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Problem-plagued WCA has yet to pay players from 2015, claim pros

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(Photo: Brandon Parker)

On March 10, World Cyber Arena announced its 2016 season. A few seconds later, the collective groan of the esports community swept across the internet.

That’s because in its past two years, the WCA has generously been considered a cataclysmic disaster on every front. Several pro players confirmed to Yahoo Esports that the organization not only suffers from severe planning problems but struggles to simply pay winning players. Some players claim they still haven’t even been paid for WCA 2014.

So how did we get here?

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(Photo: Brandon Parker)

The name game

WCA was born out of the World Cyber Games, which formed in 2000. The event would mirror the Olympics, holding its own Opening Ceremony and bringing together pro players and teams from 17 different countries. The prize pool was a hefty $200,000. The event returned year after year, jumping around the world to places like Korea, California and Germany.

Thanks to some poor decisions by management and partners, such as dropping Counter-Strike from their roster of games, the WCG shut down in 2014. Over its lifetime, the organization doled out $4.5 million in prize money.

But it wasn’t quite finished. In its death, the WCG split into two Chinese competitions: WEC (World Esports Championship) and WCA. After an initial event in 2014, the WEC went quiet. We are now in our third year, however, of the WCA.

The WCA global finals are held in Yinchuan, China. You’ve never heard of Yinchuan because it’s one of the most remote cities on the Chinese mainland, bumping up against the Mongolian border. Despite its location, the local government banded together on an initiative to build a massive esports arena, the Ningxia International Convention Center.

What they didn’t build, however, was a supportive infrastructure. And players are paying for it.

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(Photo: Brandon Parker)

Production problems

In 2015, WCA hoped to lure teams with promises of a well-organized trip to Yinchuan. What they got, however, was one headache after another.

Flights were a chaotic mess of incorrect dates, missing connections, and 14-hour layovers. European Warcraft III organizer Fabian Playah was reportedly stuck in the Beijing airport for 20 hours after a missed connection due to a scheduling mishap. Some players had to rebook their own flights and were promised to be reimbursed at the venue, which has yet to happen.

Players were lodged at a beautiful yet unfinished five-star hotel that they were not allowed to leave for reasons unknown. No one working the front desk spoke English. Teams were afforded translators, but they were local volunteers who struggled to bridge the language barrier. The venue was a full hour bus ride away from the hotel, and the buses were not heated despite temperatures in Yinchaun that hung in the negative numbers.

Meanwhile, the Chinese players took full advantage of their home field by staying at a hotel within 10 minutes walking distance to the venue. The edge given to the Chinese players and teams was an ongoing trend throughout the tournament.

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(Photo: Jeff Dolan)

It only got worse. Players settled into cheap folding chairs in a noisy practice area backstage. Game clients were in Chinese, and the language could not be changed. Competitors had to guess and check settings while installing their software, which was wiped if any of the computers turned off at any point. The computers endured seemingly random lag spikes and freezes, which were so rough they delayed the start of the tournament by six hours. Players had to select talents by memory of the portraits, and even had to explain to admins how the draft worked. The admins denied any use of third-party drafting tools like HeroesDraft, so players were forced to use lobby draft in a $250,000 tournament.

Issues plagued other games, too. For Crossfire, Chinese teams had been given the chance to level their accounts, which gave them competitive advantages such as a fully upgraded defuse kit (which cut bomb defusal time by 2 seconds). They were also allowed to use overpowered weapons (such as a long-ranged shotgun) that are only available in the Chinese version of the game.

“The tournament was very poorly ran. The rule set was terrible,” said Brandon Parker of North American Crossfire team 3sUP. “They basically said that any gun in game that you are able to buy is allowed to be used. Whereas in other tournaments like CrossFire Stars, they have a strict ruleset for competitive play.”

In Hearthstone, the Chinese fans could be heard calling out cards in international players hands. In Dota 2 there was a serious uproar about the Chinese teams working together to draft in the grand finals against EU Team Alliance. Players could hear the casters from where they were sitting which gave a competitive advantage for the teams that could understand the language. For an international tournament, WCA was impossibly biased against international players.

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(Photo: Jeff Dolan)

No money, mo problems

Production issues notwithstanding, the biggest problem with WCA 2015 is that players have yet to be compensated for participating.

The teams and players that Yahoo Esports has spoken with are owed well over half a million dollars. Included in that list are reputable gaming orgs such as Team Liquid, Alliance, compLexity, G2 Esports, Hellraisers, Tempo Storm, and Cloud9.

According to managers, players and GMs of several teams, for instance, over $30,000 is owed to Heroes of the Storm players from the 2015 American qualifiers alone. Concerned about missing prize money, broken promises and next to no communication from admins, only a single North American team agreed to go to China. And the problems with Heroes qualifiers were not limited to North American teams.

“I believe no European Heroes of the Storm team has been paid yet from WCA qualifiers,” Joaquim “Lowell” Fitas of European based Team Liquid told Yahoo Esports. “We are at the point where we don’t even believe WCA will pay any of the money they owe the teams.”

WCA overseas event manager Lily Gong refutes this and claims prize money is being paid out.

“The prize money is being paid since last month and as far as I know, almost all European players have received their prize money except several players whose bank information was not sufficient to make the bank transfer according to bank regulations in China,” Gong wrote in an email to Yahoo Esports.

“What we can promise is that every player who participated in WCA 2015 tournament will get their prize money from the WCA Organizing Committee.”

While Gong focused on 2015 payments owed, she didn’t respond to claims that some players haven’t been paid going back to 2014, nor did she address the countless production issues.

“WCG was so well organized, it was perfect,” world-renowned Warcraft III player Marc “yAwS” Forster told Yahoo Esports. “You had an English-speaking administrator for each tournament section. Volunteers were super nice. They even had nice trips to parks and you could take trips around the city. The experience was like, we have an amazing tournament but you can actually explore China as well. I was looking forward to Yinchaun the same way.”

Forster was owed $33,000 from expenses and his second-place result at the tournament, and the dam only broke after he spoke with us.

“I used my interview with Yahoo as leverage,” Forster said. “There was a break in communication for six weeks. I messaged every week ‘is there any news, do we have a timeframe for the money’? They didn’t respond at all.”

“The day I was asked for the interview, I thought it would be fair to let a WCA admin know. I asked him for a comment. This time it took him five minutes to respond. He told me he was unable to reach his financial department and that they only had one person doing all the transfers and that he was having issues keeping up with it. I just checked my account. The transfer was started yesterday. Me putting this interview as pressure on them made them at least send me my money,” yAwS admitted.

Currently, yAwS is one of only two players that Yahoo Esports has spoken with who have been paid prize money for WCA 2015.

While waiting a few months for payment is typical in esports, WCA has defaulted far beyond that. WCA 2015 was calamitous, and there’s little reason to think this upcoming season will fare differently. Barring a logistical 180, any players crazy enough to give it a go should strap themselves in for a wild, frustrating ride.

Dylan Walker is on Twitter at @Dyluuxx