lurppis: "By far the worst event"

Power Gaming captain Tomi "lurppis" Kovanen has criticized digifest's event organisation for failing to have the CS tournament played out on LAN.

The digifest organisers revealed earlier today that the remainder of the Counter-Strike tournament would have to be played online after severe delays affected the entire schedule.

Power Gaming, who travelled to Tallinn with Niko "naSu" Kovanen and Max "ruuit" Aspe as stand-ins, are through to the Grand Final after beating the likes of munkka and Online Kingdom, conceding just 21 rounds in four matches.

Back home, Tomi "lurppis" Kovanen slammed the event organisation for failing to take the adequate measures to save the tournament, which he described as "the worst" he has attended.

What is your opinion on how the tournament was organised?

Apart from all the delays, problems, and the organizers letting some teams set up their computers for 2 hours to get rid of widescreen mode, the fact they decided to finish the event online rather than change to a single elimination bracket made the entire event by far the worst I've ever attended in over 7 years of attending CS events. Considering how many BYOC LANs etc that includes, that's quite an achievement. They wanted to please everyone which is nice but realistically isn't always possible, and refused to make the unpopular decision to save their tournament.

Have the dates for the online stages of the tournament been announced?

Our players have computers in which their fps are so low their mouse doesn't move in rushes and Internet connections in which they constantly get lag spikes to 400 throughout our matches/practice, so to be completely honest I don't think any of us care right now. We talked to the people from Peliliiga (who have organized everything in Finland for years and offered Digifest some consultation as well[which they refused to follow]) and it looks like if another Finnish team makes it to the grand final, they will hold the match at a LAN event in Helsinki sometime next month so we can play on LAN, as it's supposed to be.

Your team have reached the digifest final, beating the likes of munkka and Online Kingdom. Are you satisfied with the way you have performed?

Yes, of course, I think our total practice with this lineup is something like 4 hours total as a team, and we haven't played much individually either (under 20 hours in Steam for most of us I think) so it's good to know we still have enough skill and routine to do this well even without ~any practice. Hopefully sometime in the future there will be an event we can go to after preparing properly to see how well we can do. We were getting destroyed so badly online in practice by munkka and other teams we played against that we were actually really close to not going at all on Sunday...  

Were you surprised to do this well with two stand-ins?

If we didn't think we could win we would not have gone at all, we all felt like we had a good chance vs both munkka and OK if we just played well, which we did. I'm not sure if we were confident enough to say we would win heading in, but we definitely knew it could happen.

Your team is not signed up for Xperia PLAY. Any chance that you will go to this event?

No, our players have school/work so we can't practice every night of the week or bootcamp so it would be pointless for us to go with 3 weeks of so-so practice. We have all gone to enough events in our careers that we don't feel any need to attend anymore just because a tournament is happening, so since we don't feel like we could win with the preparation we could get, we decided not to go.

Are there any other events in the pipeline for your team?

As of right now I don't think so, we had fun playing together, so if the Finnish WCG qualifier will have a paid spot for CS or any other events pop up either in April/May or after August, there is a chance we will go but right now we have nothing planned, apart from a break for about 2 months in the Summer.