Cover-Credits:
ESL One Birmingham 2024, one of this month's highlight Dota 2 events, has faced strong criticism from Xtreme Gaming's Zhao "XinQ" Zixing, regarding event management issues.
The tournament which began on 22nd April 2024, has been marred by controversies since its outset.
Before the tournament even started, ESL made a controversial decision to disqualify 1win allegedly due to missing a visa submission deadline and replaced them with OG.
This decision raised questions about ESL's handling of the event and XinQ’s recent criticism has again put them under scrutiny, this time for poor event management.
XinQ Highlights Major Issues With ESL One Birmingham 2024
XinQ, the support player for Xtreme Gaming, allegedly voiced his discontent with the event management as implied by a recent post by a community member on the Dota 2 subreddit.
According to the screenshot shared in the pose, XinQ complained about several aspects of the tournament. He mentioned the long commute time of 30 minutes from the player's residence to the event venue, which was deemed inconvenient by him.
In addition to this, XinQ highlighted issues with the venue's bright lights not being dimmed during games, which was a cause of discomfort for players. Moreover, teams were reportedly instructed to arrive at the venue three hours before their scheduled game times, a decision not favored by XinQ.
Xtreme Gaming's performance in the Group Stage of the tournament has mirrored these frustrations, as they currently sit in 5th place in Group B overall standings, facing the threat of getting eliminated from ESL One Birmingham 2024 if they lose even one game against Tundra Esports later today.
However, Xtreme Gaming is not alone in its struggle. Other top-performing teams such as Team Falcons, Gaming Gladiators, and Team Spirit are also underperforming and risk elimination from the tournament.
Another player, Team Spirit’s Magomed "Collapse" Khalilov also voiced his discontent with the size of rooms provided to the athletes.
Taking to Telegram, Collapse wrote that some of the rooms were very stuffy and that he was not satisfied with the room sizes.
The poor performance from these usually high-performing Dota 2 teams may have been due to the poor event environment that players are presented with, which could have taken a toll on the players and rendered them unable to perform at their best.
However, this remains a mere speculation and the reasons could be a topic of discussion for another day.
As the group stages of ESL One Birmingham 2024 draw to a close, the final eight teams will be decided at the end of the day and it remains to be seen whether Team Falcons, Gaimin Gladiators, Team Spirit, and Xtreme Gaming will manage to turn their luck around and make it to the playoffs or not.
