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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Cyber X Gaming Championships Degenerate To Disaster 58

Posted by simoniker from the litany-of-problems dept.
Thanks to gotFrag for their article summing up the problems at this weekend's Cyber X Gaming Championships in Las Vegas. The prize-festooned pro gaming event ended up degenerating into "an epic Greek tragedy", according to gotFrag, with "a lack of tournament preparation... no tournament schedule for every game except Warcraft III... and an understaffing at the event." Even after volunteers stepped in to ameliorate the chaos, the Counter-Strike tournament became uncompletable when "the limited amount of bandwidth at the event was unable to support the required number of Steam sessions." The tournament unceremoniously ended when "Power was turned off in all the outlets in the main area... [and] the entire event came to a screeching halt, including all ongoing games", and the majority of tournaments ended unfinished. Blue's News also has an article linking to several accounts of the problems.
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Cyber X Gaming Championships Degenerate To Disaster More

Cyber X Gaming Championships Degenerate To Disaster

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  • Amazing. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "the limited amount of bandwidth at the event was unable to support the required number of Steam sessions."

    Wow. Tell me again why product activation is a good idea? Who's ever going to want to host a large Counterstrike lan party again if simply trying to run the game causes such horrific problems?

    • Re:Amazing. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Monday January 12, 2004 @03:54PM (#7955592) Journal
      " Who's ever going to want to host a large Counterstrike lan party again if simply trying to run the game causes such horrific problems?"

      People that know what they're doing, I'd assume.
      A few weeks ago there was the CPL, easily twice as many CS players, lots more if you coun't the BYOC. CPL had no problems with steam, and everything ran smoothly. All you need to do is plan properly, maybe even plan your event so that valves top employees won't be busy at CES.
      • maybe even plan your event so that valves top employees won't be busy at CES.

        After I have purchased software, why should it matter where the employees of the software company are? I paid for it. Its a good thing I don't have to keep track of everyone involved with id, Nerve, Grey Matter, Splash Damage and Activision everytime I want to play a game of Wolfenstein: ET. Hell, that game was free. Wait, wasn't CS free once upon a time? With Steam et al, I can't think of a game that is less free (speech
        • No, I just read gotFrag often and am tired of these kiddies bashing steam for things that arn't its problem.
          Steam has plenty of problems, but you shouldn't blame everything on it.

          CS has always been a free mod, and still is. There was only one point when it wasn't, and that was during steams beta test (when anyone that wanted to could sign up for a steam account and play cs without a cdkey of any kind)

          As a user, you don't have to keep track of valve at all. But if you're going to give away $300,000+ in cas
          • If you don't like it, delete halflife and reinstall off of your cd. Don't update, because you didn't buy updates, you bought whats on the cd.

            You are half right in your conclusions troll. I have long since uninstalled the programs, pretty much as soon as I heard their plans for Steam. So about that part you are correct.

            You are wrong in that I am owed the updates. The product was not bug free when it was shipped. I am still waiting for numerous bug fixes, well I was waiting for them until Steam came t

            • Re:Amazing. (Score:3, Informative)

              by fireduck ( 197000 )
              So if I dont have Steam on any of my PC's why do I care? 4 friends of mine were in the CoD competition and am sad that they got screwed by Valve's system. That's all.

              how exactly did Steam ruin the CoD tournament, seeing as how Call of Duty was developed by Infinity Ward (i.e., not Valve) and does not use Steam?

              Ripping on Steam for a failing of the tournament organizers is extremely shortsighted. A power outage can take out a whole event, sure. But certainly not an online service used by only 1 of the
              • Someone responded to your other post below about this. It robbed bandwidth for everyone in attendance shutting down the entire event. I don't know how familiar you are with computers, but in layman's terms...the stuff on the screen wouldn't look right and the dudes couldn't hit stuff. Now, I guess they could have just shut down the CS part of the tournament, which is what eventually happened, but that still leaves the question...why are you so quick to apologize for Valve's decisions? If CS were not par
                • Okay- maybe I am a moron...or I simply don't understand the setup they had there.

                  It seems like the Valve/Steam stuff had to use the Internet to get out, and download the Counterstrike stuff.

                  But couldn't the other games just use internal networks, not attached to the outside, and their own servers?

                  A few times at work we've used our development servers (completeley isolated from the rest of the world) to run Americas Army games. No cheaters!
            • Ask any of them about the Chris Hill asking for a CoD disk to install on tourney machines. Its really not steams fault, they could of had the competition sans network (minus any form of spectating and broadcasting, not sure if CoD has that yet but cs normally has HLTV and a shoutcast with commentators).

              You arn't owed any bug fixes legally, morally sure, but not legally. You buy whats on the disk and thats what you own, just like buying MS Word 5 doesn't warrant a copy of Office 2k3. HL is and always was fu
            • Someone who has a different opinion than yours is not automatically a troll, asshat.

              And you can still get your HL updates sans steam, via someplace like FilePlanet if nothing else.
      • That may be true, but they were most likely running the LAN (non-steam) version if they had no problems with that many players.

  • Steam strikes again (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alyandon ( 163926 ) on Monday January 12, 2004 @03:17PM (#7955449) Homepage
    "the limited amount of bandwidth at the event was unable to support the required number of Steam sessions."

    Many people predicted that this very thing would become and issue and now we have seen it come to pass. So what is the solution now for tournaments? Rent a T3 for an external internet connection when a T1 used to suffice!?!?!? You can kiss low budget HL-based game tournaments goodbye until this problem is addressed.

    gg Valve

    • Re:Steam strikes again (Score:5, Insightful)

      by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Monday January 12, 2004 @03:49PM (#7955556) Journal
      Buy the lan center edition of Steam? Download a full cache to one machine and mirror it across the entire network? how about INSTALLING STEAM BEFORE EVERYONE GETS THERE?
      This wasn't in any way valves fault, cXg should of planned ahead, theres been an update every wednesday for months now, and they act as if it was some big suprise. Next time plan ahead and get everything installed and working, instead of getting up on the loud speaker asking for a Call of Duty cd because they don't even have it installed.
      • Buy the lan center edition of Steam?

        Woah woah woah, wait a second here. Buy a special version from Valve? I don't know about you, but I have serious problems with that. Why should one have to pay Valve in order to use their game offline(in a condition that used to be free no less)? Unless the game is internet-based in nature(MMORPGs), there is no reason one should need(to buy) any additional software to play it offline.
        • "Why should one have to pay Valve in order to use their game offline"

          Because you make serious amounts of money off of it?
          This isn't for mom and dads all night cs party, its for places that charge hourly rates of playing, or for places that charge large entrance fees(lan competitions).
    • If you're running an in-house tournament, why not just run a few steam servers on the 10/100 ethernet network you already have? Better yet, you can leave that for gaming bandwidth and just press some 20c cds with the latest drivers, patches, etc. and pass them around.

    • Re:Steam strikes again (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rhakka ( 224319 )
      do your Low Budget HL based game tournaments usually have 80 teams of players trying to d/l at the same time?

      If they tried to run a LAN of this size without an ISP sponsor, they fucked up hard.

  • The first time I read this: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 12, 2004 @03:48PM (#7955552)
    an epic GEEK tragedy
  • This article shows that demand is definetly outstripping supply... big time. My guess is that we'll shortly start seeing events sponsered and run by large companies with the large cash flow and organisation skills required...

  • Valve and Steam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xTown ( 94562 ) on Monday January 12, 2004 @04:00PM (#7955635)
    According to the Inquirer, Valve released a patch in the middle of the event [theinquirer.net], and BAM! You can kiss all that bandwidth goodbye.

    • Re:Valve and Steam (Score:5, Informative)

      by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Monday January 12, 2004 @04:04PM (#7955697) Journal
      Because the Inquirer is filled with vast gaming knowledge. The update was released on wednesday, like they have been for the past... 5 or so months now. cXg just never connected the gaming machines to the internet until the day of the event(friday) causing them all to have to pull the patch then.

      • Re:Valve and Steam (Score:3, Insightful)

        by xTown ( 94562 )
        I think you're ignoring the fact that if the patch had been available outside of Steam, there wouldn't have been a problem. Sure, okay, the cXg people should have set up a lot earlier. I can see your point. But under the old system, they could have generated a few dozen CDs with the patch on and updated each machine as needed, without flooding their connection. Steam is a solution in search of a problem; it fixes something that wasn't broken.
        • C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\counter-strike.gcf
          could easily be put on a cd, or SMB share, or whatever. Update one machine, mirror it to the rest. They really should of just ghosted an installed tourney machine to other machines, rather than running around with the same disk everywhere on the day of the tourney.

  • How can this happen... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Eluding Reality ( 691589 ) on Monday January 12, 2004 @04:00PM (#7955643)
    ... when they have this [cyberxgaming.com] list of sponsors?

    Cashflow shouldn't have been a problem, so they should have been able to get a decent setup, staff etc, bet those sponsors are gonna be pissed anyway

  • Articles about CXG (Score:3, Informative)

    by waaka! ( 681130 ) on Monday January 12, 2004 @04:12PM (#7955796)
    ESReality [esreality.com] has a bunch of articles about CXG--not only commenting on how it degenerated into disaster, but also concerning how the tournaments were progressing up until the plug was pulled. Interesting reading, even if you don't know all the big names in the various games who attended the tournaments.

  • The *real reason* (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fluor2 ( 242824 ) on Monday January 12, 2004 @04:16PM (#7955860)
    Source: http://www.steampowered.com/index.php?area=news

    "For about 4 hours Thursday night, Steam service was interrupted. After that time, service continued to be slow until about 11:00 am PST today (Friday). These problems were caused by device failure on our network following a power outage. [...]"

    This power outage caused the main login-server to go off-line, thus nobody could authenticate to Steam. We all thought the loginserver was DoS'ed, but it turns out that they actually had a power-outage. Single-point-of-failure, eh, Valve?

    Anyways, Valve SHOULD have released a LAN-only option for Steam. I cannot believe that they trust the internet for big compos like this.

    As for now, I would like to say that any organizers that require Steam for their compos, should really consider downloading a hacked version of Steam that make LAN possible. It is available.

    • Re:The *real reason* (Score:3, Interesting)

      by simoniker ( 40 ) *
      I know this post is getting modded up, but the gotFrag report says:

      "By 8AM PST on Saturday, all of the goals set at 1:30AM late the previous night were accomplished... As the first Counter-Strike teams were called in and began to set-up, things were working smoothly. As more players filtered in, a problem with running Steam became more and more apparent."

      So sounds like the biggest Steam problems came after this outage was fixed?

      • Re:The *real reason* (Score:3, Interesting)

        by fireduck ( 197000 )
        regardless of whether steam was or wasn't a problem (or even should have been a problem given the suggestions of other posters in this topic):

        How in the world does Steam affect tournaments for all of the other non-steam games (q3, CoD, RtCW, ET, AA). One fubared game should not take down the rest of the event...

        From what I've read in the various linked articles, this event was run about as poorly as possible. brackets weren't even established for most of the tournaments and that's somehow to be blamed o
        • Everything in gaming is now blamed on steam.
          my fps is bad, steam sucks.
          my ping is high, steam sucks.
          my aim is bad, steam sucks.
          my arm hurts, steam sucks.
    • Anyways, Valve SHOULD have released a LAN-only option for Steam.
      Valve has said they'll be doing this, but not until after HL2 comes out (for some reason).
  • Seems like a lot of stuff I've read on this is fairly speculative or second hand information. Steam was having problems on one of the days, but didn't release an update mid-tourney. They release updates on Wednsdays, and cXg should have had everything up to date before hand. There are some other rumors floating around, such as there being no security and $100,000 worth of stuff being jacked. Apparently thats mostly BS with them only losing a few items.

    The cXg organizers just f'ed up hardcore though, seems

  • As much as I liked the original Half-Life, I sure am not buying Half-Life 2 when it'll come out. Valve has proven themselves to be total dickheads over the past year, with that piece of shit Steam, their complete refusal of porting their games to Mac and Linux, and the fact that Gabe Newell got HL2's code leaked because he's too fucking stupid to use a more secure email client than outlook express. Valve, please get a clue.
  • I was going to go to CXG but due to a lack of planning on my end I could not make it there. Personally being involved in the cs gaming community and knowing some of the CXG staff members personally as well as some attendees there are a number of events that gotfrag either didn't know about or didn't want to post about. Everyone has been talking about bandwidth issues. Yes in fact it was planed to have a T3 for the event, delay after delay they instead ended up getting a business dsl line. Somehow this was j
    • This will definately hurt the pro-gaming scene, and it really sucks. My team was going to attend, but we got bad vibes, and heard too many rumors. I was not suprised when all this went down. There were at least 8 tournaments scheduled for this event. Only 2 were completed. So don't flame valve. Warcraft3, and ut2k3 were the only events to be completed. rtcw, america's army, call of duty, and more were not completed, and some never were even started. This was not about Valve, because as someone else pointe

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