You’d think that the WCG Singapore , being a national level gaming event, should possess a wealth of experience in organizing and holding gaming tournaments and events. It’s sad to say that they are just as prone to common mistakes and errors as any small time events held by cyber cafes.
First of all they cannot even ensure that their hardware runs the game properly. How do you expect any one to take your organization seriously when a PC crashed every five minutes in a national level tournament? Even worse is the fact that there is absolutely no contingency plan at all. All that the “officials” could offer was a weak “erm, can you restart the computer?”. No shit, Sherlock. Of course you have to reset the computer when it shows the blue screen of death. I don’t see how else you can fix that.
The professional way of doing it would have been to actually have people stress test the machines BEFORE the games commence, like a day or two before the actual event. It’s not too hard to find a bunch of eager kids to play computer games when you provide them access to free hardware. At least you’d find out about the graphic card over heating problem wayyyyyy before all your DoTA, CS, Need For Speed games start crashing like the recent share markets. When more time is spent on circumventing the various technical problems than the actual game play itself, you know you are in deep shit. Finally, hire some real qualified people who actually know how to troubleshoot crashing PCs, instead of having a bunch of feeble “I don’t know what the fuck is going on, so just reset and hope it doesn’t happen again.” people hanging around doing nothing.
Ok let’s talk about the “Officials”. They should just take off their lanyards and handed them over to me because as a spectator I obviously know more about organizing DotA events than they did. They didn’t even know which version of the map to play. Some players were told to play 6.52e and some were playing 6.53, even the officials were telling each other that “eh you let them play the wrong map”. Made me feel like as if I was at some dingy cybercafe tournament where the organizers knew little about the game. Yes I know the difference between 6.53 and 6.52e is not that significant, but there were many teams that picked Specter and Terrorblade. Specter’s dispersion AoE was increased in 6.53 and Terrorblade’s movement speed was buffed as well. Not to mention that the buggy river rune model was fixed in 6.53 and remained semi-broken in 6.52e. The differences were there and it was only professional to make sure that everyone were playing the same map.
Further more the officials allowed the teams to decide when to save the game for DoTA(because the PCs crashed so often, they have to rely on save/load to avoid rematch). This might not seem to be such a big issue to the unaware spectators, however it means a world of difference to the players. For example, if I save a game at an intense moment (knowing or unknowingly, of courses) it might have nasty effects on the flow of the game.
Case in point, the onstage DoTA game showed this team who saved while fighting Roshan. Right after they killed Roshan, their opponents found them and killed their Aegis carrier. Normally this is seen as a triumph for the opponent because they have successfully removed the reincarnating advantage of the Aegis. However, the game crashed soon after this and the teams reloaded the game from the time when they were fighting Roshan. Of course, this time round they KNEW that the opposition was coming their way and were ready to engage them. The resulting engagement benefited much from this knowledge since the element of surprise was lost. The Aegis bearer died just as before, but he and his team mates killed 2 heroes before dying and resurrecting. I cannot stress more on how this changed the flow of the game, because from an evenly matched game it suddenly turned in favour of the other team, all because of a BADLY TIMED SAVE. Sure enough the team took advantage of this and broke the mid lane soon after. Had the referees took charge of game saving, this could have been easily avoided by saving only after major battles have already taken place, and not before one is about to happen.
Moving on to the commentators. What is a sporting event without a commentator who incessantly rant about what happened in the game thirty seconds ago with such a thick accent that you have absofuckinglutely no idea what he is mumbling about? Yes that’s what happened today during the DoTA match on stage. Sure we need commentators to spice up the event, but for God’s sake please get one that speaks comprehensibly. Actually I prefer someone who speaks with a local accent, or at least speak in a way that most Singaporean gamers can identify with, after all it’s the Singapore WCG, not the British Council WCG.
I will probably be there again for the Dota finals on Sunday, I just hope that they would have already resolved all the technical difficulties by then and make things less painful for everyone.
