Discontent is on the rise - what does the esports community think of Flashpoint Season 3?
Ihor MatusThe recent incident involving NiP has rocked the entire esports community. Recall that on May 14, a match was held between NiP and Anonymo Esports. Everything would be fine, but after the end of the confrontation, NiP reported that the technical condition of the servers and the connection of players with them could be much better.
According to Nikolai 'device' Ridts, for whom this meeting was his debut at the new club, he said that when playing against Anonymo Esports, he lost almost 40% of Internet packages. The well-known journalist Richard Lewis said that this information cannot be true, since already with a 5% loss, the players would not be able to take part in the fight. Device agreed that his statement might not be as accurate as he originally thought, but insisted that it was still too difficult for the team to play.
After the match was over, NiP launched a flurry of criticism (and, most likely, pressure) towards Flashpoint Season 3. The club's management immediately began to defend NiP's honor and demand a replay match. This became known not immediately.
Later, FACEIT, the organizers of the championship, announced that a replay between Anonymo Esports and NiP would still take place. The Swedes offered Janusz 'Snax' Pogorzielski's team the choice of playing Bo1 on Sunday or Bo3 meeting on Tuesday.
Anonymo said on their Twitter account that they will meet halfway not out of voluntary motives, but because of the pressure that NiP has begun to exert both on them and on the organizers of Flashpoint Season 3:
We are currently under pressure from both NIP and FLASHPOINT to replay the match. In the first timeout, we offered to postpone the match as soon as we found out about the technical problems of the NIP - they did not want to do it.
We won the match, which ended honestly and remained in the past. It is definitely too late to rerun the match. We learned about a possible replay date less than 24 hours before it started, during a match in the Polish championship. We don't even have time to properly react, let alone prepare for the match. We are forced to play BO1 today or BO3 on Tuesday. This is ridiculous.
We got the impression that FACEIT is under pressure from the NIP at the business level.
Anonymo also said that NiP had 15 minutes before the start of the match in order to check the servers, but having such an opportunity, the Swedes decided to finish the match, despite the fact that they received an offer from Anonymo to postpone the match.
The event caused a resonance in the community and the players, along with the casters, began to react to the incident in a negative way. Twitter and other social networks were soon filled with not flattering statements towards the organizers.
Kasper 'cadiaN' Möller, who represents the Heroic team at the competition, believes that publishing a statement about a replay 30 minutes before the start of the meeting is, to put it mildly, very unprofessional, and in 2021 such things should not happen at all. He wrote the following:
Flashpoint made its decision yesterday, but officially published it 30 minutes before the match. How is this shit possible in 2021? Did they know they were wrong or why hadn't they announced their decision earlier? They also refused any contact with the CSPPA.
Ivan 'Johnta' Shevtsov, who is a coach in the Valorant-roster of Team Heretics, said that Flashpoint continues to amaze him, and the organizers' attitude towards the event can be described as disregarding:
Flashpoint continues to amaze me. It's just some kind of surrealism that such situations happen and no one does anything. Let me remind you that in the qualifiers for Flashpoint, the cheaters beat Apeks and other teams, but the results of those matches were not canceled, while there will be a replay here. Nobody gave a damn about it
MSL, known for his performances for North, believes that this event is extremely dishonest towards Anonymo, and the organizers themselves should be responsible for the mistakes of the organizers:
So Anonymo will be punished for your[Flashpoint]mistakes? Time to cancel the replay and give NiP a big apology and maybe compensation.
Ukrainian esports activist Vitaliy 'v1lat' Volochai asked about the possibility of implementing more radical measures towards Flashpoint:
Valve can revoke the RMR status of the tournament right in the course of the championship?
2.5 years ago, a similar story took place with the participation of the organizers of Flashpoint Season 3. FACEIT held a Major tournament in 2018, which was packed to overflowing with technical pauses, and later the public called this championship FACEIT Technical Pause Major 2018.