The opinions presented in this article are my own and may not necessarily be those of HearthstonePlayers or its staff, representatives or affiliates. I take full responsibility for the content of this article.
I dedicate this article to the hundreds of loyal and aspiring Hearthstone players who had their moods and sleep patterns ruined this weekend; I am writing this for you, and I have asked not to be paid for writing this piece.
The Dream
The premise was simple and attractive: the world’s first major Hearthstone tournament with a sizable prize pool, open to everyone who had won less than $5,000 in Hearthstone tournament prizes. For just $5, you too could enter this 3-day tournament. No best-of-3 single eliminations here, this was the good stuff: Swiss qualifier rounds over 2 entire days with the first 256 to reach 5 wins guaranteed into the knock-out bracket on day 3. All top 256 places were to be paid, from $2 at the bottom to $5,000 for the winner, for a total prize pool of an impressive $10,000. This meant you were guaranteed a lot of Hearthstone for your money, as well as a decent opportunity to profit even if you are good-not-great. Good Gaming’s web site entices with the slogan “Where Amateurs Become Pros”, and claims you will be able to watch and contact pros and find a team – among other things – using their $5/month service. The tournament was promoted by HearthHead and – crucially – officially sanctioned by Blizzard Entertainment themselves. It all sounds great, right?
Sadly, when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. While Good Gaming’s lofty ambitions are to be commended and their desire to provide large non-invitational Hearthstone tournaments applauded, to say the execution of this promise was sloppy, incompetent and utterly shambolic would be a significant understatement. It’s a long sordid story, and hard to know where to begin.
Can’t be bothered to read all this? Just skim the TL;DR sections for a summary!
Early Warning Signs
Eligibility
My first clue that not everything might be as it seems was from the information on their tournament page:
“Players must be able to prove residency in one of the following countries: United States (Excluding Arizona, Maryland, North Dakota, and Connecticut), Canada (Excluding Quebec), Mexico, Australia, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, The Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Chile. In addition, you must also meet the eligibility requirements under Good Gaming’s Rules and Regulations.”
This list excludes all European countries, and did not match up with the list of eligible countries on the linked rules and regulations page. The latter page states that individual tournament rules may override the general rules so I shot Good Gaming an email, receiving a quick and courteous response:
“Hi Katy!
You can absolutely play =)
We’ll be updating the info on the website to be a little less confusing.
GLHF!
–Â [NAME ELIDED]
GOOD GAMING | Lead Tournament Admin”
That was on 12th December. Now that the tournament draws to a close on 22nd December, the web site has not been updated.
Payment
I also noticed the site was only comprised of 3 or 4 static pages, but I decided not to worry, reasoning that perhaps the site’s content was all behind a paywall. Unfortunately, the next issue was with payment. I tried to purchase entry via the so-called Limited Silver Membership (this is a 1-month non-recurring subscription to Good Gaming; presumably the idea of the tournament was to get some customers, and that’s totally fine with me – it’s a business after all). After entering my credit card details, I received an error stating that the payment configuration system was not configured and to contact the administrator. The next day they added a small piece of text in yellow at the top of one of the details pages saying that the payment system would go up later in the week.
On 13th December when payment became available, it only worked for U.S. residents with U.S. bank and credit cards. International members were to wait for a payment system to come up. However, this was clearly communicated via email to everyone who had signed up. International payment was finally opened up on 17th December – 2 days before the start – and we were again emailed promptly and had the opportunity to sign up.
Pre-tournament Organization
11 hours before the tournament was due to start, we were emailed a massive folder of documents to read – nine in total – with instructions and rules for various things. We also had a form to fill out to confirm registration and informed that the deadline for registration for the 1st qualifier was 4:30pm EST that day. The web site stated that the link with brackets would be sent out to all players at 4:00pm EST so this seemed non-sensical, and 6 hours later we were emailed once more apologizing for the error and informing us that the deadline was 3:30pm EST.
It turned out there was no site behind the paywall. All the forms and instructions were on Google Docs. Communication was to be done over TeamSpeak, and the brackets were to be handled on Challonge. Queue hundreds of people creating TeamSpeak and Challonge accounts with hours to go and having no idea how to use either. There was no integrated system as there is for free amateur cups such as ZOTAC and the Hearthstone Open’s weekly events, and – for those of you who are not aware – Challonge as a tournament management system is not exactly known for its capacity or stability.
By this point the last-minute nature of everything was setting alarm bells ringing, but going into my stream on Friday night to broadcast the event I resolved to have a positive attitude and support Good Gaming in their efforts to bring a big Hearthstone tournament to everyone, doing my bit. After all, ultimately everything was running on time with no current problems as long as everyone followed the instructions. Unfortunately, this was a facade that unraveled along with every contestant’s patience during the ten hours that followed.
TL;DR – the list of eligible countries was (and is still) wrong, the payment system was not set up until very late, no proper web site was available; all documentation and bracket data was outsourced to Google Docs and Challonge, communication on TeamSpeak, everything was done at the last minute
Qualifier A
I played in Qualifier A, on Friday night. I think the events that followed would be best summarized with a timeline:
| 12:20pm EST | Deck list rule change email received (see below) |
| 4:00pm EST | Bracket data due to players |
| 4:45pm EST | Bracket data sent to players |
| 5:00pm EST | Check-in due to open |
| 6:00pm EST | Check-in opens |
| 6:45pm EST | Players report not being able to check in (see image below) |
| 7:00pm EST | Qualifier Round A is due to Begin – pushed back to 8:00pm. Web site still states 7pm but Challonge bracket states 8pm. An admin confirms to me personally in the previous hour that start is at 8pm |
| 7:15pm EST | I log in to find the tournament has started. Many people saw the changed start time of 8pm and were left in limbo |
| 7:45pm EST | The bracket is deleted and the scores of everyone playing discarded to accommodate those who saw the 8pm start time |
| 8:00pm EST | Start pushed back to 8:30pm EST. A new bracket is created. |
| 8:30pm EST | The bracket is deleted again. Two new brackets are created. Everyone must check in again, but no verbal or email communication is given – only TeamSpeak chat in an un-moderated channel. |
| 9:15pm EST | Tournament begins, 2 hours 15 minutes late |
| 5:02am EST | 8 hours in, we are half-way through round 6. The qualifier is aborted. |
Deck List Rule Change
At 12:20pm we all received an email stating that the requirement to submit deck lists had been dropped unless we made it to the paid single elimination bracket on Sunday:
“Due to the INCREDIBLE response we have had in Sign Ups, we need to alter the format of the Tournament slightly to accommodate the large amount of people wanting to participate.
Deck Lists are now only required from Players who Qualify for the Main Tournament Phase on Sunday.”
Thereby, the door for cheating in an officially sanctioned tournament was opened. In the TeamSpeak channel, the admins’ rationale was that cheating only mattered when money was on the line. I pointed out that the 256 players making it to the money stage being fair in the first place was predicated on the absence of cheating in the qualifiers, but this fell on deaf ears.
Check-in delays
The following image was posted by a player attempting to check in at 6:45pm EST to confirm that check in was still open while Challonge refused to allow him to do so:
Challonge was overloaded and unresponsive. While this is not Good Gaming’s fault, one has to question the wisdom of holding the bracket for such a large event on a budget freebie web site that is not designed for it in the first place.
Timeouts
On more than one occasion during the night, we were waiting for one match to complete in a round before progressing. One round took over 2 hours to complete, over 50 minutes of which was spent waiting for one match. Clearly a time limit should have been set, but nobody seemed to be on Battle.Net to check if they were actually playing. Even in ZOTAC and HS Open it is common for an admin to spectate my games if they are running long.
Communication channels
We were told that it was required for all players to be in the TeamSpeak channel during the event as part of the rules. Many players were participating in the tournament but absent from TeamSpeak – they were not DQ’ed. Before the tournament started, I asked if it would be ok to mute the channel because I didn’t want the voice-overs on my Twitch stream, and I was told that was no problem because all important information would be communicated via writing in the chat, so I muted it.
Good Gaming’s TeamSpeak server crashed and had to be restarted several times throughout the event.
Abandonment
Half-way through round 6, my opponent told me that the round didn’t count. I thought he was trolling me since I was ahead and told him to finish the current game then we could talk. We did and he advised me to unmute TeamSpeak. The female admin who was the main voice of the TeamSpeak channel had started off the night professionally but it seemed that the discussion had degenerated into something about her cat jumping on her laptop. I especially enjoyed her complaints about being tired, when my planned midnight-5am CET stint had turned into a 3am-11am one, and to say that people were tired and tempers frayed would be putting it mildly. In any case, the information that came through was (as word for word as I can remember it):
“My laptop is crashing because it’s been on for like, 24 hours, and the bracket got screwed up, so if you got 1-4 or more in the last 5 rounds, email us and you are in on Sunday.”
(afterwards she said that 1-4 was not enough and you needed 2-3 or better)
This information was given only verbally, not in written text.
The Result
Because Challonge only supports a maximum of 256 players per tournament, the bracket had been split into two: one of 256 players, one of 88, for a total of 344. In bracket A1, there were 145 people with scores of 2-3 or better. In bracket A2, there were 54 of us with scores of 2-3 or better (I include screenshots below should Good Gaming try to cover their tracks by deleting the tournament from Challonge). This means that 199 of 344 participants on Friday and a maximum of 256 in total were promised entry to the paid stage of the tournament.
In summary, Friday was not a game of Hearthstone: it was a war of attrition.
Here is what an administrator told me about payments and deck lists on Friday:
“GG | [NAME ELIDED]: @Katy, we were looking at a lot of different bracket systems to see which one would be best. Challonge is pretty easy to use and sign up to. the payment issue was out of our control and we worked desperately to have it fixed in time. you’ll still need a Deck List for Sunday and we have measures in place to ensure if someone tries to cheat they won’t get very far without immediate punishment”
Why they could not just use PayPal for all payments rather than splitting it between a US payment system for US customers and PayPal for the rest of the world is anyone’s guess.
TL;DR – the bracket started over 2 hours late, the deck list requirement was dropped allowing for cheating, communication was not done on the stated channel, the qualifier was aborted in round 6 when an admin’s laptop crashed messing up the bracket (according to her), and 199 out of 344 contestants with a score of 2-3 or better were promised entry to the paid bracket on Sunday.
Qualifier B
Mercifully I didn’t have to play in Saturday’s qualifier, having got through to the paid bracket already. On Sunday, I sought out feedback from those who had. Here are the main points:
- The qualifier started on time
- It wasn’t aborted, but the average round length was the same therefore it went on for a very long time
- Many people were AFK. Good Gaming decided to declare every single win as a dispute unless screenshots were provided for each win. While they stated this is not a change to the rules, merely that they “didn’t need to do it” on Friday, different rules were nevertheless applied to those who played in qualifier A vs qualifier B
- Three separate brackets on Challonge were merged in round 7 due to the number of AFKs. This announcement was given briefly over voice; anyone who had gone to the bathroom for a moment would’ve missed it and been excluded from future rounds
- The level of organization was reported to be about the same as on Friday from a variety of players
A small sample of chat (the names have been obfuscated):
Dr: how did Saturday’s quailifer go? Friday wasn’t pretty
Ky: Saturday’s was worse
Dr: did it run until 5am?
Katy Hearthstone: o_O
Da: lol What time doe we start today?
Fu: Saturday was grossly mismanaged with several mid-tournament rules changes.
ra: yeah
Ky: Well, it was about the same… But it went on and wasn’t cut early
…
Katy Hearthstone: Fu: what rules?
Ky: Saturday’s started earlier than Friday’s, but they both went on to around teh same time
Fu: I hit 6 wins at 12pm and wasn’t actually removed from brackets (per my email) until 3am despite notifying several people
Jo: are brackets up ?
El: They just need more people to run this it seems, like alot more.
Dr: was there an email sent out with info for today?
Fu: Since there were a significant amount of afk people, we were told that all of our wins were now disputed and that any that we didn’t have full screenshot logs of were invalid even if your opponent did not dispute.
kw: I got that message too!
kw: And they did not say that on Friday
Ky: Emails haven’t been sent yet, they are working on that now
Dr: ok
Katy Hearthstone: Fu: wow, impressive.
Fu: Dr, I haven’t seen any emails from goodgaming since I initially registered
ra: i had 3 emails thursday morning
ra: friday*
Mt: wait@fu i assume that only applys to qualifier B people right? cuase they never told us that friday
Fu: In my years of competitive mtg experience (10+), this is the worst tournament that I have ever played in.
Sq: Then don’t play
kw: Fu, I agree.
Ky: mtg is also not online though, correct?
Fu: @mt, I would assume that all wins are disputed. They did not even accept win submissions without a full screenshot log yesterday.
TL;DR – Saturday went about the same as Friday, but started earlier and had different rules applied; the qualifier wasn’t aborted but the average round length was the same
Single-Elimination Phase
On Sunday, the (supposedly) first 256 players to reach 5 wins in their Swiss matches were to play a paid single-elimination phase.
It does seem that lessons had been learned since the bracket had been set up on Xfire instead of Challonge this time – although again that is a deviation from the official documentation we were sent in the first place, it was probably for the best. Unfortunately, lessons about communicating with one’s customers were still lacking and admin seemed completely in disarray as the scheduled start time came and went.
Qualification Gnomails
Tonight, our tale begins at around 2:00pm EST when check-in was due to open (with deck lists due by email at 2:30pm EST and the tournament to begin at 3:00pm EST). The administrators had informed us on Friday that qualification emails would be sent out prior to Sunday to those who had qualified. With one hour remaining, we had – of course – not received any emails. It would seem they tried to use Challonge’s mailing system to do this; I am not 100% sure but they told us repeatedly to check our Challonge sign-up emails. Whatever they did, it didn’t work because emails arrived in a trickle rather than a pour, with some players who 4-1’d or 5-0’d on Friday not receiving anything while many 2-3 players got in straight away.
The contents of the email was the tournament bracket link on Xfire and the password to the TeamSpeak channel for qualified entrants, as well as instructions on how to submit a deck list. By the time I got my email – 10 minutes after the due start time and 40 minutes after the official deck list submission cut-off time, I had already been pm’d the channel password and link by a fellow contestant who decided to be kind to me (thank you for that), and performed all of the necessary steps. In the meanwhile, we did all receive another email apologizing for us not receiving an email. The admins had all left the public channel by this time so those who couldn’t get in and weren’t aware of the password or tournament bracket URL were left in limbo.
I’m a N00b, Get Me Out of Here
This time I had left TeamSpeak on and experienced the staff as very patronizing. Everyone was told over and over again ad nauseum to make sure we checked the right email address, and all our folders including our spam folders and – and this was my personal favorite – that is was our responsibility (as in the contestants’) to receive the email. We were also reminded several times that we were amateurs, not pros. We might not be pros, but we’re not complete idiots. Personally, all my email goes to my tablet and it makes an email-specific noise when email is received. I receive all my email this way and have never experienced a problem with it. The problem was not the players’ inability to collect their email, it was Good Gaming’s inability to send it.
This patronization continued into the tournament as individual members were berated verbally by the admins and told things like “I shouldn’t have to tell you how to play Hearthstone”. The tension escalated as bans were repeatedly threatened by both male and female staff speakers to anyone who voiced criticism. While I recognize and accept that a tournament organizer can ban an individual from a tournament for any reason they see fit, I doubt doing so just because a player has an opinion – and in this case most likely a perfectly valid one – will leave a very good PR taste in Good Gaming’s customers’ mouths afterwards. We also had to waste our time listening to her talk about eating cookies and speaking in Spanish for fun during the live matches.
Deck List Debacle
Regarding deck lists, I would like to quote to you the rules from the Deck List document which state that deck lists may be sent as a full screenshot or via use of a screen cropping/clipping tool. Unfortunately, while writing this article it would appear that Good Gaming have locked out access to everything except the FAQ and TeamSpeak 3 documents, so I am unable to quote this for verification. In any case, I sent screenshots of my deck lists and a few minutes later a blaring voice on TeamSpeak yelled at the players,
“Why are you guys still sending deck lists as images?! We are giving you the instructions, you are not following the instructions! If you do not send us deck lists as text, we can/may/will ban you from the tournament and all future tournaments”
– or words to that effect. I re-sent my deck lists as text – they wanted us to make the deck lists on HearthPwn and export them, but there was no time for that (this was a sudden change that came through in that qualification email); I doubt I was the only one dripping in irony to myself at that point about the concept they could even imagine we as a collective group would ever partake in Good Gaming’s activities again in the future.
December Showers
I got my deck list submitted with 60 seconds to spare. In the end, it turns out I didn’t need to worry, because for a good while the admins refused to start the bracket until all 256 players were present. Deck lists trickled in over the next 45 minutes and needless to say, not everyone was present. It got to the point where we were told “you don’t have time to shower, don’t you DARE shower” and people went to shower anyway to prove a point. I made chicken and fries, so, at least I had chicken.
In the end I believe we started with 236 players or thereabouts.
It Turns Out We Didn’t Need to Qualify After All!
During this fiasco, I had sent one single email to the admin and one single pm on TeamSpeak 3. I know it’s not smart to flood them with messages so I waited patiently. I didn’t flood the public channel either. None of it was ever replied to. In the end, so many people were missing the qualification emails that they just posted the bracket link in the TeamSpeak channel. Due to the insistence on waiting until all 256 slots were filled, and given that 199 people were promised slots on Friday, we can be pretty confident that:
- not all of those who should have qualified got to play
- some randoms who should not have qualified did get to play
What does this mean? It means that the 2 days everyone spent qualifying was a complete waste of time. It also means that monetary compensation has been given to people who did not earn it and denied to people who did earn it. We were told that “mechanisms are in place” to prevent this happening. I would love a representative of Good Gaming to explain to everyone exactly what those mechanisms are.
TL;DR – the tournament started 45 minutes late, many people did not receive their qualification emails with instructions until late or at all, some who qualified may not have got to play and some who did not qualify may have gotten to play, staff were extremely patronizing to customers, deck list submission rules were changed effectively at the last minute, the tournament was posted publicly so the qualifiers became irrelevant.
What Went Wrong: Good Gaming’s Statements
One individual contacted me privately; I have anonymized his/her nickname:
“*************”: were you going to write an article about this?
“Katy Hearthstone”: yes
“Katy Hearthstone”: why do you ask? 🙂
“*************”: well because i want to encourage you to do that
“*************”: it’s been an absolute nightmare, the admins have been rude or nonresponsive, i was told on friday i qualified only to find today that i am on a “wait-list”
“*************”: these people should not be running a tournament :/
So what were Good Gaming’s reasons for the failures?
It’s Not Us, It’s You
We were told repeatedly on Sunday that it is our responsibility to receive emails, and do various other things, and that basically a lot of stuff was our – the players’ – fault, for not following instructions. Doubtless there were people present who are incapable of following instructions – that is always true of course – but it would seem that the majority followed instructions and just got frustrated. Nobody threw personal insults in TeamSpeak, people vocalized their irritation at how the tournament was being run but there was no slagging match and almost no bad language. Sadly, rather than pressing on, the staff at Good Gaming failed to understand that the players who can’t or don’t follow the instructions should be discarded and the game needs to move along. On occasion, we simply couldn’t follow the instructions due to Good Gaming being at fault and not providing us with the required information; in those cases, communication was poor, the staff were very slow to resolve the problems and we were repeatedly left in limbo over the course of the 3 days; we should not be patronized for failing to follow instructions that are not possible to follow due to lack of information.
Swiss is Flawed
When we eventually got our qualification emails on Sunday, the organizers blamed the Swiss format for the problems.
“The Swiss tournament style we were required to conduct for the qualifiers was not an ideal format for the world’s largest HeartStone [their spelling error] tournament. In our future tournaments we will not be using the Swiss format and using our own system that will be much faster and easier to conduct.”
Are you laughing as much as I am? Actually, I’m not laughing at all because this isn’t funny. Swiss is universally used in these kinds of tournaments including well-known TCG Magic The Gathering – sometimes at real-life venues with participants numbering in the thousands for large events. The idea that a format is to blame is ridiculous: what is to blame is the way it was implemented. Rather than having 4 or 5 1-hour rounds and then a single-elimination bracket for tiebreakers after OWP% and other standard Swiss table metrics have been applied, the admins chose to make the game continue until 128 people had won 5 rounds each, rotating the brackets endlessly. Doing this, in combination with splitting the players into multiple sub-brackets demonstrates a clear failure to understand how the format works. Not only was it left to linger too long, the idea of Swiss is to match opponents with similar win/loss rates up on subsequent rounds, while keeping track of opponent average win percentages and such as tiebreakers. This cannot be done effectively when players are separated in sub-brackets. This could have been avoided by not using Challonge for the bracket system.
“My Laptop Crashed”
This may be a bitter pill for Good Gaming to swallow, but we don’t care. It’s not our job to sympathize with you because you choose to use sub-standard equipment to run a several-hundred player tournament. Any modern laptop should have no problems running for 24 hours without crashing. If you can’t afford a decent PC for an event of this magnitude, don’t host one until you can.
TL;DR – Good Gaming says that the blame lies partly with the players, that the Swiss format is not usable for large Hearthstone tournaments and indirectly concede to having inadequate equipment for the task.
Company Background
Good Gaming, Inc. is wholly owned by the CMG Holdings Group – a fairly worthless publicly traded Chicago-based outfit classified as a “marketing and communications company” (they are currently trading at around the 1 cent level at the time of writing). The COO of CMG Holdings Group was paid just $225,000 in FY2013, so we can be pretty confident they are not exactly making a tidy profit. Their portfolio reads:
“In 2014, the company acquired 100% of the equity interests of Good Gaming, Inc. (GGI). GGI is an online gaming portal with a business objective of assisting eSports gamers to hone and elevate their skills so as to enable them to compete at a higher level in amateur thru professional gaming tournaments.”
Someone should probably tell them they’ve been scammed. GGI is a cat-loving woman with a broken laptop and some incompetent IT guys by the looks of things (note: is not a statement of fact). A quick email to their somehow full standard contact address gives a clue to the real people behind the company:
While Mike Beckford, Sam Schwieters and Todd Swafford must be kicking themselves for not configuring their mail daemon properly right now, they are pretty easy to find if you just google the company name anyway. In March 2014, MarketWatch optimistically wrote of the company:
“Good Gaming Inc. is designed to engage the surging 500 million+ active gamers worldwide as the premiere eSports content provider for the active casual gamer all the way through the professionals.”
Sam Schwieters elaborates:
“We will offer social networking avenues for organized gaming associations (teams, guilds, clans,leagues) to create, form, support, groups of top level players to capture prizes and notoriety in the virtual community in a more predictable way and provide a platform for publishers and game developers to create exclusive eSports content for their target audience. Our entry will create a more robust and satisfying competitive game experience by introducing a proprietary matchmaking system for top level gamers beyond the current simple linear ranking system. We will also offer innovative tournaments and other organized competitions across multiple gaming platforms and multiple gaming consoles worldwide.”
It looks like GGI’s splash – or more like uncontrolled bellyflop – into eSports has given themselves some unintended notoriety of their own. In terms of operating income:
“Good Gaming Inc. expects to capture in its first full year from all sources of revenue between $2.0 and $3.5 million. In its second full year of operation, Good Gaming Inc. expects to capture from all sources of revenue between $5.0 and $8.0 million and in its third full year of operation, Good Gaming Inc. expects to capture from all sources of revenue over $20 million.”
(source)
I’ll give you a minute now to catch your breath while the laughing subsides; CMG Holdings investors, I believe this is what we call a ‘sell signal’.
In Summary: Unconsciously Incompetent
I fully believe that Good Gaming had every good intention to put on a great tournament for Hearthstone players everywhere, and the games themselves were actually really fun and I met some great people. All of the opponents were sporting and nice to each other and there didn’t seem to be any problems in that department. I was rooting for this tournament to be a great one to blast Hearthstone tournaments wide open for all, but alas, it was not to be.
The entire tournament smacked of unpreparedness, last-minute rush fixes, incompetence, insufficient manpower and most of all inexperience. I have never participated in such a shoddily run, woefully piss-poor excuse for a gaming event in my entire 35 year life. Hundreds of people who cancelled other plans to participate had their weekend wasted, and Good Gaming’s plan to seduce new members to their subscription service lies in tatters. But this begs the question: how on Earth did this cowboy shop get sanctioned by Blizzard in the first place? What kind of due diligence did Blizzard perform before saying yes? I have reached out to Hearthstone’s global PR manager for comment on this and will provide an update if I hear anything. I have also reached out to Good Gaming, Inc. themselves and CMG Holdings Group for comment on this piece.
So what now? Well, I have filed a dispute claim with PayPal that the product I received is significantly different from the one purchased. I don’t care about the $5, or the insignificant sum I won by playing. I care about the principle, which is why I am prepared to sit and write a 5000 word article about it on behalf of the hundreds of frustrated Hearthstone players who poured their time and energy into the Good Gaming tournament. This kind of rank mismanagement makes a mockery of the eSports industry in general and is embarrassing for the Hearthstone community in particular. I am passionate about our game; I love Hearthstone and I want our eSports niche to prosper with professionally run open tournaments.
It is my firm belief that Good Gaming, Inc. and their staff members should never be allowed to organize an officially sanctioned Hearthstone tournament ever again.
I wrote in TeamSpeak about my refund during the final rounds on Sunday night, and it was the only thing I wrote in the channel for some hours:
This was their response:
After 20 years on the internet, I finally got myself banned from a chat room. I didn’t realize it was slanderous to recommend people get a refund on an item they are dissatisfied with. Still, at least they responded to one thing quickly that day.
Did you play in Good Gaming’s Hearthstone $10k Open on December 19th-21st 2014? What did you think of the way the event was handled? Share your story in the comments below!
The Katy Hearthstone Show
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 /djkaty
 
 
