Hammers Kirby · @followkirby
1st Apr 2017 from TwitLonger
OW Pit match vs Dignitas
I wanted to go back on the events that happened today before & during our match vs Dignitas, in the OW Pit Championship.
Around 18:45, 30 mins before the scheduled start of the game, we were contacted by tournament admins to see if we were okay with the match being delayed and played as last EU match of the day, therefore after Misfits vs. ex-aTTaX (who were both fine with playing earlier). The only reason that was given to us for the delay was that Dignitas were having "trouble with 1 of the players that [wasn't] here for some reason". But despite it messing up our schedule for the evening, we were willing to wait if there was no other solution.
https://gyazo.com/e903ff56dd5f01caf520a5ee4c1ed20d
The match started around 20:30, we played the first half of Hollywood, where we attacked and got the payload close to the end of map, without any technical issue. Right as the 2nd half was about to begin, fischer (one of our DPS players) started to have big lag spikes & rubberbanding ingame, before eventually disconnecting. He was unable to log back in, until trying on his smurf account "JustLubeItUp" but then again had lag/rubberbanding, before being disconnected from Battle.Net once more. This was purely a BNet issue, as his connection to TeamSpeak was perfectly fine (normal ping, no packet loss).
Here is a clip of him attempting to reconnect to BNet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saVL--kFr7Q
And here's what he was experiencing ingame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slYRabSTgiw (notice the ammo count & the reload animation happening multiple times; aswell as the huge freeze).
And despite what was happening to one of our player, not to mention the fact that the entirety of (EU?) BNet servers went down less than an hour before (https://clips.twitch.tv/AlertAnimatedCodHassaanChop); we were told that we would be disqualified if we did not continue the match after the allowed 15mins of pause. We would've been more than happy to lose Hollywood by default, and play the remaining 1 (or 2) map once the issues were solved. Considering you gave our opponent over an hour's leeway for whatever reason, it seems completely unfair to force us to continue this match with a substitute player, ChipSa, who was not prepared for the match (or even to play) and yet played admirably.
Our performance in this tournament hasn't been stellar but with both Dignitas and us at 1-2 records at the time, this match was crucial to determine the last team to qualify for playoffs out of Group B. Dignitas is a good team, so there is no guarantee the match would've gone a different way if fischer would've been able to play; but we do feel like we were deprived of the opportunity to compete in good and fair conditions.
This entire situation could've been avoided if:
1. PIT organizers cared a bit more about the competitive integrity of their tournament.
2. Blizzard gave us the opportunity to compete on a tournament realm, instead of being at the whim of Battle.net.
3. OW had a resume from replay feature.
We can no longer qualify for the PIT playoffs, but will still do our best in our last match tomorrow vs Misfits. GLHF, GGs to Dignitas