EGL4 London - 29th-30th of October

So I'm here on a pay-to-use PC in a hotel and it's pretty awful internet and I can't easily open new tabs (and the spacebar is falling off) so I'll keep this as brief as possible while hopefully addressing a fair few points.

Firstly, I wasn't able to access a PC today so I couldn't keep anyone updated, but here's roughly what happened from the people I was able to talk to;

-- The PCs were ordered several weeks ago, they did not get the correct PCs or capture cards and only half of them were ever sent by the company they ordered from. Four of them did not initially work.

-- On the subject of the stream, two of us did turn up (contrary to an earlier post suggesting otherwise) and MrBitter was unfortunate to not be able to travel. The evening prior, after a full day of console setup, the PCs (which were located in the Emirates store by their staff at past 10pm) were set up on stage and upon testing it was discovered that stuff didn't work. EGL staff worked through the night to get things sorted. How do I know? Because I was there.

-- In the morning, the stage amplifier broke. At this point the admins faced a decision; with only four working PCs, they either pulled the PCs from the stage and cancelled the cast for the day entirely but rescued a Day 1 that was clearly not going to finish on time, or they continued to attempt to set up the cast and risk the Group Stage running into Day 2. They made the absolutely correct decision. Although I was gutted to not be able to do my job because of situations beyond anyone's control, the tournament ultimately had to come first.

-- Food was allowed into the event (but obviously, branded food or food that could make a mess was kept out - sandwiches, salads etc were fine) and was served there too. Not only was there a shop selling stuff for lunches, there were also premade bags with sandwiches and stuff that could be picked up. The person who mentioned this obviously didn't look hard enough.

-- On the subject of 5-man groups; there is no all-win situation. Either you give people byes in the knockout stages by having more than 8 groups (unfair to the people who don't get byes) or you have groups with more people in them. If you have more than 8 groups and an odd number, there will also be groups with 3 people in (thus making it "easier" for them, also unfair). I don't see a way around this that doesn't involve capping signups at a lower amount than they did.

Ultimately, understand this: I am disappointed. I'm like everyone else that has a problem with this tournament - I expected something, and it didn't happen. But that's life. The wonderful thing about attending a tournament and being able to talk to the admins is that you get a new perspective on things. As far as I could tell, all of their problems were caused by faulty equipment or bad service by "respectable" companies that they bought and hired stuff from.

You can't budget for things like this happening! It's like raging at IPL3 for having a truck plough through some internet cables. It happens, you deal with it the best you can. If there's no stream tomorrow because they need the PCs to get through the day, so be it.

I have 3 minutes left on my internet, so the only other thing I'll say is that I've been here the day before the event and I've been here through the event itself so far; and these guys have put in more work than you and I would ever want to. They've had single-digit hours of sleep over three days. Give them a break.