After a much-needed tournament delay is marred by bad timing, Winter Circuit #1 is on for this weekend
This is The Final Circle, a newsletter for competitive Apex
As you all probably know, Online Tournament #1 of the Winter Circuit was postponed due to the game’s stability issues. It’s on for this weekend, with qualifiers on Friday and Saturday and the official broadcasts on Sunday. Catch me live-tweeting it this weekend @UR_Scrubb. Here’s a complete table of the starting times from the ALGS Discord:
========= Friday =========
Europe - 6:00pm GMT
North America - 6:00pm PT
========= Saturday =========
APAC North - 12:00pm JST
APAC South - 12:00pm SGT
Middle East & Africa - 12:00pm TRT
Europe - 12:00pm GMT
South America - 12:00pm BRT
North America - 12:00pm PT
========= Sunday =========
APAC South - 3:00pm SGT
APAC North - 6:00pm JST
Europe - 5:40pm GMT
South America - 6:00pm BRT
North America - 1:45pm PT
Better late than never?
The decision to postpone Winter Circuit #1 was the right thing to do, given the game’s stability issues. The timing of the postponement, however, was badly mishandled, showing a lack of regard for players and fans, as well as the competitors in EU who fought to secure their spots, only to have their results invalidated.
Players were experiencing significant stability issues in Apex since the Fight Night patch dropped on January 5th, and pros were worrying about how a tournament could be played given those issues. “So…are they gonna cancel this fucking tournament?” repeated Snip3down, in a stream on Monday, January 11th. “Or let us crash the whole time?”
There was no coordinated response from EA/Respawn on the game’s issues for days, but finally, Zac Conely addressed the anxieties of pros at 1:41 PM EST on January 13th, when he warned that the tournament could be postponed:
A day later, on January 14th, EA/Respawn made the determination that the patch was effective, and that the tournament would go ahead as planned. Tweets from @Respawn, retweeted by the @PlayApex account, simultaneously confirmed that there had been issues and announced the patch. This email was sent to competitors:
At 8 P.M. EST on January 14th, Zac Conely reiterated the official view in a tweet:
But Conely’s tweet was bombarded with reports of crashes from pros set to compete in that weekend’s tournament:
The tournament was officially postponed several minutes after the first round of NA qualifiers were due to start—teams were wondering when they’d get their lobby codes. At 9:05 PM, every player chatting in the NA Discord server still thought the tournament was about to begin: “its 5 minutes after checkin closed guys lol…give them a sec theres a lot of teams,” wrote el_jack0, a player waiting to compete.
At 9:07 PM EST on January 15th, a full day after reports of massive crashes in pro scrims, and after the entire first round of EU qualifiers was played, Conely tweeted about the postponement, reversing the decision of January 14th to go through with the tournament. The results of the first EU qualifying rounds were later invalidated.
Why did the decision to postpone come so late? Conely’s tweet about “new errors” on January 15th implies that EA/Respawn was unaware of crashes occuring post-patch on January 14th. But it’s highly unlikely that the barrage of tweets and reports of crashes on the 14th from prominent players could have escaped their attention.
This situation followed a now-familiar pattern in the Apex scene, where a period of sporadic communication or silence by devs is followed by a spurt of post hoc explanation, often undertaken by a lone employee on their personal social media.
We are only a couple of weeks out from the Caustic buff debacle, and the Winter Circuit #1 postponement was a similarly baffling reversal, one that could have been avoided by definitively rescheduling the tournament well ahead of time, rather than blindly trusting to hope that a last-minute patch would miraculously fix the issues.
In March of 2020, this clumsy outreach style led to the 11th-hour cancellation of the Arlington Major LAN in March 2020 due to coronavirus. The tournament, scheduled for March 13th-15th, was cancelled around 5 PM EST on March 6th, after an extended period of silence during which pros clamored for updates, and, given no response from EA/Respawn on the issue, had to assume it was still on. By March 6th, at least one international team had already flown to the States; everyone else had long ago made their travel plans.
Despite a job posting at Respawn on December 10th that involved improving “the ALGS player-communication framework”, communications continue to be reactive and defensive in nature, rather than proactive and clearly messaged.
Finally, it’s not on Daniel Klein or Zac Conely to shoulder the burden of being shining examples of clear and consistent messaging for one of the most popular games in the world. The community sorely needs a definitive and transparent source of information regarding developments in the competitive scene with broader exposure than the ALGS email list or the ALGS Discord server. Valorant and Fortnite, for example, have competitive-only Twitter accounts that post concise updates in a timely fashion on any important developments.
As always, if you want to support independent coverage of the competitive Apex scene, subscribe to the weekly newsletter!
Agreed. Great point regarding the repeating pattern short stints of transparency followed by hard silence. Very frustrating to see how the flow of information could be handled well just for it all to go dark again. I also agree that they need to prioritize the timing of their decisions and understand how many people it affects when they delay. It's just not worth whatever it is they think they will gain with sponsors, if that's even a real reason why they have been so slow. The damage it does to the perception of their ability to make decisions quickly and effectively hurts the competitive scene more than anything else.