i53 The Good The Bad and The Ugly

Comment

The Good

Groups Scheduling

The groups were well scheduled, ran on time and without many hiccups. As they should do.

VexstaR

It’s great to see an up coming UK team that has been playing a lot online and practicing hard come second at LAN. Hopefully we will see this lineup stick together, improve and post a good placing at epicLAN and then i54.

Casting

Kyan1te and Chewwy did a great job throughout the weekend streaming upper bracket games and the final. For the first iseries final that Chewwy has casted in CSGO he did a great job and I would personally love to see this duo come back next LAN and be even better. It would be great if they could cast even more games in the upper bracket next LAN.

Up and Coming Teams

It’s great to see the UK scene growing a little and having some great up and coming talent. The teams that should be proud of their LAN and working on improving for next LAN are: VexstaR, 2S2P, RASTA.B2G and ALL4. It’d be great to see the same lineup next LAN getting an even better finish.

The Bad

Casting GOTV at the Final

There’s nothing wrong with casting the GOTV stream for the final, it’s great for the online stream and would be completely fine for watching live if the teams weren’t there. But, if you introduced sound cancelling headphones for both teams you can cast the game live and attract more viewers at the event. It ruined the match when you heard Infused shout when the stream was mid round because that meant that Infused either won the round that had just started or the next. For a better final atmosphere and to attract more viewers at the event introduce sound cancelling headphones. It will improve the final 10 fold.

Grand Final Format

A best of three with the advantage of vetoing first if you won the upper bracket is ridiculous. VexstaR must have hated the admins after that one. The format needs to change. It should be a best of five with a one map advantage for the upper bracket winner.

Prize Pool

Now for a 32 team tournament, a prize pool of £4,000 isn’t a lot. Especially when a ticket is £97 each. This means that of the £15,520 maximum that the tickets sold to the CSGO community not even a third of that was put up as prize money. Obviously you can buy the tickets for £75 in early bird, this would make the minimum ticket takings £12,000. Enough to have at least a five, six or seven thousand pound prize pool surely. This can be increased by giving the UK event more coverage, us, HLTV, TheDailyDot, CSGOLounge etc. Entice the sponsors Multiplay, increase awareness and coverage, it’s going to benefit everyone.

Seating

We need a CSGO section, and not a small half a hall section. The Multiplay Seat Picker makes you put in a game you will be playing at the event, so make a section for CSGO that only people who have selected CSGO can sit in. Also, the full size of Lounge One would be big enough to fit the CSGO community in. This will make adminning easier and reduce possible delays, such as the upper bracket still being played at 3:30am. The admins can then just go over and get people on the server and reduce breaks. For a winter LAN, 32 teams is a lot. CSGO is growing and iseries need to accommodate it.

Lack of EU Teams

There were a few EU players at this event, but not nearly as many as there could be. To attract EU teams, and top level EU teams too, you need to both post a higher prize pool and set up a quality PC hire service. If EU teams start attending a UK LAN it will improve the UK skill, improve awareness for UK LANs and post bigger stream numbers, all helping Multiplays revenue, so there’s no excuse not to do this.

Lack of Admins

However hard Vicious might try, he can not admin a large CSGO tournament all by himself. There needs to be a team of 3-5 admins that can manage, schedule and seed a tournament well.

FM Toxic

The strongest team in the UK for multiple LANs didn’t perform this LAN. Third is decent but not what we expected from this team. They also were losing a lot of rounds to lesser known teams, for example 16-9 against uFrag. This could have been because they weren’t playing in the halls but I feel like Toxic didn’t have the LAN they could have had.

The Ugly

The Seedings

After much talk about our unofficial seedings I felt we had seeded this correctly, however the official seedings were completely different. Teams like ours and SUKS were seeded above teams like NotEvenGlobal, ALL4 and CAZ eSports. While teams like Perilous Fury weren’t even seeded.

Not Even Global Crumbling

15-6 up against TLR on Mirage and the Not Even Global team manage to lose in overtime.

No Demos Again

i52 all the demos were corrupt, i53 autorecord doesn’t work and there aren’t any demos unless you manually told GOTV to record or recorded a demo yourself. A way around this would have been telling the teams to record the demo themselves, use the ESL plugin or eBot.

Communication

If you didn’t go to the CSGO meeting then you are in the dark pretty much the whole of LAN. You can guess the IRC channel and cf-event if it isn’t your first event but if it is you’re doomed. When you sign up to buy your ticket for LAN you should give your phone number which should be used by the admins to send prompts to team leaders, for example ‘your game starts in 10 minutes, join up to server #11’.

Tickets

Multiplay ran out of tickets, this lead to teams not having enough tickets to take the full five lineup, created mix teams of just people who were at the event and pissed off the entire UK CSGO scene. A simple email from Multiplay saying ‘hey guys we’re running low on tickets buy yours now if you want to attend’ would have been enough.

Outside Event Coverage

Large CS websites such as HLTV and CSGOLounge hate the UK scene, they simply don’t cover it at all. Which needs to change if the UK scene is to grow. This includes the fact that there wasn’t GOTV IPs or a stream for the group games, hopefully Kyan1te and Chewwy stream some group games next LAN too.

Adam

Author

Adam

Adam is the owner of BC-GB, find him on Twitter. BC-GB is the place to get CSGO tips, news and blog.

Up Next

Related Posts

Discussion about this post