Ramona Azween · @RamonaAzween
10th Nov 2018 from TwitLonger
My thoughts on ANSARA FEAR CSGO and Malaysia Esports.
I decided to pen this after chatting with many of the players attending ANSARA FEAR CSGO SEA Grand Finals. This is strictly my personal thoughts on what happened and what can be improved on.
To begin with, I qualified through the Malaysian qualifiers last month with my team, Sphynx. From what I know, all other regional tournaments ended around the same time as ours. Here’s where the problems start. The flight tickets for the international teams were only booked and delivered 24 hours before the time they were due to fly, which is absolutely ridiculous. They had very vague news about when they were flying and where they were staying, and to make matters worse, they had to find their own way to their accommodation without help from the tournament organisers. Communication between the oganisers and the players was very poor. Imagine the confusion and apprehension all the teams must have felt, a day before the tournament they weren’t even sure they had tickets or a place to stay.
This is an international tournament, players are coming into our country and receiving our hospitality, I just feel like certain standards weren’t met. I know from my other CSGO friends in professional teams that international tournaments where people are flown in, have VERY high standards for player care and comfort. They have people tagged to each team to take care of their needs and also act as a go between for players and organisers. Small details are taken care of by this liaison individual assigned to the team, such as picking them up from the airport, providing the scheduling details, ensuring they have food to eat, getting them to the venue and back to their homes safely, especially considering that it’s teams of 5-6 girls in a foreign country. There is a need to have people who they can turn to for their concerns. There has to be sort of standard operating procedure regarding player care for future tournaments, if we truly want to be the Esports hub of South East Asia. I mean, this hardly affected me because I live in Malaysia and getting to the venue was not an issue.
The tournament itself was planned poorly. A combination of tech problems, poor stage location, scheduling mistakes, created one of the biggest messes I’ve ever been part of. For starters, all players were made to arrive at the venue at 8.30 am, regardless of whatever time their game was, and they had to go there themselves, without help from the organisers. I feel like this is so easily avoided, by chartering buses at set times to take players to the venue and back home, organisers could make sure all the players would arrive or be back on time, and they did not have to sit around waiting more than 12 hours just to hear that they would not even play on the first day due to delays.
WHY would you make the players sit around in an area that has no player lounge, no place to calm down and relax away from the stage, to be able to prepare for competitive gaming? We had to wait for an unbelievable amount of time just to play. I understand that tech issues are sometimes unavoidable and because of that, other factors become really important. Players need to know roughly what time they are expected to play, and they need a place to wait and prepare. It doesn’t have to be super exclusive like a whole room with bean bags and TVs and candy, it just needs to be a cordoned off area with enough space for the other teams waiting to play to just sit down and relax. If there is no lounge for the players, the least organisers could do is, NOT make all teams come so early, and provide us with only 10 PCs. Everyone already knows that with 10 PCs, playing a Best of 3, you have potentially a game that could last anywhere from 2 to 3 hours, and only 2 teams/1 match can be played at a time. Despite all that, every team appeared on time even though they are fully aware that there was no way all of them were going to play at 8.30 am, a testament to the professionalism of the teams. This just reiterates my point earlier on about having a better schedule created by the organisers. These players are going into a high pressure situation to perform in front of a crowd of people, and they have the added stress of not knowing what time their game is going to start or what was going on. If we take a look at the way traditional sports competitions are run, the players are performers, and to ensure that the tournament receives ample attention,
we have to make sure that the players can perform at their best. Being an Esports hub, I think it’s important to consider that the players are a critical part of the “team” (which is the combination of organisers, production and players) that draws the crowd, and their care, comfort and of course safety should be paramount.
This is the bottom-line, we had a horrible tournament experience. Problems after problems came up, starting from impossible scheduling, to tech issues that could have possibly been avoided, taking long hours to resolve the said tech issues, having a venue with conditions that were shocking. For the first time in my life, I was subject to the weather when playing a PC game. It was ridiculously hot, and when it started raining, we weren’t fully sheltered from it and could feel raindrops while we were playing. This is also a safety issue for the players, as the electrical equipment was exposed to the water as well. I believe I speak for many of the Esports athletes here when I say that we put in hours of training, especially since winning the qualifier a month before this tournament to give our best. Like other athletes before us, we sacrificed our time, juggled work/school commitments to give Malaysia CSGO a good name, and all we expect is a better run tournament, so that we can give our all. The amount of mental stress and physical exhaustion that players went through waiting for hours is incredibly draining, and the players can’t perform at their full potential. What’s worse, is that we lose the attention of the crowds/livestream with all these issues and delays. If you think the players are confused and tired, think about the spectators as well. They had no idea what was going on and there was no way we would be able to hold their attention. The casters themselves had to come over and help out because they couldn’t resolve the problems, which feels like there was no one taking charge of the situation, and everyone was their own boss. At one point, the admins left the decision to the players themselves. All these glaring issues were overshadowed by the achievement of being the largest ever Malaysian Esports tournament.
After all that has been said, this is by no means a personal attack on anyone. The admins weren’t rude at any point and I’m sure the tech team did as much as they could. For the community to grow, for Malaysia Esports to grow, the tournaments cannot be run like this. There needs to be a conscious effort to improve and learn from the mistakes of the past, as well as learning from already established organisations around the world. The thing is I myself can’t change anything to make this happen but I am hoping this plea to the organisers and powers that be will be heard. I’ve been competing for 15 years, and it’s sad to see that the quality of the tournaments since I’ve started has not improved much. The same problems that had plagued us then have come up again and again and it’s a cycle that we need to get out of. All I have is hope, a hope that someone has the vision to drive the growth of Malaysian Esports in the right direction.
Yours sincerely,
Ramona “GFi” Azween