Here we round up the Gfinity LAN weekend and highlight some of the improvements Gfinity need to make and what we enjoyed about the weekend.

Production Still Sucks

ReDeYe was drafted in to improve the production quality of Gfinity as at the last Gfinity event the production was abysmal. This event wasn’t much different. The production value on the Friday was terrible, sound issues, constant breaks due to technical issues and little to no communication of this on the stream. A simple overlay saying there are technical issues would suffice but the only reason people knew the breaks were because of technical issues was because of SirScoots saying so every so often. Despite ReDeYe now being Head of Production I don’t think he will have had much influence on this event so hopefully this will be fixed next. Random music and ingame sounds were still playing when the camera went back to the analyst desk, mics weren’t working even on the last day of the event, Sunday. After the incredibly poor production last event you would have thought they’d be able to improve for this event and even do practice runs before the event at their own venue. There were more issues in the grand final as well, an overlay said Cloud9 won on Nuke against Virtus.pro in the third place game but it was infact Virtus.pro who won on Nuke.

More Money Than Space

Hiring the top casters, teams and personalities to cast, play and analyse is pretty much the only thing that makes this event worth watching. However, they seem to have spent all their money on the talent and not had enough money left for bigger booths. As well as the players not having a lot of space to play, the venue doesn’t have a lot of room to expand, it’s a converted cinema so you can only fit a maximum of 600 spectators in the whole venue. Not great when we’re seeing crowds in the thousands at Majors.

The “Sound Proof Booths”

They’re not sound proof. The teams should wear sound cancelling headphones or add more sound proofing to the booths so that it’s completely fair.

Poor Connections

Players were playing on 58 ping on LAN and weren’t able to play a full game out completely. As well as this affecting the players it affected the streams, lagging cutting in and out, and having to restart them constantly.

Delays

The whole first day only one game was played and all the other games were moved over to the Saturday. Granted they fit these games in well and were ready for their first day to be an absolute shambles.

The Analysts

A fantastic trio of Thoorin, Richard Lewis and SirScoots gave the analyst desk to be one of the best things about the event. These three could easily have a talk show together; they flowed well. SirScoots held it together being the mediator, and Thoorin and Richard Lewis bounced off each other very well almost making the huge amount of breaks fun to watch/listen to.

UK Representation

Gfinity is a UK LAN it would have been nice to have what i-series has for Europeans. An online qualifier for two spaces at the event for UK teams. This might have given the other teams someone to easily beat but it would also give the UK scene something to work towards, some more exposure and participation at the event. As well as this it would give the UK scene a reason to go to the event. As it stands now, it’s just another tournament that you’d watch on Twitch but wouldn’t go to because the venue is small, the other UK guys aren’t there because there’s nothing to do other than watch games and when you get there it seems more like you’re supposed to just sit there for the whole day and watch, not socialise, eat or drink. Just watch. And going off last events prices, it’s incredibly expensive to go and sit in a dark room on your own having an equal or worse experience than you would if you were watching on Twitch.

Twitch Chat

It was horrendous. People were allowed to spam anything and everything from Kappa to the swastika. It took until Sunday for some sort of moderating to come in to action and even then spam was happening and the odd swastika was posted.