XSE Pro League's organisation is a disgrace to Counter-Strike

This might come over as harsh, but what we’ve seen from XSE Pro League so far has been utterly shocking.

It’s an event so bad that comparisons have been made to the worst event in CS history, Gaming Paradise 2015. That event at one point had no PCs, had players get their passports confiscated, and never paid prize money. You probably see why those comparisons are pretty loaded then.

If you haven’t been watching, I’ll do my best to give you a summary of the drama that’s unfolded so far.

Something that’s worth noting here is that most of the staff at this event appears to be basically free labor. This Reddit post by u/GoodLilia0 translates a Chinese post and chat logs going into how the staff are volunteers. I recommend you read the post for more details that they added, but people like assistant referees, network engineers, and assistant observers are all unpaid at a $1,000,000 event.

Some of these people are probably paying out of pocket to stay in the area to work for free.

Now, all of that aside, I’m not an expert on Chinese work culture. So again, I recommend you read the post for more detail.

Onwards to day 1, where things immediately went wrong. The first games faced hours-long delays, for reasons we’ll go into in a second. Logically fans began demanding refunds for the wait. The organizer offered free mousepads as compensation, which many fans then wanted to claim.

They then found out those mouse pads were actually being sold, just for 50% off.

The reason the delay was so troublesome they had to offer mousepads is that it wasn’t just one issue. The issues ranged from PCs not having CS installed, to desks being different and wrong, to accounts being hacked, and more. All of this meant the day ended at 3 AM local time.

To make matters worse, day 2 was more of the same.

For starters, the transformer apparently exploded, leaving the entire arena blacked out. This happened in the middle of 9z’s game, shockingly, causing further delays in the games.

Also, remember that hacked account? That was Magnojez’s, and they found out how that happened.

It turns out the PCs at the practice area had malware installed. You can’t make this up. Keyloggers, Trojans, apparently World of Warcraft? That last part is what zorte said anyway, but he might have been trolling.

Though at this point, it’s more likely true than false.

All of these factors have culminated in one of the worst tournament watching experiences of my CS life.

The audio usually sounds awful and is regularly overlaid with the audio from the Chinese feed. There were even WhatsApp-like notifications going off on stream on day 1. And along with hearing poorly, if a kill wasn’t caught by the unpaid observer, there likely won’t ever be a replay of it either.

The fact that this event has VRS consequences is a disgrace to the game of Counter-Strike. Valve have to find a way to make it so people can't just muster up a prize pool and get the best pros in the world at an event that's actively putting them at risk. In this case with spyware on the PCs.

The only hope we have left is that it improves somewhat over the coming days, and that the playoffs bring an actually interesting product.

I’m not holding my breath.