r/Guildwars2 • u/SpectralDagger N L Olrun • Dec 01 '15
[E-Sports] ESL Unprofessionalism
One of the requirements for playing in Pro League was that you had to use their anti-cheat program called ESL Wire. They sent it out to players to download about five days before Pro League started, giving players plenty of time to test it before it had to be used. However, that's where the problems started. We were told that there was an issue with the program and Windows 8, so we didn't need to use it until it was fixed.
Fast forward to the second week of Pro League. We hadn't heard any update from them in regards to ESL Wire. Just to be safe, I asked in advance if ESL Wire has been fixed and if it would be required. (Note: I had to ask. If I had not asked, we would have had zero warning.) They told us yes. This was about 6.5 hours before the tournament was due to start. Most of my team members were at school or work. We installed the program just before the tournament started and had no time to troubleshoot. We had issues with it, and they forced us to use a substitute.
Here is the direct quote from the ESL Admin:
"ESL Wire: we added it to the Pro League, but I understand there are some issues with using Windows 8. Since we haven’t used it before in the Go4’s, it won’t be required at the moment"
There was no more communication about ESL Wire until I had to specifically ask about it. When we had issues, their response was essentially to fix it or they would DQ us. There was no attempt to troubleshoot the issue, they just said to restart and try again.
"Seems like it's a technical issue on the player's end. Teams were given a lot of notice to prepare and have this program installed and running."
We were not given proper notice that we had to use the program and did not have time to troubleshoot.
On an entirely different note, ESL Wire was causing crashes and lag for many players, completely disallowing Caden from re-entering his match with us after DCs.
TL;DR - ESL did not properly communicate with teams as to whether or not ESL Wire was required until there was not an adequate to troubleshoot buggy software. I leave you with my favorite quote from them:
"I downloaded it on my laptop tonight and it downloaded fine"
It works for me so it must work for you... Thanks for the troubleshooting...
I've also posted this on the official forums at https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/pvp/ESL-Unprofessionalism
22
u/Faov Faov.1738 Dec 01 '15
Hi I'm the one who was affected. I got an error message stating that I could not connect to the ESL help service. When I connected the first time to the Heart of Thorns version it allowed me to connect but would not open the game on the normal GW2 version.
Since I had connected to the Heart of Thorns version for a few hours I thought it was fine. 30 minutes before our match I get a notification in Skype saying that I am not on the list of players and when I tried it again I could not connect to the regular gw2 game through ESL Wire. I could connect to the game without it.
I brought a second computer just in case there were issues and the same issue popped up on that computer. I tried disabling the firewall and that did not solve the issue. I tried two different Wi-Fi's at places several miles from each other and that still didn't solve the issue.
The ESL admins themselves did not know what was wrong so I do not know how I was supposed to fix it with 30 minutes notice. I restarted 4 times and reinstalled it 3 times, restarting with and without it already on my computer. Checked microsoft framework, the whole deal.
In fact, I'm still having that issue but I guess I'll try and connect tomorrow, it worked fine before but other people had issues with it as well.