Strike #6: A long way from Bucharest to Chengdu

What should have been a simple question of logistics and integrity spiraled into a short-sighted reaction.

Strike is a (not so) regular column written by HLTV Editor-in-chief Milan "Striker" Švejda, which focuses on new realities of a Valve-regulated circuit.

First and foremost: I've been hired by PGL as talent for Masters Bucharest. The tournament organizer and the event will feature heavily in this column, and although there is nothing in our agreement that prevents me from speaking my mind, it's my ethical duty to share this for transparency.

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A few weeks ago, PGL and ESL found themselves locking horns over their two upcoming tournaments, PGL Masters Bucharest and IEM Chengdu.

The two events had been scheduled such that PGL's (October 26-November 2) was due to end the day before ESL's began (November 3-9), and this became grounds for a proxy war of sorts between the two rival TOs.

After all but two of the top teams confirmed their attendance at IEM Chengdu in early August, some of them began to explore the possibility of attending PGL Masters Bucharest as well just as the invites for the event were about to come in at the beginning of September.

The interest prompted ESL to send out a warning to the attending teams. The organizer shared its view that the scheduling of the two events made it impossible to play in both and further said that a team's withdrawal from Chengdu would result in their ban from ESL's next event, IEM Krakow.

After some back and forth between the teams and TOs, this led PGL to shorten its studio event to end on the Saturday of November 1 instead of the Sunday, to allow teams that make it to the last day of competition to travel to Chengdu in time.

Read more

PGL shortens Masters Bucharest in light of IEM Chengdu clash

The whole situation was met with what I think was a short-sighted reaction from some in the community, one exacerbated by ESL's villainous reputation.

Simple facts were being repeatedly misunderstood or misrepresented in every major thread. That was not necessarily surprising given the perception of the 'big bad duopoly,' but it was no less confusing when the situation could not be any clearer and reasonable in my view.

One simple fact is: Bar the invention of teleportation, it was physically impossible to make it from Bucharest to Chengdu in time for any team that would reach play on Sunday, i.e. the grand finalists and the third-place decider teams.

Parallels were being drawn to the situation where ESL allowed teams some leeway to travel from PGL Astana to IEM Dallas in May when that is no parallel at all. Time zones went the other way and teams could (and did) feasibly make it from Kazakhstan to the States just in time for their matches, even though it was a close call.

That is not the case with Bucharest and Chengdu — the top four teams would be guaranteed to miss the whole first day of competition, on which all 16 participating teams play.

With that simple fact in mind, let's consider what it would really mean if a team planned to attend both events under the original schedule.

Scenario #1: You make it past the quarter-finals in Bucharest and are forced to forfeit the first match in Chengdu or withdraw entirely. Either solution would hardly be acceptable for ESL, whose event would lose significant value and/or run into logistical issues with replacing a team at the last minute.

Scenario #2: You make it to the quarter-final and are forced to forfeit or throw the quarter-final match in Bucharest to make it to IEM Chengdu in time. That's not just bad for PGL and its event; it's a horrible integrity issue.

Scenario #3: You pray you don't make it far enough in Bucharest — in which case, why even attend?

Aurora and GamerLegion were the only two teams to consider this and played the game correctly. They predicted that Bucharest would have a weaker field and opted to play there instead of Chengdu, and it came with the bonus of not having to make the long trip.

I'd feel cheated if I were them. The rules of the game changed after they made the decision, where it's now possible to play in both events — yet, they were not allowed to change their minds because ESL's invites had been finalized prior to PGL's.

And it all could have been easily prevented with just a bit of foresight. It had been clear for over a year that these two events were scheduled this way and that they were taking place on separate continents, but it seems the first time PGL started looking for solutions was when they found out their invites would not be what they had hoped for.

Another common piece of misinformation was that ESL has no right to ban teams from their events, shared even by the likes of Richard Lewis and Mauisnake. This is actually explicitly allowed in Valve's Tournament Operation Requirements rulebook governing the circuit, as long as a TO fulfills the necessary transparency obligations:

ESL's rulebook already had such rules in place, as their email points out. In Valve's eyes, ESL's original wording was too vague and did not reflect their stance that the disqualification decisions should be applied consistently and not at the discretion of the TO.

That resulted in changes to both the TOR (to reflect said stance, because the previous wording didn't) and the ESL rule governing sanctions for event withdrawals while this was all happening.

And ESL are not even the only ones to have had such a rule in place. Though they never utilized it, PGL also added a similar one in the aftermath of FURIA withdrawing from their Cluj-Napoca event earlier in the year to mount pressure on the TO to put incentives in place for team organizations.

Read more

Strike #2: The big orgs won the battle of attrition, but the war is far from over

All in all, the rivalry between the two tournament organizers and the fierce competition element to the new, Valve-regulated circuit cannot be ignored.

There's always the possibility that certain scheduling decisions were made two years ago with this rivalry in mind, and that the clashes between the two TOs' circuits were by design. I certainly can't tell you otherwise for sure.

But it is far-fetched to me to imply that this situation constitutes ESL strong-arming teams, when all the organizer was doing was protecting its own event, for good reason.