Rainbow Six Siege’s Six Invitational 2018 Is A Mess So Far

It’s that time of year again. Filled with hope that this one will be different. That this “professional quality” tournament won’t flounder and fail. That Siege has a future as a competitive game in the eSports circuit. Yes, it’s time to believe that this amazing, and a growing game will continue to climb the ladder of popularity, even maybe finally get the recognition it deserves. Time to waste entire days watching Twitch and rooting for the underdogs. Or rather, it would be time. If Ubisoft servers didn’t crash right in the middle of the qualifiers.

We’ll start from the beginning. The Six Invitational Qualifiers started running on January 5th and run through to the 12th before picking back up again in the live event on February 13th. The Qualifiers being composed of teams who had run through their own region specific tournaments to even get that far, were populated by pro-league teams and up-and-comers alike. Familiar names like North American based teams FlipSid3 and Vertical Gaming making an appearance right next to fresh faces with hilarious names like Russian based team Room Factory or UK based team #XboxMasterRace. The whole thing has a really cool international feeling to it, which is not lost on the audience. Polish team Patokalipsa had no small amount of support from their countrymen in Twitch chat for both of Patos streamed games.

But it wouldn’t be a Ubisoft event without something going horribly awry. For the EU bracket which kicked off the qualifiers, this was the inclusion of now disbanded French team beGenius. beGenius were a professional team during last season (Blood Orchid) pro-league. They had made it fairly far with what they had, until the team was disqualified as one of their members Shaiiko had been using a macro. It’s unclear what his macro was for, speculation including that he used it for recoil management or even wall hacks to make callouts for his team, but either way the guy received a two-year ban from the ESL. However, the team, beGenius, was only disqualified for that season meaning they were permitted to return to the qualifiers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbydoGum_pk

How can you allow a team who facilitated a cheating player into your invitational bracket? What kind of message is that sending to everyone else? For a company trying to cultivate interest in the scene, you’d think they’d want to keep distant from a team with a poisonous reputation. It’s not like it was about including an established French team either; the French community is not short of representation, they’re one of the strongest core nations in the game. Supremacy, Millenium, and Vitality are all established teams with mostly French rosters (Vitality having Swiss player Panix and Belgium player risze as the only exceptions). French players also make up the roster of younger teams like Requiem and Against All Authority.

The decision to include beGenius in your “biggest event of the year” when you’re trying to build the audience is a questionable one at best. Probably needless to say, but there was very little support for beGenius during their games, or even among their peers. The close-knit nature of the French community meant they weren’t completely without some fans, but it’s so hard for people to stand behind a team who let a cheater get as far as he did. When beGenius at the number-one seeded spot was knocked out by the bottom seeded Polish team Patokalipsa it was hard to feel bad for them. And I don’t think anyone was surprised by their announcement to disband after getting knocked out so early and seeing how little support they had.

As for the North American (NA) bracket, I’d love to tell you how all those games went, but unfortunately I didn’t get to watch them all. Not that I was being lazy or not interested, or even distracted by real life. The games were dropped and due for rescheduling thanks to the ol’ Ubisoft Classic where the servers suddenly decide to take a nap.

I could harp on about how shitty it is to have your core game have a worldwide server outage when you’re trying to host an international tournament, because it definitely deserves a special mention, but that’s not really the worst of it. The greatest chord in this symphony of bad decisions was the idea that the NA games would just pick up whenever the servers came back on. If that doesn’t sound like a bad idea on text, that’s because it wouldn’t have been. If they had told anyone that’s what they were going to do…

Around Midnight EST, Michael “KiXSTAR” Stockley and Parker “Interro” Mackay did their best to host and stream what was basically a surprise qualifier match from Stockley’s apartment in Poland. The servers came back on, and of the four matches that would have been streamed that day, two of them proceeded at that time with Ronin beating FlipSid3 and Vertical Gaming beating Bird University. On the one hand, how the hell could an organized tournament which, again, is trying to cultivate an audience, let a surprise midnight match go on? But on the other hand, it turned out to be the better option, because neither of the other two games (RogueGG vs. Reckless and Era vs. Looking For Org) got broadcast at all. So I guess by showing at midnight at least there’s a recorded video of the games for the people who missed it.

So NA was a total mess, but whatever, just a speedbump; at least the Latin American (LATAM) region has some favorites like BRK and Fontt both from Brazil. Or it did, when the qualifiers started at least. Team Fontt forfeit all their games with the speculation being that they received their invitation to the Wild Card spot at the finals. If that sounds confusing or doesn’t make sense to you, you’re at the same level as LATAM fans who wanted to watch their favorite team play, and everyone else who’s been struggling to follow the Six Invitational so far.

I don’t want this to sound like I hate the game or the organizations behind it. The Six Invitational is awesome, Siege deserves to be a serious eSports game and it has the foundation to be one. But when you make it so hard for people who already want to watch to continue being a fan by including orgs with toxic reputations and cutting broadcasts of favored teams, who exactly are you serving? It’s not like a mildly interested player is going to go “ok, who are the twenty people I need to follow on Twitter and then refresh their feeds regularly to see who is streaming which match-up and when?” This needs to be readily accessible, for everyone. Game times need to be withheld, and postponing a game for issues is fine, but it needs to be rehosted at a specific time, not “when they feel like it” or “when our super fickle mystery servers allow us to.” A professional scene needs to be just that: professional. If the ESL can’t handle that, Ubisoft needs to find another tournament organizer who can, or they’re choking the potential out of their best hope at a serious competitive game.