Although this certainly was not the first event or league in eSports history with severe delays, opening day of the 2007 WSVG Louisville event stumbled due to delays in schedule and organization across the board for all games.

The delays that plagued this day came from several sources including loss of internet, faulty servers and loss of tournament staff throughout the competition. From early in the morning it became apparent that the start of most games would be delayed due to internet problems. These problems set the schedule back by three hours for the majority of games. Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft tournaments seemed to suffer the most from this delay. This problem also contributed to the lack of HLTV for CS (that problem has yet to be resolved) and the live stream broadcasting planned for the event.

Not only did players and games at the event suffer, the online fans did as well. GotFrag spoke with WSVG President, Matt Ringel who explained that internet problems were not the fault of the event or venue network. Ringel stated the problem in fact came from the internet service provider to the venue itself and was no fault of the WSVG. Matches for CS started later in the afternoon with WoW matches scheduled for 11am beginning near 4pm.

Once the internet problems were fixed, problems began to arise with hard drive imaging and server related problems. Ringel stated to GotFrag that a large portion of servers the event had planned to use were rendered unusable for the day. The growing delays began to take its toll on some players and frustration set in as admins were not able to give any definite time schedule.

The players were given no choice but to wait for their matches to be played. Also adding to the confusion was the fact that some teams had access to server rcon passwords and were changing settings and starting matches on their own without admin supervision. In addition, teams were leaving the tournament after matches and failing to report scores. Unfortunately, the problems did not stop there.

The biggest problem of the day would come from the loss of tournament administration staff. As the day progressed the lack of admins became more and more apparent. Admins seemed to be there one minute and gone the next, never to return. Towards the end of the night, the staff had been whittled down to almost non existant. The volunteers had simply walked off and apparently decided to not participate.

Matches were scheduled to wrap up on day one at 6pm local time. A scheduled player meeting was held at 6pm and Ringel addressed the group of players. Once this meeting concluded it was decided by the tournament director to continue the CS matches until the full group play had completed. Everyone but players, press and admins were asked to leave the tournament area. This left the entire second half of group play to finish with only one CS admin.

Players from all the teams still to compete were standing near the tournament area waiting for their matches to begin. The majority of WSVG staff also left the venue at this time although, Matt Ringel and several WSVG employees returned later to help. Many of the staff left the venue for dinner although players were forced to remain at the venue after concessions had closed.

GotFrag spoke with a frustrated James O'Connor from x3o and he stated that his team had been waiting a majority of the day for their matches and were still not given any kind of time frame on when they might play. He also stated that it was very difficult for a team to wait to play so late at night and then return early morning the next day for matches.

He stated that the delays were very severe considering the magnitude of an event this size and stature. As the night progressed, O'Connor pitched in and helped seat the standing players and helped get some matches underway in order to expedite his team’s turn at bat.

In one of the highlight CS matches of the day, Turmoil versus Convention, mass confusion set in as the server crashed and there were no admins on hand to handle the ensuing dispute. The sole World of Warcraft admin stepped in to moderate the situation and eventually the problem was solved. Counter-Strike matches wrapped up around 1:30am, more than seven hours behind schedule. Many of the problems had been resolved by the end of the day but the lack of admins still remains a problem.

In speaking with GotFrag about the admin situation, Matt Ringel had this to say, “We started the tournament with twenty admins, we were down to three by the end of the day.”

When asked how this issue would be resolved, Ringel stated that they were actively recruiting admins from the BYOC participants.

Ringel also stated that these were fairly isolated incidents for WSVG as the previous China event had gone off without a hitch and that they would also be looking to correct these problems in the future.