NiP and Anonymo Esports Replay Mirage Map Tonight

On its website the organizers Flashpoint Season 3 published an appeal to the CS: GO-community, who explained what had happened and was told that waiting for further participants of the match between NiP and Anonymo Esports.

According to Flashpoint, the information provided by the teams was too messy, and therefore the organizers did not have an objective understanding of what was happening: In addition, the tournament operator admitted flaws in its system:

The information communicated on Sunday 16th of May and the way that information has been shared by all the parties involved did not provide a clear and complete picture about the facts and decisions that happened, and we owe a sincere apology to everyone from the teams, to players and the rest of the community. No matter the level of complexity and the amount of discussions that were being managed, all official communication remains our responsibility and it should have been managed with significantly higher standards.

The organizers noted that the players of the Swedish team reported both during the matches about the loss of packages, and immediately before the very beginning of the fight, which is somewhat inconsistent with the statements of the NiP management:

During the match of NIP versus Anonymo, the NIP players claimed before and during the match a significant amount of packet loss.The issues were only experienced by the NIP players and on multiple data centers and locations; this seemed to be a typical routing issue which is the responsibility of players/teams to address and solve, in order to play an online competitive match.

Flashpoint noted that the parties could not come to a formal agreement, and the immediate termination of the match was not possible due to the fact that the administrator did not have all the necessary information:

During all conversations, there had not been any official/formal agreement between the teams to postpone the match. While it is true that one Anonymo player posted a message in the in-game chat about the possibility of playing another day, it didn’t get presented in the official channels, where the management of Anonymo was requesting to resume the match according to the rules.

NIP’s first official request to not play the match was noted to be after the conclusion of Map 2, before going into Map 3. That being said, an admin could not, on a purely subjective basis, make the decision of postponing a match because one single team was claiming to have issues; because then any decisions of postponing a match taken on a similar basis could compromise the competitive integrity of every match. Therefore, the admin made the decision to force the players to conclude the match as per stated in the official ruleset.

The decision to replay was made after it became clear that the technical problems were not in the hands of the players. It was also decided to conduct an in-depth investigation to study the issue:

On Saturday morning, the NIP management team advanced a formal request to replay the match by providing meaningful data and information to prove that the issues experienced by the players was not caused by anything that was under their control and therefore, based on the official ruleset, the match should have been replayed.

The admin team, after a preliminary investigation on the materials and information provided, agreed there was enough evidence to accept the claim and start a deep investigation to further understand the nature of the issue.

Flashpoint spent eight hours testing and analyzing the situation, after which they offered Anonymo Esports the choice of replaying the entire match or the Mirage map separately. The organizers said that NiP requested an opportunity to replay Mirage, but the administration decided that Anonymo should have the choice to play not only the last map, but the entire match.

Organizers ultimately came to the decision to replay Mirage, using the pre-consultation on the Integrity Commission in eSports.

Flashpoint promised in the near future to share a new set of rules, which will imply the likelihood of such force majeure circumstances and have clear instructions for resolving such problems:

We will be sharing with all the teams an updated version of the rules to better define the types of issues that will be taken into consideration, as well as how the rules should be applied and how to avoid having teams replay a match that would be more suitable to be rescheduled or deemed unplayable. We will also provide every team access to the game server at least 24 hours before the match to have enough time to investigate other potentially rare edge cases affecting poor internet performance of any genre and avoid having similar scenarios as the one that happened during and after the match in question.

The replay between Anonymo Esports and NiP on the Mirage map should start today at 21:00 UTC +3.

Flashpoint Season 3 started on May 10 and will end on the 30th. The rating tournament will feature 16 participants who will share the points required to qualify for PGL Major Stockholm 2021. The organizers will also compete for a small prize pool of $ 50,000. The winner will claim $ 17,000 and 1,600 RMR Ranking Points.