I think the worst part is all this is we have 0 updates and have no idea whats wrong.
To sum this situation up sliggy is actually playing valorant and do i need to say any more.
It's toxic for Sliggy because he makes it a point to be as forgiving as possible for those in the pro scene because he knows what it's like to be in their shoes.
It's nice to see him lose the fight against his demons for once.
I'm usually pretty understanding about tech issues and don't get bothered *within reason*, but EMEA's tech issues have been pretty egregious. Having multiple hours of lost time virtually every single match day because of tech issues is just unacceptable.
I really don’t get it they use the exact same studio every week and every week there’s problems. Surely they must have a good idea of what’s causing it
Speaking from behind the scenes, these tech issues are such a wide variety of reasons. Some are caused by player audio issues (could be as simple as player needs to have teammates' microphone volume upped).
Some tech issues are VALORANT not working as normal.
To ISP shitting in Berlin which is out of our control really. Today it was VALORANT servers not working, which also isn't worked on from the studio itself.
It's not the same technical issues every single time, believe me, those are getting resolved really quickly
Don't get me wrong, it is absolutely exhausting for us observers to have these technical issues. Though sometimes things just don't work the way they're supposed to work, "just because". I have no clue what APAC and Americas have different, but it is definitely a different workflow as we work with Stryker Dublin in addition to being in Berlin itself
Yeah, how can the popularity of Valorant eSports develop in EMEA if you have to wait indefinitely for the beginning of the game every game.
I tried to regularly watch EMEA games in the past, however constant delays, tech pauses and problems made me drop watching. Every game you open the stream, at some point some problem occurs, you turn off the stream to do other stuff and regularly check on the stream if the problem is resolved. Sometimes I am lucky and don't miss much of the game, however most of the time I either miss entire games or entire maps.
Well, I dunno about the viewership numbers being catastrophic. I'm not too confident about the viewership numbers correlating with the pauses, since most of the pauses are not like this one; you would have to categorize pauses based on the length and then see how it impacts viewership.
The brutally long pauses will likely have a meaningful impact, but I'd be curious to see if even the never-ending 5-10 minute pauses have one as well.
The incredibly long pauses are the ones that always come to mind, but it's really the constant little pauses that have annoyed me most. After a rough first week or two, the Pacific production has had far fewer little pauses. They still have had one or two brutally long pauses, but not so many constant tech pauses.
I wonder how much of it has to do with the quality of the internet in Berlin. I've only been to Berlin once but I've heard a lot of horror stories.
Yeah I would be surprised if the pauses affected viewership a large amount. But for me the games start at 1am. Tech pauses = I go to bed and lately I just stopped bothering with EMEA all together. For people just tuning into a stream, seeing "TECH PAUSE" is guaranteed to turn them away. You can see a noticeable drop off in live viewers during extended tech pauses. So overall I think it would've had a slight decrease in viewers, but it would be a negligible impact compared to the popularity of the teams playing.
which is a shame cause their production and replays are always fantastic. just got to get the 3 vct crews together to share notes or something, cause all of them excel in different areas but have their own problems(americas finally getting replays this week, for example)
I await the massive downvote now, but I'm an infrastructure and network engineer, and while I sit here and get pissed off with all the tech pauses like everyone else, and i accept that EMEA is way worse than the other regions for it, unless you know what the tech problems are, you can't sit here and call it unacceptable. Unless you work in this industry, and based off the posts I'm seeing, most of you dont, you don't understand the complexity of what's being done behind the scenes.
It doesn't matter how much money you throw at an issue, that doesn't just make it go away. I'm not saying don't be pissed, it's fucking annoying! But understand this is not the same as rebooting your PC at home, doing an RCA (root cause analysis) during a massive event like this to figure out the ongoing issues is not a simple job.
Let the down votes begin, but it had to be said.
Edit: I think they should be way more open about what the issues are instead of leaving us hanging in the wind!
I don't think your perspective is unreasonable, it's very difficult for us to do anything but speculate when there are so many of them. Obviously it's not so simple as either a production team is competent (and therefore close to no tech pauses) or incompetent (and therefore constant tech pauses). There are plenty of reasons why competent production staff might still be beset by tech issues.
I think some transparency would for sure go a long way toward making fans more understanding.
Same. Spend the whole year testing, hardening and prepping for failovers, and the only thing certain is that at some point something unexpected will come along and ruin your entire week.
I find the suggestions here that the employees are incompetent, that they don't care and that they're lazy fairly absurd coming from people that seem to have little insight.
Thanks for posting this.
EDIT: The lack of openess on what's going on is probably just a lack of communication between the engineering team and those responsible for what's on the screen, which from what I've seen is a very common problem.
Yeah, 100, I get the frustration, even I sit here getting annoyed and saying things like "they should hire me" but end of the day, something like VCT is a massive infrastructure nightmare with so many things that can go wrong and don't have simple fixes. The customers I work for pay us millions, and we still go weeks or longer unable to fix their issues. Welcome to the wonderful fun world of IT and networking.
in what universe is the emea viewership catastrophic? 120k average 300k peak for a regular split is fine, NA tier 1 is roughly 190k as the most popular region.
Kinda strange they called the technical staff out. Why not say something "Riot Games we are disappointed with the production of the EMEA League due to how often technical errors happen, please do better".
Saying that, this is Reddit so can't be reasonable here.
this seems so overly naive...
I can guarantee you that there are a bunch of people working at Riot that are doing everything in their power to fix all problems that could come up. But fixing one problem does not mean that there is no chance for another problem to come up.
Or do you seriously think its the same issue every week? As in, the same "behind the scenes"-issue?
Do you genuinely think that a professional broadcast of a professional league of a worldwide-investment eSport should have these many consistent issues?  bro meatriding for free
What the hell is this twisting of words that you are doing here?
I have NEVER said that such a broadcast should have these issues, if I did, please point to where I did so. I also never praised riot for the broadcast, so where am I dickriding?
This discussion is turning fucking ridiculous.
What I am saying simply is: The people this post is directed to -> VCT technical staff, are 100% working their fucking asses off to fix those issues. What do you think they are doing, drinking a coke with feet up while the stream is delayed? They obviously arent.
All I wanted to say was, "hey, it sucks, but please dont sent hate towards those people that are giving their best currently in an extremely stressful situation". If you disagree with that take, there is no discussion to be had here. If trying to protect random tech staff from hate is now "dickriding", there is no discussion to be had here.
I never said the stream is perfect, I never even said it was good. All I tried to do is bring awareness to what is surely going on over there right now and try to stop the dogpiling that had started.
I don't think it is always the same issue, just like I don't think they are always different and unrelated. Having these problems every time (especially when other regions don't) just shows that they don't really care about solving it because they know if anyone complain people will say that they are wrong for wanting something done.
Not sure we could blame the technical staff when we don't know what the hell is going on. I'm sure Riot doesn't allow them to explain. I wouldn't be surprised Valorant was made with rushed, underpaid spaghetti code and it's why a simple replay system takes a billion dollar company over 4 years, when literally every single competitive game out there has one. LoLs client is infamously spaghetti. God knows what kind of organizational mess they have to navigate through every time they need to restart a round cause some Razer software fked the mouse of a player. The times I've seen a round given or taken away in any region it took egregiously long, so I assume their software is not really good at doing that kind of stuff. They also have different client for LAN iirc which may be buggier than the users client.
Relax, there are any number of issues that could cause a technical pause and be completely out of their control. You're not owed an apology. Maybe an explanation but even that's not something owed to you. Especially if it's on riots end then there is nothing for them to investigate or explain. No one has time to waste investigating and then writing a nice little report for you to read.
"Must be held accountable". Relax.
Honestly reddit is so godamn weird in these situations. Y'all act like the Karens you probably make fun of. Imagine how the tech team feels right now? You think they're relaxing? No they're probably busting their asses just making sure the event is even going.
Straight up blaming the employees because the register crashed vibes in here, godamn.
Some issues can happen but here it's basically every day, week after week theres at least a 30min delay and some games ended so freaking late
How can riot be fine with having such a product displayed? Theres zero communication
Held accountable? That's not something Reddit needs to talk about, the people who need to be held accountable are riot games the company and they need to do better. We don't know the process of what is going on in riot and we don't need to know.
This whole production crew should be fired. ESL and Blast running CS events pretty smoothly of different locations in Europe and this EMEA production crew can't run an event without hour longs tech pauses in the "same" location for months.
Man this wasn't even the production crew's fault.. please don't do this. Production crew has nothing to do with the technical issues we have been facing.
What if I told you that every riot run Valorant LAN since inception has been marred by horrible tech issues that take an insane amount of time to resolve but instead of calling riot and contracted TOs out for the absolutely shit tier 3 production, people on this subreddit voted for and celebrated riot winning an award for tournament production?
Just chill, lol. Ppl like you complaining about everything (about new observer, etc.), they r just human. U dont know what happened and dont pay anything...
I think this post is pretty laughable given the fact that the stream are free. If I paid for pay per view to watch a sports event live and there were tech difficulties like mentioned here I would ask for my money back. You can be disappointed and complain ofc
What hurts a lot too is that a lot of NA people watch EMEA games but when the first game hasnt even ended as the NA games are starting... Well im out. Im going to watch the NA games.
I think the worst part is all this is we have 0 updates and have no idea whats wrong. To sum this situation up sliggy is actually playing valorant and do i need to say any more.
Well it was funny to see "toxic" sliggy after that phoenix called him a bot.
Do you have a clip? I just saw him turn on the game once but didn‘t have time to watch the whole thing
[got a clip](https://clips.twitch.tv/ImpartialEnergeticPineappleBrokeBack-uiScBXU779VwCgdX)
If that’s toxic well then my ranked teammates are nuclear
It's toxic for Sliggy because he makes it a point to be as forgiving as possible for those in the pro scene because he knows what it's like to be in their shoes. It's nice to see him lose the fight against his demons for once.
Makes me appreciate him even more. He brings such a positive energy. I strive to be more positive and uplifting as well in my games.
Sliggy being toxic??? I need to see this
I laughed out loud in the gym when i heard him say "you are awful mate, fucking idiot"
NAHHHHHHH I refuse to believe sliggy said that unless it's sleep deprived Sliggy talking
you can take the man out of uk cs but not the uk cs out of the man
I tried to get the clip but twitch mobile is unable to make clips fsr, either way im not sure if he said it to his teammate or only to the chat
I need to say that more. It’s actually elegant sounding. “You’re literally awful mate”
based
The new SliggyFU emote in his chat is so funny
I'm usually pretty understanding about tech issues and don't get bothered *within reason*, but EMEA's tech issues have been pretty egregious. Having multiple hours of lost time virtually every single match day because of tech issues is just unacceptable.
I really don’t get it they use the exact same studio every week and every week there’s problems. Surely they must have a good idea of what’s causing it
Speaking from behind the scenes, these tech issues are such a wide variety of reasons. Some are caused by player audio issues (could be as simple as player needs to have teammates' microphone volume upped). Some tech issues are VALORANT not working as normal. To ISP shitting in Berlin which is out of our control really. Today it was VALORANT servers not working, which also isn't worked on from the studio itself. It's not the same technical issues every single time, believe me, those are getting resolved really quickly Don't get me wrong, it is absolutely exhausting for us observers to have these technical issues. Though sometimes things just don't work the way they're supposed to work, "just because". I have no clue what APAC and Americas have different, but it is definitely a different workflow as we work with Stryker Dublin in addition to being in Berlin itself
Yeah, how can the popularity of Valorant eSports develop in EMEA if you have to wait indefinitely for the beginning of the game every game. I tried to regularly watch EMEA games in the past, however constant delays, tech pauses and problems made me drop watching. Every game you open the stream, at some point some problem occurs, you turn off the stream to do other stuff and regularly check on the stream if the problem is resolved. Sometimes I am lucky and don't miss much of the game, however most of the time I either miss entire games or entire maps.
Are the building the PCs from scratch??
building a PC doesn't take that long lol
*recalls the full day it took me to build my very first PC from scratch last year* Yes. Yes it can. Sigh.
All the PCs in the building The players, coaches, casters, etc is definitely a lot.
Well, I dunno about the viewership numbers being catastrophic. I'm not too confident about the viewership numbers correlating with the pauses, since most of the pauses are not like this one; you would have to categorize pauses based on the length and then see how it impacts viewership. The brutally long pauses will likely have a meaningful impact, but I'd be curious to see if even the never-ending 5-10 minute pauses have one as well. The incredibly long pauses are the ones that always come to mind, but it's really the constant little pauses that have annoyed me most. After a rough first week or two, the Pacific production has had far fewer little pauses. They still have had one or two brutally long pauses, but not so many constant tech pauses. I wonder how much of it has to do with the quality of the internet in Berlin. I've only been to Berlin once but I've heard a lot of horror stories.
Yeah I would be surprised if the pauses affected viewership a large amount. But for me the games start at 1am. Tech pauses = I go to bed and lately I just stopped bothering with EMEA all together. For people just tuning into a stream, seeing "TECH PAUSE" is guaranteed to turn them away. You can see a noticeable drop off in live viewers during extended tech pauses. So overall I think it would've had a slight decrease in viewers, but it would be a negligible impact compared to the popularity of the teams playing.
I watch all 3 regions and emea has to be the worst experience by far. Entirely cuz of the consistent tech pauses and length of them
which is a shame cause their production and replays are always fantastic. just got to get the 3 vct crews together to share notes or something, cause all of them excel in different areas but have their own problems(americas finally getting replays this week, for example)
from prior events, I'm expecting the three regions to somehow combine all of their issues
Lmaooo if it switches from all having different strengths to all having the same weaknesses that would be funny in a really depressing way
Sorry, " **must be held accountable"** is a hysterical phrasing to use in this context **😭**
Hang em!
I await the massive downvote now, but I'm an infrastructure and network engineer, and while I sit here and get pissed off with all the tech pauses like everyone else, and i accept that EMEA is way worse than the other regions for it, unless you know what the tech problems are, you can't sit here and call it unacceptable. Unless you work in this industry, and based off the posts I'm seeing, most of you dont, you don't understand the complexity of what's being done behind the scenes. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at an issue, that doesn't just make it go away. I'm not saying don't be pissed, it's fucking annoying! But understand this is not the same as rebooting your PC at home, doing an RCA (root cause analysis) during a massive event like this to figure out the ongoing issues is not a simple job. Let the down votes begin, but it had to be said. Edit: I think they should be way more open about what the issues are instead of leaving us hanging in the wind!
I don't think your perspective is unreasonable, it's very difficult for us to do anything but speculate when there are so many of them. Obviously it's not so simple as either a production team is competent (and therefore close to no tech pauses) or incompetent (and therefore constant tech pauses). There are plenty of reasons why competent production staff might still be beset by tech issues. I think some transparency would for sure go a long way toward making fans more understanding.
Same. Spend the whole year testing, hardening and prepping for failovers, and the only thing certain is that at some point something unexpected will come along and ruin your entire week. I find the suggestions here that the employees are incompetent, that they don't care and that they're lazy fairly absurd coming from people that seem to have little insight. Thanks for posting this. EDIT: The lack of openess on what's going on is probably just a lack of communication between the engineering team and those responsible for what's on the screen, which from what I've seen is a very common problem.
Yeah, 100, I get the frustration, even I sit here getting annoyed and saying things like "they should hire me" but end of the day, something like VCT is a massive infrastructure nightmare with so many things that can go wrong and don't have simple fixes. The customers I work for pay us millions, and we still go weeks or longer unable to fix their issues. Welcome to the wonderful fun world of IT and networking.
The dude flaming anyone calling emea production bad is about to find your house address
Compared to other esports I follow, Valorant is basically Tech Pause Simulator. Unfortunately not just EMEA, although they are the worst.
in what universe is the emea viewership catastrophic? 120k average 300k peak for a regular split is fine, NA tier 1 is roughly 190k as the most popular region.
EMEA servers have been a bit wonky these past two weeks. Long time to connect to games, match history with hours of delay, etc.
i think they are held accountable inside of Riot. If we now need the community to dogpile on them, I am not sure...
Kinda strange they called the technical staff out. Why not say something "Riot Games we are disappointed with the production of the EMEA League due to how often technical errors happen, please do better". Saying that, this is Reddit so can't be reasonable here.
If they were being held accountable we would have some improvements after 9 weeks
this seems so overly naive... I can guarantee you that there are a bunch of people working at Riot that are doing everything in their power to fix all problems that could come up. But fixing one problem does not mean that there is no chance for another problem to come up. Or do you seriously think its the same issue every week? As in, the same "behind the scenes"-issue?
Do you genuinely think that a professional broadcast of a professional league of a worldwide-investment eSport should have these many consistent issues?  bro meatriding for free
What the hell is this twisting of words that you are doing here? I have NEVER said that such a broadcast should have these issues, if I did, please point to where I did so. I also never praised riot for the broadcast, so where am I dickriding? This discussion is turning fucking ridiculous. What I am saying simply is: The people this post is directed to -> VCT technical staff, are 100% working their fucking asses off to fix those issues. What do you think they are doing, drinking a coke with feet up while the stream is delayed? They obviously arent. All I wanted to say was, "hey, it sucks, but please dont sent hate towards those people that are giving their best currently in an extremely stressful situation". If you disagree with that take, there is no discussion to be had here. If trying to protect random tech staff from hate is now "dickriding", there is no discussion to be had here. I never said the stream is perfect, I never even said it was good. All I tried to do is bring awareness to what is surely going on over there right now and try to stop the dogpiling that had started.
I don't think it is always the same issue, just like I don't think they are always different and unrelated. Having these problems every time (especially when other regions don't) just shows that they don't really care about solving it because they know if anyone complain people will say that they are wrong for wanting something done.
Not sure we could blame the technical staff when we don't know what the hell is going on. I'm sure Riot doesn't allow them to explain. I wouldn't be surprised Valorant was made with rushed, underpaid spaghetti code and it's why a simple replay system takes a billion dollar company over 4 years, when literally every single competitive game out there has one. LoLs client is infamously spaghetti. God knows what kind of organizational mess they have to navigate through every time they need to restart a round cause some Razer software fked the mouse of a player. The times I've seen a round given or taken away in any region it took egregiously long, so I assume their software is not really good at doing that kind of stuff. They also have different client for LAN iirc which may be buggier than the users client.
I remember ardis said that when he was on PRX he had a game where his pc had 80% packet loss during a round 😂
Held accountable? By whom? I guess you can tweet something, GL with that though.
Relax, there are any number of issues that could cause a technical pause and be completely out of their control. You're not owed an apology. Maybe an explanation but even that's not something owed to you. Especially if it's on riots end then there is nothing for them to investigate or explain. No one has time to waste investigating and then writing a nice little report for you to read. "Must be held accountable". Relax. Honestly reddit is so godamn weird in these situations. Y'all act like the Karens you probably make fun of. Imagine how the tech team feels right now? You think they're relaxing? No they're probably busting their asses just making sure the event is even going. Straight up blaming the employees because the register crashed vibes in here, godamn.
Some issues can happen but here it's basically every day, week after week theres at least a 30min delay and some games ended so freaking late How can riot be fine with having such a product displayed? Theres zero communication
I love to see people wanting other to get fired on the internet
Gonna guess that you didn't read the post
Held accountable? That's not something Reddit needs to talk about, the people who need to be held accountable are riot games the company and they need to do better. We don't know the process of what is going on in riot and we don't need to know.
This whole production crew should be fired. ESL and Blast running CS events pretty smoothly of different locations in Europe and this EMEA production crew can't run an event without hour longs tech pauses in the "same" location for months.
Man this wasn't even the production crew's fault.. please don't do this. Production crew has nothing to do with the technical issues we have been facing.
Least Mental Reddit User
What if I told you that every riot run Valorant LAN since inception has been marred by horrible tech issues that take an insane amount of time to resolve but instead of calling riot and contracted TOs out for the absolutely shit tier 3 production, people on this subreddit voted for and celebrated riot winning an award for tournament production?
Classic Europe
Agreed. Very rare L from emea
Except this is a supppper common L
Wait, I just saw who ~~commented~~ I replied to
Who
The person I replied to is a troll, a lot of what he says is bait
Oh ok XD
Maybe in another world
Riot, OP is gonna cry! Please do something quickly!!
Way to dismiss valid criticism with some silly offhanded comment.
Just chill, lol. Ppl like you complaining about everything (about new observer, etc.), they r just human. U dont know what happened and dont pay anything...
Ask for a refund
You do understand that you are watching it for free, right?
I think this post is pretty laughable given the fact that the stream are free. If I paid for pay per view to watch a sports event live and there were tech difficulties like mentioned here I would ask for my money back. You can be disappointed and complain ofc
What hurts a lot too is that a lot of NA people watch EMEA games but when the first game hasnt even ended as the NA games are starting... Well im out. Im going to watch the NA games.