too much, and some blamed the company for unprofessional planning and better conduct and some distance vision could have prevented From such problems happen in the first place.
(Photo: Official Website, Riot Games)
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