Yesterday, I went to my local EB and found that there was a tournament being run by a small marketing company for Battlefield 2 on XBox. I'm not sure who was aware of this tournament, but the competition took place across the nation on Xbox Live. If you had a higher score than people in the store, then you moved on the next bracket and so and and so forth. The company, located in California, hired a few young people from Illinois to run the tourney. Now, I live in Indiana, right outside Chicago (maybe an hour away). Why they traveled 2 hours (forgot exactly where they came from) all the way to the northwest corner of Indiana is anyone's guess. Anyway, from the get-go they had a barrage of problems. I couldn't even count how many times they had to restart. They had to restart for the most ridiculous reasons, too. Some being, the game wasn't set up correctly, or certain people weren't logged in. My personal favorite for having to restart was that the game had crashed. I don't know who's more stupid; EA for having a game that crashes easily when having a mere few hundred people trying to play in a tourney, or the marketing company for going with EA's game in the first place. Nonetheless, no one looked good in this particular scenario. It really came off as a poorly run production. I also remember speaking to one of the older guys helping to run the thing (older in this case meaning maybe 20 or 21, b/c everyone else appeared to be in high school), and he explained how he was staying the night at a friends house and he gets a call telling him to check his email. However, he didn't have access to his email at the time, so he had to check it at the store (EB). He found out, last minute, that they totally changed the structure of the tournament. I don't know about anyone else but I found this to be quite humourous. Maybe it was funnier in person, but who runs a tournament from the seat of their pants like that? lol edit: I think this is in the right forum. I hope...
