During the GameGune 2010 tournament, HLTV.org reported that the GameGune organization did not care about the spectators, as they allowed matches to be started up to a half an hour earlier than scheduled, making it hard for spectators to watch their favorite teams play.
Today, GameGune has released a statement in which they defended their response, but clarified their initial intention. The whole statement can be found below.
First of all, the title misquotes blatantly our words. Nobody from the organization said that and the only thing you will get writing this is making people think that GameGune is a tournament that does not give a damn about spectators, and that´s not even close to the truth.
The article is not sincere about what really happened. The schedule that ORG people sent to the press before the tournament is approximate and everybody knows that. If everything goes better than expected (which is what happened), and a match can start earlier, so it will. For us, the most important thing is to take care of players. Our goal is that when the tournament is over they are happy with the organization and the facilities, so they will repeat next year and tell everyone about us. If we were such a bad organization as the article seems to imply, teams would never come to our tournament year after year. You can ask every single team of the tournament if they have had any problem with org people, computers or schedules.
We´ve always asked every participant about their opinion in order to improve and that made us what we are now. I know that advancing matches is not good for spectators and I want to apologise for the inconvenience we may have caused. But, as I said, it´s not true that we don’t care about spectators. From the very first match of the first group, HLTVs are up and running. We have every demo of every match recorded. We have all POV demos recorded. We also have server logs to do statistics with your website program. So, happily I can say that, the only problem in the tournament has been this 30 minutes of advancing the match. This could have been fixed if HLTV.org people had talked to ORG people right after the previous match and had asked when the next match was going to start rather than just writing down what the approximate schedule said.
To sum up, GameGune ORG is sorry for the inconvenience we may have caused, and we invite everyone to come to Bilbao and see how things are run here and how teams feel about the organization. Players would rather have an earlier start. We care about them because they are the single most important part of the tournament, because without them, there is no GameGune.
Nix0n from HLTV.org commented on the situation via the comments section of their website:
I would like to be the first to comment on the matter, as it was me who brought the post in the first place.
First of all I’d like to underline that GameGune for years I’ve been in HLTV.org, has always been very cooperative, with this year being no exception. MIRAA and I got picked up in the airport, dropped off at our hotel and generally served with the best conditions press could pray for. The GameGune organizers, especially zoR, made it really easy for us, in terms helping us getting HLTV setup, gathering POV demos and so forth.
Turning over to what was said to us, when we were confronted with the fact that a match in the lower-bracket would start 30mins earlier, I stressed that it is a really bad idea to pre-pone matches. As stated by zoR, matches could start earlier than schedule, where to I responded that they should not, drawing parallels to football, where this would never happen. I noticed that several users had complained about matches starting before time earlier in the tournament, which made me fight hard for the matches to begin at the “scheduled” time.
What I quoted zoR for (We don’t care about spectators, it is better for us and for the players), was his words and not something we fabricated. As nothing was recorded, it will come down to our word against his.
On a personal level, I can totally understand how zoR reacted to this. Had I been in his shoes, I would most likely have reacted the exact same way. Together with many of the other guys in the crew, I am a good friend of zoR for the past many years, which made it even harder to bring the post, as I knew it would do damage. I do however feel as a reporter, that we are obligated to report such situations, that it will damage a long-time friendship is simply the downside about getting close with the people who’s tournaments we cover.
As mentioned, I can totally understand that zoR feels offended and disappointed in a friend. I do however still think of zoR as a friend, if it’s likewise only zoR can decide.
The whole post can be found here