Fierce Tiger and VG.Flash comment on Asia Minor qualifier final

Turmoil continues to unfold in the Chinese scene following Kun "⁠LEo⁠" Hou's VAC ban on Saturday, which led to Fierce Tiger being disqualified from CS:GO Asia Championships. The former ViCi trio used an unknown player nicknamed "tbgirl" in the Asia Minor Chinese qualifier, and FACEIT is currently waiting on Valve to confirm if there is a connection between him and LEo.

VG.Flash experienced internet issues just before they were set to face Fierce Tiger in the grand final of the Minor qualifier. After a delay of more than hour, Fierce Tiger refused to wait any longer, and FACEIT decided to hand them the forfeit win over VG.Flash. The losing side discovered that external parties had tampered with their network connection, preventing the players from joining the server in time. Police and technical experts were contacted to investigate the matter, and both Chinese organizations have revealed their perspectives on the situation found below.

VG.Flash go into full detail regarding the recent Minor qualifier

Fierce Tiger announced their side of the story about the final match, which was set to take place on May 20 at 2pm (Chinese local time):

"1. We followed the rules set by the organizers and joined the FACEIT Asia Minor China qualifier match lobby on time.

"2. VG.Flash could not start the match on time due to unexpected issues.

"3. After communicating with the admins initially, FACEIT said we should wait 10 minutes (all chat logs with the admins are in the video provided).

"After 10+ minutes, none of the admins notified us of when we could start the match. After a while, one of VG.Flash's members came online and notified the admins that they had problems with their internet connection at their place, even after switching servers. They then asked the admins if they could be given more time to fix their issues, this occurred at 2:25pm. After learning about the situation, we understood and agreed to wait a little longer. After waiting for an extended period of time and without any further communication with us, they rescheduled the grand final to 4pm.

"We feel that we aren’t being respected and properly treated so we sent the following points to the admins:

"Yesterday in the same tournament, our opponent in the first match didn’t enter '.ready' in the specified time slot after joining the server, which caused the server to close down by itself with the opposition losing by forfeit.

"The second match versus MAX, only one of their players entered '.ready' before the match started. Therefore, the match took place as a 1v5 scenario until the end of the game. They appealed the result to the admins but they were also given the loss.

"Finally, the events of today happened, we gave VG.Flash 1 hour and 10 minutes to handle the unexpected issue. However, they delayed the match to 4pm without communicating with us beforehand. Although ‘friendship comes first, and competition comes second’, there should be no exception to the rules, we hope that FACEIT's decision is based on their rule set. In the end, the decision was made by the organizer, and we feel deeply sorry."

On the other hand, VG.Flash gave a more detailed explanation of their situation on Weibo following yesterday's initial tweets:

"1. Internet disconnection

After the map vetoes were completed, three of our VG.Flash players joined the server, and at this time the internet at our place disconnected. After a lot of retries to re-connect, we swiftly got in contact with the FACEIT admins about the situation. After the admins agreed to delay the match, we immediately moved our PCs to the house next door and borrowed their internet connection to play the match (as you can see in the video below, our players are carrying their computers over).

At the same time, the technicians arrived to check. They found out that the cable coming into our house that was in a connection hub/cabinet outside the house was specifically marked and unplugged intentionally. The technicians contacted their headquarters and told our team leader that there were some unknown people asking about our address and the internet connection layout yesterday.

2. Communication during the match

When the internet issues happened, our leader immediately got in touch with the admins. They agreed to delay the match until 4pm (as seen in the screenshots linked here). Then we moved our PCs next door to setup.

The admins said that they hope we can all display good sportsmanship to ensure the completion of the tournament at 3:15pm. All of our players then joined the server at 3:17pm but at that time there were only the 5 of us on the server (screenshot at 3:23pm shows that our team is already in the server setting up). The admins told us at 3:57pm that because we could not join on time, the opponent could not wait any longer. Therefore, we were handed the loss. We don’t understand the reason behind this considering we were already in the server.

The VG.Flash roster was created not long ago, and were given significant attention by the Chinese player base. VG.Flash is a powerful contender in the Minor qualifier and we were confident in securing our slot to the Asia Minor. The internet issues are purely unexpected and highly possible that it was done maliciously. We don’t have any reason to intentionally delay the match by creating the issues ourselves.

Many factors that caused this ending has impacted our organization and the players heavily. We are fully committed to keeping the communication up with the admins, and our circumstances are totally different than the other teams that were disqualified in the tournament. We hope that the organizers improve their online tournaments' rules and allow more tolerance for any unexpected issues during online matches. Please make the correct decision and have a rematch played, FACEIT."

Here is the English transcript in the video provided by VG.Flash (shown above):

Technician: Supposedly there should be a wire here, but he checked on your cable, pulled it out and made a mark.

Team Manager: So it was only pulled out? Then what about this wire?

Technician: Maybe it's because of this plug area.

Team Manager: So he unplugged our plug?

Technician: No, they unplugged the cable inside.

Team Manager: They unplugged the cable inside and you've already fixed it for us?

Technician: Yes.

Courtesy of /u/KaiHongTan for the Chinese to English translations in the article.