Copenhagen Games 2018: The justified salt compilation
Copenhagen Games have long been the flagship esport event in Denmark annually. It's three days of BYOC tournaments for an array of esports titles draws in scores of competitors from the region and around the globe.
While most every event experiences a few bumps in the road, varying from personal quarrels, match delays, or any number of the vast production issues that can occur, Copenhagen Games 2018 took the cake as the most disfunctional event we've seen in some time.
Things started to fall apart rapidly from the get-go, as a lack of communication from Copenhagen Games admins led to HLTV canceling coverage of the BYOC portion of the CS:GO tournament:
Admist the coverage-less BYOC, many players began to point out grossly haphazard infrastructure flaws that some attributed to server issues, as well as safety:
For a tournament organizer who's been at this for well over ten years now, these kinds of mishaps and shoddy setup mistakes should be long behind them. Yet somehow, they endure.
It may have been telling that connection issues were on the horizon as Copenhagen Games admins decided to do a stress test, not days prior to the event, but 30 minutes prior to the BYOC beginning.
Admins would later go on to claim the event had fallen victim to a professional-grade DDoS attack that was affecting their network, but surely it couldn't have been due to running near 100 servers with several hundred users overloading it, right?
While some of these mistakes and poor setup decisions slipped under the radar for many, the most egregious of mishandlings that players spoke volumes about were the match delays.
Casper "cadiaN" Møller was one of the more notable figures to vent his dismay when Rogue's matches had been delayed over eight hours.
Kinguin player and fan-favorite Wiktor "TaZ" Wojtas posted similar complaints on Facebook around the same time while taking advantage of the delays to hit the gym.
Countless attendees voiced similar complaints, some even requesting their money back:
Some of the mystery behind the delays was revealed as The Imperial, one of the many teams in attendance, Tweeted out their archaic paper map veto. With so many free online tournament bracket websites available, it's curious that Copenhagen Games opted to use a system that is easily lost track of.
From server issues to the network dropping out "every 30 seconds", Allen "AnJ" Jensen of Tricked, summed up his Copenhagen Games experience with this short quip:
As was stated prior, no event is without it's faults, but the Copenhagen Games really set themselves up for blunder after blunder from the get go, and fans seldom forget — especially when the issues occur with the same amount of certainty each year as the event itself.
