$7,500 CS:GO Winter Warfare tournament cancelled
The Gaming Stadium hosted a $7,500 CS:GO event at the weekend, entitled CSGO Winter Warfare, at the Element Hotel by Westin, in Burnaby, BC. Or at least they attempted to, as it turns out the event did not go to plan.
It wasn't too much longer from that tweet that Ricky "Smiley" Sandoval announced the LAN had been cancelled. Smiley was competing at the LAN with a mix called The Bangers, featuring fellow Canadians Victor "cardiac" Kwan, Ellis "els" Clay, Robbie "ANewOldPerson" T., and Kory "SEMPHIS" Friesen. We reached out to Smiley, who told us:
The Gaming Stadium hosted a $7,500 non byoc lan, was suppose to start at 10am doors opened at 11am, after that every one set up and the internet wasnt working then whole rows of pcs just kept shutting off. So they are trying for hours. They get the internet working and matches start getting played but then pcs kept shutting down mid match. Then they fix the power but then the internet is now not working for some people fast forward to 5:30pm [PST] they just call everyone to the front and announce they are going to cancel it. My team didnt play 1 match.
Smiley's teammate at the event SEMPHIS agreed with Smiley's description of the events, as well as stating that the "fuse box got fried and knocked out the power." A reply to another Tweet from Smiley wishing the organizers well in the future is, so far, the only official written notice the event ended prematurely.
On behalf of the organizers, caster Brandon "MLGAnakin" Darby revealed onstream that the event had been cancelled due to a number of issues, and revealed that the attending teams had been given $400, double the cost of the tickets. There's a portion after the clip below, which can be seen on the stream VOD, that stated it was a combination of issues and was "not quite the hardware, more of the venue not being able to support the computers as well as the internet" as reasons for the cancellation.
We reached out to The Gaming Stadium for comment, and as of publication they had not provided answers to questions offered.
UPDATE: Spiro Khouri, VP Sales & Marketing at The Gaming Stadium told us:
The main issue we ran into was the venue did not have the power to supply what we required. Around 1pm we had a bank of PC's shut off. From that point on we did our best to split the power but it continued to be an issue. At the start we were using six different breakers and by the end we had access to eight. It still was not enough.
We spoke with their [Venue] team early in the process about the power required. We were ensured by multiple people at the venue that what we required for power would be available. Initially we were going to have 16 teams and 80 pc's for this event. After some internal discussion we cut that down to 12 teams and 60 pc's. We felt by cutting 20% of the pc's we would definitely have the power as the venue was sure they could power 80. As you saw/heard this wasn't the case and even 60 pc's was not doable.
We tested everything we could. From a PC perspective we personally installed steam and CSGO on each computer as well as tested them all prior to the event and found no issues. At the venue we tested internet and the bandwidth (50mbps up, 75mbps down) was sufficient for a CS tournament. The one thing we couldn't test was power as we relied on the venue. We let them know what was required and we were assured it would be fine.
Each team paid $200 to enter our tournament. We gave each team $400 back, so double their buy in. We are also now planning to have CS:GO be the first event at our Stadium when it opens in April and the 12 teams who registered will get first right of refusal to sign up for that tournament. We also bought pizza and drinks for everyone at dinner.
Our priority was to make sure the players were taken care of and understood. At the event we kept the players informed as to what was happening. When we made the decision to cancel the event we had all of the teams come together and we made the announcement. Since the players knew what happened and that was our priority at the time we didn't feel the need to put out an official statement.
The venue staff were great in helping us try and solve issues. Although the power was not what we required we do not want it to sound like we were throwing them under the bus. At the end of the day the responsibility lies with us and we need to do better.
We learned, among many other things, that there definitely is a need for a dedicated esports facility in Vancouver so things like this do not happen in the future.
