This past weekend, over one hundred PC and console gamers converged on New York City in the World Cyber Games (WCG) US National Final. A select few will earn the right to represent the US at the WCG Grand Finals in Singapore this November. The featured tournament games were Dead or Alive Ultimate, Halo 2, Counter-Strike, FIFA Soccer 2005, Need for Speed Underground 2, WarCraft, Warhammer, and StarCraft. A prize purse of $32,000 was up for grabs by teams and players who finished first, second and third in their respective tournaments. While this is the fifth year the World Cyber Games have taken place, with over one million gamers worldwide participating in the event, fan made tournaments have been run with better execution.

The Dead or Alive and Halo 2 portions of the tournament allowed for online qualifying rounds over the past several months. However, both online qualifiers were heavily delayed, and the DOAU online qualifiers never even took place due to the fact that the WCG failed to promote the registration properly. The DOAU online qualifiers were limited to 64 participants, but a mere five players were able to register. All five were auto-advanced to the US National Finals to face off against the eight offline qualifiers.

While some may fault the DOA community for not having a strong following, as one of the best selling fighting game series on the Xbox, DOA has a large fan base, and many of those faces were up in arms about the lack of notification for online registration, and the length of time registration was open. In addition to the long delays for online registration to begin, once it finally started, the registration was open for only a few days. By the time the DOA community was informed, it was too late.

The participants who did register in time were left in the dark as the online qualifier date came and went. Several days after the posted start date, the participants were finally contacted and asked when they would be able to play. They were then left in the dark again, and finally informed that there would be no online qualifier, and all participants auto-advanced. However, that information didn't come until less than a week for the National Finals, giving players little time to prepare for a four day trip to NYC.

To further add to the confusion, the tournaments schedule posted on the official WCG website was different from the schedule e-mailed to the players who qualified for Dead or Alive Ultimate. The players didn't know what day they were supposed to play on until the beginning of the first day. Adding to the frustration was the fact that DOA players were not allowed to play the game at the tournament venue until 15 minutes prior to the start of their tournaments. Meanwhile, Halo 2, WarCraft, StarCraft, and Counter-Strike players were able to play almost as much as they wanted to before and after their tournaments.

As the icing on the cake, tournament matches for WarCraft, StarCraft, Halo 2, and Counter-Strike were recorded and televised on large projection screens in the audience viewing area. Yet, not a single match from Dead or Alive, Need for Speed Underground 2, FIFA Soccer, or Warhammer was shown on the projection screens. The actions of the WCG made it very clear which games they chose to respect and which games were treated like red-headed step children. One DOA player was even told by an official referee that he didn't need more than 15 minutes of pre-tournament warm-up due to the fact that he was playing a console game. That same referee had very little knowledge about DOA, even though he was selected to referee the tournament.

Several of the games featured in the WCG tournament were poorly handled, but even the favored games experienced several issues. Every tournament in the US National Finals was single elimination. While in most cases this would still determine the best player or team, almost every other National Final was double elimination, giving every player and team a second chance at taking the crown. To top it off, the single elimination tournaments were not seeded, meaning that several tournament matches featured several top teams facing off in the early rounds. This caused several top ranked teams to finish outside of the top three, losing any chance to win money. Meanwhile no name teams, with significantly easier brackets were able to take home money for second or third place finishes.

In the future, the World Cyber Games needs to hire people who know how to run a gaming tournament properly, because it's clear that the people running the US National Finals dropped the ball on numerous occasions. I've been to dozens of fighting game tournaments in the past, all organized and operated by the fans, and every single one of them offered significantly better execution than the WCG. It's simply amazing that an event on the scale of the World Cyber Games can be handled in such a poor manner. Hopefully next year will offer a more professional outing.