Cover-Credits:
The Valorant India Invitational is taking place at the GMR Arena in Hyderabad, India and things have not gotten off to a good start. With a prize pool of $100,000 USD on the line and six international teams attending the event, the event was expected to be the biggest Indian esports event in the country, but things have not been going smoothly. Multiple members of the Valorant India community have called out the organizers for failing to host the games on time. The players have been waiting for several hours but the games are not taking place according to schedule, due to delays.
Only one out of the eight games has taken place in five hours
Global Esports’ Rahul “Emi” Hinduja stated that there are eight games scheduled for today and only one game has taken place as of 3:35 PM IST.
BOOM Esports founder Gary Ongko said that a four-hour delay is never a good look. Some of the games have seemingly been rescheduled to later in the night (according to vlr.gg) and Ongko retorted on Twitter saying that he would never let his team compete at 2 AM.
One of Team Secret’s managers, Yamyam Villanueva Yui revealed that she has been waiting for the match to take place since 10 AM IST and that the organizers kept delaying the games for 30 minutes over and over again and the teams ended up waiting for hours.
With so many international teams set to compete in the event, this is not a good look for the tournament organizers. The prize pool of the event is reasonably high and such a poor experience for players and teams was not to be expected.
Hopefully, the event picks up the pace and is able to organize the rest of the games smoothly. Currently, we are in the group stage. The top two teams from each group will qualify ahead to the playoffs which feature a single-elimination format where the semifinals will be a best-of-three series and the grand finals will be a best-of-five match up.
