Intel Extreme Masters Katowice is off to a rough start. Production errors and weird cutaways have made the stream a nightmare to watch. Montecristo was labeled as Deficio and SJokz couldn’t even do an interview without the camera randomly panning to somewhere else. If these were the only problems, this wouldn’t be that bad of a tournament. Unfortunately, according to Deman, the tournament realm server that all the games are played on went down, so there was a two hour delay in games. In the first four hours of the stream, only two games were played.
The weirdest mistakes had to be on the IEM Garena stream. TSM's scrim communications were played on air, revealing their strategies and team picks for the tournament. TSM Reginald said on Twitter: “ Our comms were broadcasted without us knowing. I hope our champion pool wasn't leaked..... ” This has to be one of the biggest screw-ups in professional League of Legends. Airing scrims negates the purpose of them, giving the teams TSM has to play against an unfair advantage.
Not like TSM needed any helping losing though; they threw away a massive lead against ESC Ever. Doublelift got a pentakill at 35 minutes, and the casters assumed the game was all but won for TSM. Turns out, TSM has really awful shot calling and split apart during a team fight at Baron. ESC was able to capitalize on this and managed to ace their team and push into TSM’s nexus. It was an embarrassing game for TSM, sending them into the losers bracket.
Esports tournaments have been running into trouble recently. DOTA’s Shanghai Major has been a total mess. A caster was fired publicly by Gabe Newell and the whole production has been a shambles. I hope big tournaments like these don’t continue this trend; it’s hard to be considered a legitimate enterprise when everyone around you is screwing up.
