Americas RMR plagued by coach headset issues
The beginning of the Americas RMR struggled as shipping delays caused Liga ACE to scramble, looking for alternative solutions in the days leading up to the event. A massive workers' strike in Germany meant necessary equipment for the RMR was delayed, pushing equipment testing to later times.
Liga ACE were looking to use soundproof headsets and servers from Germany for the event in Monterrey. After it became evident that the equipment would not arrive on time, the company immediately sought a solution by acquiring new servers locally and deciding to use HyperX Cloud II headsets for all players. It also necessitated an adjustment to the location of teams so that they would be on opposite sides of the ballroom where they could not possibly hear one another.
The solution seemed to work in theory, but coaches quickly noticed that they were unable to effectively communicate during timeouts, with some noting that the microphones for their own headsets sometimes did not work at all. It is unclear if this issue is due to the change in headsets and servers, or is a separate isolated problem concerning the connectivity to Teamspeak.
In order to get around the ineffective headsets, coaches would have to take their own headset off, borrow a player's, and then speak into their mic during a tactical pause.
This is not isolated to any single coach. There are videos captured that show Fluxo head coach Wilton "zews" Prado needing to perform this workaround, among other coaches. Others like Kory "SEMPHIS" Friesen have told Dust2.us that they hesitated to call a timeout simply because they didn't know if they could talk, or exactly how they would talk to his players without potentially violating a rule; this was specifically an issue during the Nouns vs BESTIA match.
According to HLTV, a BLAST statement said that "TeamSpeak on Thursday had to be manually managed by our League Ops Team on the ground due to some issues," which was apparently resolved on Friday. "On the Americas headsets, this is news to us. Those headsets are brand new and we have an automated mic system that allows coaches to speak to players during timeouts ect, but will look into this further."
It is entirely possible that human error played a factor into the first day issues, but there has been no confirmation that coaches exploited any potential such faults.
