The European, Asian, and Oceanic teams will not have to travel a long way to compete at their respective IEM Road to Rio RMR tournaments as they are both placed in their own region.
However, that’s a luxury the North and South Americans don’t possess due to ESL having placed the Americas RMR in Stockholm, Sweden because of “visa issues”, they explained. Something, that caused harsh criticism and confusion from people in the community.
ESL has now commented on the matter with Director of Product Management, Shaun Clark posting the following statement:
We (or I) take accountability for not meeting the expectations we are held to, or should uphold ourselves. It’s very simple, the Americas RMR should have taken place from either North or South America. I am not here to point towards excuses or add deeper rationale behind a poor decision, we simply were too slow in taking the appropriate action which led to the tournament taking place in a visa-neutral country.
At this point, we can’t reverse this, for any teams wanting to arrive earlier we are working on connecting them to or suggesting potential boot camp locations to optimise conditions ahead of the competition. Not our remedy but what we’ll go through.
It’s important we get these things right, we got caught up in optimising logistics and we lost sight of what was the right thing to do / best for the community.
Jason “Moses” O’Toole, renowned CS:GO caster and expert, was one of the individuals who criticized ESL for their decision and handling calling it “embarrassing”.
