After coming back from events I always like to read feedback and comments that people have as to how we can improve the event, however there have been so many comments made by people who actually have no idea what was going on, so I'm writing this to tell you of problems we encountered, and how we handled it, and why certain decisions were made.

Firstly, many of you have complained about the delay we had on Saturday and blamed it directly on us. We had planned to do a lot of preparation work on Friday before the event to test PCs, get servers up, etc. We knew there would be a function going on upstairs in OS but we were told we would be able to use at least half of the tournament PCs to setup. Unfortunately when we got there we were told we couldn't do anything and just had to come back on the Saturday morning to get everything ready. This to us was a huge set back, but there was nothing we could do, so we got there on Saturday to sort as much as we could and get the event underway. After registration everyone got on their PCs and started logging onto Steam. OS didnt have enough game licences to cope with all the people logging on, and when people started logging onto their own accounts Steam banned people from OS logging on completely, which brought both the 1.6 and Source tournament to a standstill. All servers were ready and HLTVs were up, but the problem was that the company doing the proxies for us were all out of contact and had hardware issues their end, so we weren't able to get public HLTVs out for the group games. To solve the Steam bug, we did a complete sweep of the event, getting everyone to log off and login as rows. We also found another solution to help speed up the process and eventually everyone managed to get on Steam and start playing. As we were so delayed, we didn't have enough time to get everyone to install the gui, which meant that we literally had to tell people to play on defaults and check everyones config, which took a lot of our time (bare in mind there was also a 1.6 tournament with more teams that we also had to attend to). Once games got underway everything went pretty smoothly and we managed to get the group games over and done with on the Saturday, although with a big delay due to Steam.

We spent the night sorting out the fixtures and seating plan, and due to the fact that we didn't have time to sort the guis Corin managed to install zblock on all the servers to prevent any illegal commands to be used. Everything ran as planned, HLTV was up thanks to dedishack who stepped in last minute and we recorded each bracket game individually for the public to use after the event. In the evening we had a conflict, as you all know, with the ebuyer and m!nt game that took place. ebuyer defused through a box, which is a known rule that you are not allowed to do in CSS as the bomb must be visible. I came back to the admin area to see that the demo was being watched over by some of the admins as m!nt approached us about this, which is completely acceptable. Now, there is no official rule written down for this, however we do have this rule stated in our CSS rules:

"- Admins have the right to overturn any rule or decision at any time, without any prior notice, including but not limited to changing results of matches and times and details of fixtures."

I agree that it is partly our fault for not specifically stating rules about bomb defusing, but there are also rules that we do not state for 1.6 as they are rules that are obided by as standard and do not need stating. Also, we were not asked by anyone before and throughout the whole tournament whether defusing through objects was allowed, therefore we could not state it earlier. We had to make a decision as to whether we would penalise this offence or not, and we did a vote with our head admins. The decision was made to punish ebuyer for the offence, however we didn't want to give any defaults to either team and to make it as fair as possible. In the end we decided the best way to go about it was to give a certain number of rounds to m!nt to make the game a draw, which would then lead to overtime. This was the fairest way to give both teams a chance to go through to the next round. Also to note, we also had some partial advise from so called 'neutral' people, naming no one in particular, and it was interesting to see this so called neutral person go to stand behind ebuyer in the overtime to cheer them on like no tomorrow.

What happened after the game was completely unacceptable, and us IG admins had to step in to break up what happened.

Now how I see the delay in the tournament and the decision made for the ebuyer/m!nt game incompetance on any of the IG admins is beyond me. Also to say we do not care as much about CS:Source as we did about 1.6 should read on. First off, we managed to secure a sponsor for the CS:Source tournament which boosted the prize fund considerably, even when we had a turn out of about 11/16 teams. Also, this isn't our first CS:Source tournament either. If any of you remember, we were hired to run the EuroCSS tournament that took place in Harrow, only to have xxhanubis to run off with the prize money, therefore leaving us to gather all the teams and run the tournament for free and find some sponsors to give at least some sort of prize for the winners. The rules we used for that tournament are the same we used for this tournament, and we had no conflicts at all. If you read UKCT then you'll see that all of the 1.6 participants realised that the Steam error was not our fault and were extremely happy with the way we ran things. Some of you may be unhappy about the delay due to various bits of your hardware not working, but we tried our very best to help each of you individually to get everything working for you and to make the games as smooth as possible. There aren't many CS:Source tournaments that are non-BYOC in the UK, which is why it may take time for Source players to get used to not playing on their own home PC. It is a lot different in many aspects, which I won't go into.

Thanks to all the people that participated as well as the staff covering the event. As always I like to read and reply to any constructive comments, so please leave any you may have here. Thanks for your time.