Electronic sports (eSports) is becoming a more common form of entertainment. Last week, ESPN2 showed the college-based MOBA tournament "Heroes of the Dorm," and the live games constantly have a fairly large in-studio audience. But sometimes, technology gets in the way of a game.
That's what happened during the latest entry in the Halo Championship Series (HCS), a collection of professional teams competing inside the popular sci-fi shooter. Game developer 343 Industries had to cancel the competition from last weekend after experiencing a problem with connectivity. The connectivity issue was so bad that the official Halo Twitter account (@Halo) tweeted that "We're aware of and investigating party joinability issues. As a result, we'll be canceling HCS Cup #1, and apologize for the inconvenience."
Eurogamer reported that "(April 25-26) was set to be the first regular season online cup for Season 2 of the Halo Championship Series. The plan was to see the cup span two days with two separate brackets, and while matches took place on Saturday, 25th April, as planned." However, the servers hosting Halo: The Master Chief Collection tournament had a number issues starting Saturday afternoon.
This isn't surprising, since 343 Industries has had a number of problems with The Master Chief Collection and has issued multiple patches to fix the game in the last few months. In fact, the game is so buggy, many in the eSports field don't think that it's "tournament-ready." Thankfully, the next installment in the "Halo" series, "Halo 5: Guardians," will arrive on October 27.
The HCS started in November 2014 as a partnership with the Electronic Sports League (ESL), a global eSports outfit with 5 million members worldwide.
