Extreme Masters boss Michal "Carmac" Blicharz apologised to Quake fans in a statement on ESL-World for the technical difficulties and delays that have plauged today's QuakeLive games at the World Championship at CeBIT. The IEM product manager explained that further network issues had forced them to play today's matches online and had led them to the decision to move the remaining group A matches to tomorrow.
ESL's IT director, Björn Metzdorf, also commented, pointing to attacks from a "malicious bot net" as all three tournaments at CeBIT slowed to a crawl. "While our firewalls were able to block the incoming packets, the sheer amount of packet flood completely filled up the internet connection leading to our hall," he explained. "This made it impossible to log on to the online parts of World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike and Quake Live, causing both drops and lags, and thus a tremendous amount of delay."
Only six QuakeLive matches were completed today in what was a stuttering start for the tournament billed as the biggest in QuakeLive's short history. Shane "rapha" Hendrixson was the early pace-setter with a victory over Maciej "av3k" Kryzkowski but, for many fans, the technical issues have without a doubt overshadowed the opening day's action.
The full statement form Michal Blicharz can be found below.
"Dear Quake Fans,
The Intel Extreme Masters World Championship has experienced delays in the schedule due to technical difficulties with the Quake Live LAN server. The remaining Group A matches are moved to Thursday and will be finished after the Group B matches.
The players have been experiencing high pings (50+) on the LAN servers. The ESL IT staff have found no problems with the network (the server was also connected directly into the switch the Quake Live section was on, which did not help). There also seems to be nothing wrong with the server software that would cause this problem.
To address the issues we delayed the tournament matches and restarted it online later in agreement with the players (the ping to Frankfurt servers is less than 10). Later on, due to DDoS attacks on our network and one player's technical difficulties (which no player was able to solve), a decision was made to continue the tournament on Thursday.
At the moment id Software is working with the ESL IT to build another server in order to make sure that the game will be played on LAN for the remainder of the event. We are doing our best to address the situation.
I am very sorry that we were not able to deliver the optimal spectating experience today. I would like to sincerely apologise for the situation. We will do our very best and more to deliver the kind of experience that we have been delivering so far this season on three of the remaining days of the tournament.
Michal "Carmac" Blicharz"RelatedESL World
Sad, sad times.