The Summer Slam was run at the Omega Sektor where the previous two CGS drafts have taken place. Prior to the event there was a fair amount of anticipation within the UK community, as an opportunity for people to come together over the weekend in a fun atmosphere and win some money as well. However almost everyone at the event has had a complaint somewhere along the line.

The Omega Sektor PC's

The LAN was created for 300 people each having a PC at the venue, when people arrived at the event on the Saturday they were told that there were not enough PC’s for the full 300. It later came to light that there were only 225 available at the Omega Sektor that weekend, so this left a considerable amount of people without a place to play. This led to a few of the CoD4 teams not being able to sit down and play their games until 9pm on Saturday when they were promised PC’s from 10am that day. Later the next day the lack of PC’s led to the SGL cancelling the CounterStrike Source tournament.

So what caused all the problems at SGL? Simple, a lack of organisation. There have been many accusations that the problems that have arisen are the Omega Sektors fault and that the staff were rude and unhelpful. It is not my place to question who Omega Sektor hirer to employ at a LAN cafe, but one would think they might have more knowledge about PC peripherals and how to fix computers if they go wrong. It was also made apparent that some staff employed there didn’t even know a LAN was happening that weekend.

However it is the SGL’s, and Game frontier as their owner’s, responsibility as a tournament organiser to prepare for such events properly. Not knowing that Omega Sektor was not at the full 300 PC capacity was either a miscommunication on Omega Sektors part or the SGL knew and decided to go ahead with the LAN as planned. The CoD4 tournament itself also had an odd structure with a lot of problems arising with the use of the PAM4 competition mod, and players then being asked to fix the problems as the admins did not have enough knowledge to deal with them.

Although the SGL have run events in the past, notably ESWC qualifiers in previous years and administration for the EU CGS qualifiers they have failed to run the event here to a satisfactory standard. This raises questions as to their future in offline events and even online as their reputation has taken quite a blow in the CoD4 community and very badly within its main user base of CounterStrike Source. Will the players and the teams be able to go back to trusting an organisation that has failed like this?