Watly said:
@Lagstro, I'll outline the decision very briefly for everyone to see.
In case someone is questioning the communication on server location, I communicated with Lagstro on the 25th of November that the default servers would be France - USEast. He agreed to this under the condition that they could play on Germany if that would make it fairer. He also explicitly wrote to me 'Feel free to enforce US East - France, even if anyone on our team tries to argue against it (you can screen cap that).'
@Roberta, John, The NA team had no qualms playing under sizable ping advantages in a variety of other match-ups, no need to pull the victim card here.
I think you are unfairly representing what I actually meant. Don't worry, I can post my side of the conversation
It's very clear I had initially voiced concerns about playing on the French server, and that I would talk to Tardet about what server to play on, and all the way back in November, France and Germany were the only 2 options.
I told you I would only be okay with you enforcing US East and France
IF I didn't talk to Tardet or Paulo at least 2 or 3 days in advance about playing on a different server, precisely to try to avoid a mess like this the day of the match, which would have been unfair to France.
I did my part. I talked to Tardet about playing on a German server that exact same day I told you that, and he agreed that playing on Germany would be fine.
Then I had a UK server set up A WEEK ago, and let Tardet know about it as soon as it was up, and he was already collecting data on his team's pings on the UK servers and the US EAST servers for several days now. I asked him several times throughout the week, especially the past three days, and after looking at the pings, he assured me that he believed that France playing on UK should have been completely fine, that it would obviously have been a fairer option, and that it would be very unlikely that France would cry about playing on the UK server the day of. Tardet has admitted to this several times already, in our group chat, in the stream, on discord, etc. I'm sure he could confirm it once again now if needed. I believe Tardet is also a little disappointed that France made a fuss about playing on UK that still would have favored them anyway, and just ended up creating a less than ideal situation for us by not allowing me to play the EU sets due to completely unplayable ping on France.
Considering I held my side of the deal and let Tardet know about the server a week in advance, and he even said UK should have been fine a week in advance, I don't believe you had the right to outright enforce France anymore, and should have done your best to arbitrate the situation, and enforce the fairest decision, which you made no attempt to do, even when my only request was that we quickly check our pings for you to see what would make more sense, and you just flat out said no because France didn't want to play on UK.
You specifically told me to handle the situation with Tardet this whole time, and never told me to tell you anything about how we were setting up this match. I don't know what you need to consider the server official, but I did give Bullez full access to the server, that's how he put the nc mod on the server. If there was really any other issue with that, I could have very quickly given you access too, but you didn't even ask for it.
You had no problem whatsoever wasting a lot of time entertaining France's desire to switch up the order the sets were played in (which would have affected the preparation we had for the match, that's why you are supposed to bring these things up IN ADVANCE, not as the match is about to start) That's the only thing you actually flipped a coin on, even though I didn't agree to it, and there was no precedent for switching up the order the sets were going to be played in.
Let me just make it clear, I am not trying to diminish France's victory. I'm just voicing my displeasure with the way Watly handled the server situation. When everyone else present at the match and watching the stream knew very well that UK was obviously the way to go. There's no point in arguing how the match could have gone differently had a different server been chosen. It's the fact that we were outright denied a fairer match option by the administration in the first place that ends this tournament in bad taste.
Watly said:
@Roberta, John, The NA team had no qualms playing under sizable ping advantages in a variety of other match-ups, no need to pull the victim card here.
You know very well that's a bad argument. We were always set up with the fairest server match-up possible given the options available. Of course that meant that sometimes we were the ones that ended up with an advantage, like in the NA vs Poland match, but you cannot argue that having us play in Poland would have made that match any fairer, it only would have made it more favorable for them than it ended up being for us. The problem here is that you DIDN'T allow the fairest available option to be played.
Again, France made their way to the finals and took a round from us in the tiebreaker on our home server. France played well and won the match. To me, that's the end of the discussion about the actual outcome of the match.
