DHW qual postponed to next week

DreamHack Winter qualifier has been postponed to next week and the organizers, FACEIT, have taken it upon themselves to cover the cost of the flight tickets for the two qualified teams.

The online qualifier that will hand out two slots for the $250,000 DreamHack Winter tournament was supposed to start yesterday, but it was postponed due to problems on the FACEIT platform which saw their website running extremely slow or not loading at all for most people.

Their decision after the problems last night was to hold the whole 128 team qualifier today, starting from 18:00 , but after the community's reaction and some more troubles on the platform, they decided to move the tournament to next week.

To make up for the rising prices in flight tickets so close to the event, FACEIT have stated that they will cover the travel costs for the two winning teams.

"Yesterday night we issued a statement to explain why our platform went down, as well as to why we scheduled the entire tournament on one day.

The reasons for this are that we do not want to conflict with other events, such as the Fragbite Masters qualifier on Wednesday (who were kind enough to reschedule for us), and Techlabs during the weekend. The second reason is that if we wait too long, flight ticket prices will continue to rise.

The solution we offer is to schedule the qualifier next week regardless of these rising prices, on Tuesday 19 and Wednesday 20 November. As we understand this might be a problem for a lot of teams who wish to attend, FACEIT will be covering the costs of the flight tickets for the two qualified teams."

Here is the new schedule for the qualifier:

Tuesday, November 19th
16:00  Check-in opens
20:00  Round of 128
21:00 Round of 64
22:00 Round of 32

Wednesday, November 20th
19:00 Round of 16
20:00 Quarterfinals
21:00 Semi-finals
23:00  Final

The organizers also addressed one of the issues that caused their website problems, and urged the guilty parties to stop using scripts to check-in for the tournament.

"During the night we have been running an analysis with our service providers to spot the issues we were having. The result of these analysis, among other things, pointed towards some scripts ran by some of our users that were bombarding our APIs to trying to join and check-in to the tournament hundreds of times per second. This created an extremely huge amount of requests that we couldn’t possibly handle.

We are taking actions in order to avoid this to happen again, at the same time we would like to urge the players who are running these scripts to stop. It is only overloading our systems and won't help anyone. Teams which continue will risk a ban from the tournament and from FACEIT."

Both finalists of the qualifier will secure a spot in the biggest Counter-Strike tournament to date, DreamHack Winter, which will hand out $250,000 in prizes, while the winners of the qualifier will earn a better seed.

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