ESWC Day 3

The day started at 7am, even earlier than yesterday, since we had been kicked out of the press area a tad sooner than we’d like, and because ESWC said the matches would start as early as 10am and we still have a lot of HLTV to setup. Naz and I got up early and left Spand at the room so he could go to the store when it opened and bring us some food. We reached the Palais Omnisport at 8am, one hour before the press was allowed in, so we had a hard time convincing the French ESWC staff that we really did have a purpose inside. Finally Crimy helped us out and we got a tour of the backstage admin area, as well as a head start on the HLTV so we could have it all ready. Oh btw, the trip to the event was again by bus, and I am proud to say that we did not walk very far today as we even managed to catch the bus back, more on that later.

Anyways, after 30 minutes or so our HLTV was about ready to be connected, and everything seemed to work, so I setup our GeoMaster software that makes sure that clients are forwarded to the best possible HLTV servers, without them having to do a whole lot. But then the problems began, 10am came and went, and no matches were to be found, and more and more people were hammering HLTV.org to see if there were some ips, this of course resulted in the site coming to a grinding halt, but with some extra caching the problem was almost gone at the end of the day. And after 1½ hour the first matches started too, most of the matches were just with huge favorite teams against inferior opponents, nothing much to say about that, I think almost all favorites made it through to the 2nd group stage. During the day the matches started running quite regularly, and it was turning into quite a day, and I even met Nostra - excellent! 

During the day something funny happened though, as we had the top teams going by us all the time, rarely anyone took the time to interview them, while the female teams were getting filmed all the time. Seriously, is this what pro CS is coming to? Looks before skills? Come on… Anyways fuck it, if people want to spectate crappy CS just because a girl is behind the keyboard, I say let them…

The else positive day ended quite annoying, with us getting kicked out of the press area at 21:30, leaving us without chance to upload any demos even though we had just gotten them all transferred to the webserver, they will be up first thing in the morning though.

All in all a great day, with a lot of work, but also a lot of hits on the webpage, and hopefully happy sponsors. Oh while I remember, what the hell is up with French toilets? I do not consider myself that big, and when I can hardly exit the damn thing, something is horribly wrong - I wonder if there are any kinds of design schools in France at all.