Dear osu! community

Dear osu! community,



In light of the recent events, we thought it'd be necessary to clarify a few things among the numerous misunderstandings.

For those who are unaware of what this is about, we are refering to the Vaxei vs. Chocomint match that happened last Sunday.

VOD here (courtesy of CPOL): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--YUCLZipN4&



1. Brief summary



Last Sunday morning was held one of the semifinals match of Game Osu, opposing Chocomint and Vaxei, two of the favorites of this tournament. It has come to us after the match started that Chocomint was injured, yet decided to end the match without forfeiting due to seemingly being pressured by our forfeit policy (more on that later).

The match was then followed by Reddit and Twitter threads where some of the most important figures of the community accused us of forcing and threatening Cookiezi to play in order to maximize our Twitch audience, despite him being injured.

This whole situation ended up with a huge backlash from the community on Twitter, Reddit and our Discord server.



Original Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/osugame/comments/dqvxgw/vaxei_vs_chocomint_gameosu_round_5/



2. Reschedule/Forfeits policy



As opposed to what might have been poorly said, players always had the right to reschedule/forfeit in exceptional cases like this, we do care about players' health and we are not apathetic, we are looking to make the tournament as sane for players as possible.

We have always been flexible with our (re)schedulings as a match is better than no match when it's justified enough (i.e players not being home, personal issues or in this case, hand injuries), even going against our policy. (see: https://gameosu.s-ul.eu/doHAXdeK)

Even though there were no forfeit policy on the website, we do follow common-sense for it, we believe a player should always be able to leave the tournament whenever he wants and for whatever reasons.



3. Regarding cash prizes removal in case of forfeits



Original Statement: https://gameosu.s-ul.eu/LEZWw1Hf



Due to a wave of forfeit among players and because of the upcoming pressure from having to stream enough matches for our sponsors, we decided (Friday night) that we would mention the possible removal of any cash-prize earned by forfeiting the tournament.

Unfortunately due to a communication mistake on our end, we omitted exceptions in the announcement, with the most important being about cases like injuries or important personal issues. Quite obviously we would never invalidate someone's achievements for unfair reasons.

We apologize for making this statement this late in the event, and overlooking its consequences. We will do our best to avoid confusion in the future.



As for why we decided to create such a rule, we can't allow ourselves the risk to lose, for example, a Grand Finals match because a player decided to forfeit without justifying himself. This is a common rule in sponsored tournaments (ie. ESL) to prevent abusive forfeits.

Because of our engagement with the sponsors, having less matches due to forfeits would make our sponsors reconsider their investments in the future, and this is obviously not conceivable for us as we think this is a positive outcome for the game going forward.



Do note that this forfeit rule applied for full forfeits of the tournament, not just single matches forfeit. A player in Winner bracket could forfeit his match and not be out of the tournament, therefore not invalidating his cashprize even in case of unjustified forfeits.





4. Some clarifications



We have never threatened anyone, neither forced anyone to play at a specific time that could have been better for us.

Chocomint and Vaxei have both been contacted prior to their matches and both agreed on a time that wasn't ideal for Sardoche (5:00 AM in France). We did indeed ask them if they could play outside of the 0 UTC to 7 UTC hour range, but we never forced them to play at a time they didn't want to play.

As Mirthille (scheduler) stated here, they both got to choose the schedule they wanted. https://puu.sh/EAdY1/1345afaf9e.png



5. Feedbacks/criticism



We have always listened and thought about what the players wanted and asked of us, and we always try to improve the Game_Osu considering their feedbacks, even going as far as changing some of our design ideas due to major feedback issues (i.e modified finals pool in #GO3, removal of FreeMod following our players' poll answers etc).

We believe that we are still far from offering the most player-friendly tournament there is, but it is our will to better ourselves and the tournament so we can both please players and keep sponsor investments in the future.



6. Going forward



We understand that the idea of sponsored tournaments is something new for the community and the players. The stakes of running such a tournament are way different than what most standard osu! tournaments have to abide to. We made a mistake believing that players would understand clearly that we wanted professional and rigourous investment out of them, when such thing is not the norm. It should have been our role to communicate better and share our views about the tournament better, and we made a poor job at it.



For this we want to offer our most sincere apologies to the players.



Now going forward.

We want to keep making sponsored tournaments a reality for osu! and we want these tournaments to not just be the Game_Osu but tons of others. Making osu! fit the global scope of what sponsors, investors and influencers want is hard, and it has to come to a new design if we want to make it continue and possibly expand.



osu! is one of the only games where you can run international tournaments with all of the best players in the comfort of their homes online, due to the game not having ping/lag issues. This spawns new issues that other e-sports competitions we inspired from don't really run into, such as the hardcore scheduling we have to deal with, all while trying to stream as much matches as we can to the biggest audience possible.

We would never put sponsors and audience first before players, but there are contracts that both Sardoche and sponsors agreed on which require of us to stand by things such as trying to stream as much as we can on what is our main source of viewership, Sardoche's channel.



This past "drama" is not going to make either Sardoche or our sponsors reconsider their investments, however in the future it is likely that this kind of situation could rule out any further event of the kind, which I believe would be both saddening for us, the viewers and the players who'd like something more to look forward in their competitive osu! time.



We hope this made things more clear for some of you, and we hope to regain your trust and support again in the future. In the meantime, we will try to make the necessary changes so that we can all have a good time doing something that we love.



Thanks for reading us again,



Oxy & Kaanibaru

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