- Many teams suffered from huge lag spikes from the beginning of the tournament
- Several matches had to be delayed by several hours
- Participants were understandably frustrated at the issues
The IEM Brazil Europe Qualifier saw a bunch of unexpected upsets, some of which included a ton of frustrating connection issues in many matches.
Qualifier Swamped by Technical Problems
We’ve all experienced technical issues when playing games, the consequences of which can range from slight performance drops to lag making multiplayer matches unplayable. Esports events are not immune to said issues and they arguably have an even bigger impact on high-ranking competitive matches. The IEM Brazil Europe closed qualifier has recently been undergoing a plethora of technical problems that have caused large delays.
The CS:GO tournament already saw interesting matches in the beginning, although they were plagued by lag from the onset. Popular names such as BIG, ENCE, and Sprout all suffered defeats at the hands of lesser-ranked teams and are now sent to the lower brackets, being close to elimination from the IEM Brazil circuit.
But as fans were witnessing unexpected unsets and great performances from underdog teams, a slew of major technical issues started to which the earlier lag was a prelude. The match between BIG and Sprout was supposed to begin at 21:00 CET, was beset by a 90-minute delay with just six rounds being played in that timeframe.
A similar issue was faced by ENCE in their game against Bad News Eagles. Marco “Snappi” Pfeiffer took to Twitter to vent his frustration. He pointed out that his team was forced to play with “three players lagging out,” and that the team was being kicked out “mid duels,” all of this as ENCE is trying to avoid getting eliminated from the tournament.
The ESEA responded to the player apologizing and saying the organization is working to fix the issue. However, they were met with a coarse response from ENCE’s captain. “Yea 4 maps into the tournament you work fucking fast. It’s been an issue for years which makes it worse,” Snappi responded.
Eventually, both the ENCE-Bad News Eagles match and the Sprout-BIG match resumed but the damage had already been done. Both encounters eventually concluded well past midnight local time with ENCE and BIG emerging victorious. However, players on both the winning and losing sides were understandably frustrated by the technical issues, especially considering this tournament is the only IEM Brazil qualifier available for the Europe region.
As to what caused the issues, there is still no information from the tournament organizers.
