PGL Krakow was the second major of the year, after ELEAGUE Atlanta. Valve always had a reputation for picking the best people when it comes to hosting the major. However, some recent “problems” in the hosting as well as in certain matches does make people wonder why Valve chose PGL to host a major this year.
The first problem, was the problem of framerates. Since the last Counter Strike : Global Offensive update, most players have been getting reduced framerates on even beefy rigs that would not struggle with the game otherwise. However, the Ninja In Pyjamas team had a possible fix for the issue, which did help a lot of people fix their low framerates in-game.
However, most players were surprised to hear of the bad specifications of the rigs which were to be used by the players in the rigs. The rigs were supposed to use old Core i5’s, which aren’t that impressive, according to Marcus ‘coldzera’ David. Marcus also said that 70-150 FPS is not a framerate professional players like him are used to. Andreas ‘Xyp9x’ Hejsleth and Christopher ‘GeT_RiGhT” Alesund were seen complaining about the resolution on the PCs as well. A screenshot of a casual banter between the players about the PCs at PGL Krakow 2017 is shown below:
There were a large number of complaints from Counter Strike fans, who could not view the matches on the in-game CSGO TV, that allows one to spectate matches. The game would freeze on the loading screen, and would have to be force quit from the Task Manager. One had to repeat the process till one actually connects to the game and is able to view it.
There have been allegations of cheating, or rather, exploitation of bugs in game. Allegations of the exploitation of a bug in-game were leveled against BIG in their match with FaZe Clan. In the map Inferno, when BIG were playing CT, they used the jump bug at numerous spots on the map to spot FaZe players before FaZe players spotted them. This meant that BIG always had a split second advantage, which they used (or rather, abused) to the fullest extent. A video showing the exploit can be seen here :
Valve had issued a statement on this, saying that teams are free to use the jump bug if they felt like it. The statement could be read here : https://www.hltv.org/news/21053/crouch-jump-bug-officially-allowed-at-the-major
The problems with the major don’t end there. Technical difficulties led to the last few rounds of the BIG vs Cloud9 match being played offline, without it being streamed on the Twitch channel or on GOTV.
Moreover, in the match with BIG, Michael “shroud” Grzesiek had a scoreline of 4-22, mainly due to his PC not having the NVIDIA GeForce drivers installed. This was said in a tweet by Jake “Stewie2k” Yip, another player for Cloud9.
This has led to widespread outrage by the viewers as well as the players against the organizers, leading to a further plummet in the number of viewers. PGL has given an official apology for the same, in the hope of calming down frayed tempers.
“PGL Krakow 2017 – CSGO, like you’ve never experienced before” – that’s true, because very few tournaments experience this sort of mishaps, and certainly not majors, which are planned much before the major is actually announced to the public.
