Technical Issues in Day 2 of the PGL Krakow Major

As mentioned in a prior article, there had been much controversy regarding the hardware to be used for the PGL Major Krakow which has been underway for a few days now. Unfortunately, day two was struck with such a nuisance and a group stage match had to be completed off-stream. This obviously upset fans and players.

The effected game was an encounter between BIG and Cloud9, an important group stage game which many were excited for. By half time, the stream was still online and BIG lead as Counter-Terrorists by 8 rounds; a scoreline of 12 to 4. Suddenly, the match was paused. Casters, fans and competitors were lost in confusion which quickly turned into outrage.

Soon after, on Twitter, PGL announced that they were “working on fixing the issues before the start of the next match.”  An in-game observer, “sapphire”, managed to live-stream the rest of the game casted by James Bardolph who sat behind the C9 players. It was an underwhelming attempt to continue showing content.  This is definitely a rarity for a Valve Major.

Funnily enough, “Stewie2k” from C9 was sending out tweets while the off-stream match was taking place. Without his phone, he used the in-game computer in the technical break. It was revealed that two players from the match were somehow disconnected from Steam.  The tweeting player was respectably unhappy and felt rather cheated. Below is a sharp statement taken from one of his posts:

“There’s no way this is a Major. I don’t believe it,”

Apart from this upset, the tournament has compensated and will further do so with epic competition and tight match-ups. However, another technical error could destroy PGL’s reputation; especially if it affects a semi-final or even the grand finale. That would be a nightmare for all.