ESL has been tasked with running the open qualifiers for not only Valve tournaments but others as well. Their efforts are just outright lazy and despite some of the problems being very easy to fix or address, the admins just turn a blind eye or even seem annoyed to have to fix them.

For reference, in virtually every NA open qualifier very few teams play compared to other regions. This means that due to how the brackets work being one-size-fits-all-regions NA teams sign up for a tournament advertised as being on say, a Wednesday, but wind up having to checkin without playing at all on that day and instead only playing the second day. This not only leads to a lot of confusion but also just downright wasted time. I don't see any reason why games aren't just play the day of as opposed to the 2nd day. in the #na-support channel of the ESL discord this can be viewed. The next upcoming tournament, ESL Mumbai, has it scheduled to be three days of games where the bo16 starts late on the 2nd day. NA in the last tournament only had 15 teams. That means that it will again have another day and a half wait before playing at all. https://i.imgur.com/SJGzcwy.png This is just a short snippet of the various complaints about this, but there are MANY more.

Another problem is that there is apparently literally no seeding being done for any of the open qualifiers. I think that this problem goes without saying in that the point of open qualifiers, when two teams advance to regional qualifiers, is that the two best teams should get through, but the odds of that happening are drastically lower without seeding. It's possible for the three best teams to wind up on the same side of the bracket so the teams that through are say the 1st and 4th best as opposed to 1st and 2nd. A manager for a professional team complained about this but it never garnered a response to my knowledge. https://i.imgur.com/Or5K7hL.png The admins overall make numerous mistakes. For one of our games the bot used to create games was bugged and didn't invite us and the password was never posted in our match room on the ESL site either. It was a lot more difficult to just get an admin's attention to DM us the password than it should have been. They also make very odd decisions like trying to get a team to quit midway through a game for a caster. https://i.imgur.com/ZXWUMkI.png

Further proof of constant frustrating mistakes being made in just the last qualifiers alone is evident when the lobbies aren't even being hosted correctly. Amateur casters were wanting to cast the games but were unable to do so numerous times due to the games simply not being on the tournament ticket. https://i.imgur.com/jBTq0ez.png

The admins also never addressed numerous player problems during the tournament where other teams were flat out not showing up. Observe the timestamps for each of these posts from this player's complaints. https://i.imgur.com/s8jC0c1.png Then over 30 minutes after the time that the match was supposed to start, an admin finally replies stating that the screenshot didn't have a timestamp when the player clearly said that it did. https://i.imgur.com/1ir0Q2H.png