The fall season officially (kinda) kicked off this week with XSE Pro League in Guangzhou, China, and there are some really interesting teams coming out to play. Major attendees get challenged by many of the teams that just about missed out, and the pressure sits on teams like 9z and BetBoom to repeat their Major performances.

The Argentinian squad were immediately upset by EYEBALLERS, off the back of a red-hot JW rolling back the clock as he once again steps back into tier one.

FaZe, NIP and new-look Luminosity had horrible starts to their campaigns, finding themselves on 0-2 after two days, as the aforementioned Swedes and home-favourites TYLOO soared into the 2-0 pool as we head into today’s fixtures.

That’s all we’re going to say about the games, because frankly, they’re the least interesting part of this event.

Most of the drama in Guangzhou has actually come off the server, and not in a good way. We’re almost ready to call it already - this might be the worst-run event of the year, and maybe ever.

Trouble started even before the games began, as Luminosity had their jerseys confiscated in customs just ahead of their return to Counter-Strike. Though, as it would turn out.

In fact, the PCs used in the tournament in some cases seem to have had keyloggers and several viruses installed, leading to Magnojez having his Steam account broken into just before their first match. In fact, CS seems to have been the only thing not installed on the tournament PCs.

Those who avoided having their accounts stolen on game day still had to wait hours to even get on a server. The early games on day one were marred by hours of tech delays, and several were delayed by as much as three or four hours.

Supposedly frozen was given a broken desk, which took the admins a whole hour to fix, and the RAM in his PC had to be switched out four times before FaZe’s match could even start.

Even on day two, when delays were somewhat reduced, issues persisted. 9z and SINNERS had their match interrupted by a transformer exploding, cutting power in the entire venue. During the outage, fans were reportedly shouting for a refund, upon which they were promised a free mousepad as compensation.

Turns out, it was just a 50% discount.

We’re only two days into this sh-tshow, but we doubt it’s going to get better. If it keeps going like this, we’re ready to call this the worst-run Counter-Strike event of all time.

And there’s a million dollars on the line. Splendid.