Every 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Apex Legends Global Series in-person tournament to date has been fought with a caveat – the three in-person LAN events have never had a full t🐎urnout from the qualifying teams. Much of this🥃 was due to Covid-19 restrictions or contractions, but teams also struggled to get into the countries hosting the tournaments.
Ali ‘Naghz’ Naghawi, who performed b🍰rilliantly at the Split 1 Playoffs for JLINGZ, couldn’t get a US Visa to travel to the ALGS Championship with Element 6 last year because he had previously visited his family in Iran. Pioneers’ Maksym ‘Max-Strafe’ Stadniuk has never played on LAN with his teammates, despite qualifying, because he is Ukrainian and his country will not let people leave during the ongoing war against Russian invaders. This made the removal of Ukrainian flags from the ALGS aꦆudience sting even more. Si𝔍milarly, Auroraꦚ’s players have been denied visas due to many countries tightening restrictions for Russian citizens.
But who’s at fault? Many fans point the finger squarely at EA, which organises the Apex Legends Global Series, but it’s not as simple as that. When international conflicts are in play, getting every team to an in-p🍃erson tournament can sometimes be out of the organiser’s hands.
“I don't want to blame anyone for this, [it’s] just an unfortunate set of circumstances and a miscommunication,” says Alexandr Sokolov, team manager of Aurora. “But the organisers could listen a little more to the players and organisations and try to help prepare for tournaments in advance.”
The relatively lasꦏt-minute announcement of where the 2023 Playof🌊fs would be held didn’t help teams. Even after EA had announced the London venue, it took the organiser a long time to send out invite letters, which are vital documents for obtaining a visa. Sokolov believes that EA doesn’t understand that CIS players have so many issues with visas, or doesn’t understand why those issues persist. More notice would improve teams’ chances of getting visas.
Dewa United echoes the same sentiment. Despite coming third in the APAC South qualifiers, the Indonesian squad struggled to get visas for♎ London with the short time fr💝ame that EA imposed. Dewa’s coach Fajar ‘Salvatorez’ Rofianto says that it’s notoriously difficult to get visas from Indonesia, and EA’s delay in sending out invites ahead of the Christmas period made things much more difficult for his team.
“We finished Split 1 Pro League on December 11,” Salvatorez 🐼explains. “We wanted to start processing the visa then, because we are from Indonesia, and it’s really hard to get a visa for the UK. EA said no, our regulations say we need to wait to complete Pro League from NA first, and then we can process together. That’s nearly ten days just gone because we were just waiting for NA to have their Pro League.”
After the NA Split finished on December 19, the visa process began. How꧟ever, Dewa was further delayed from December 25-30, due to the Christmas holidays affecting applications and officials not working over the period. Salvatore൲z says their visa application couldn’t really begin until January, with just a month to go to the tournament.
Further issues cropped up with paperwork. Dewa produced around 60 documents as a part of their visa application, but was rejected initially because the agency said that EA didn’t supply the travel invitation. On a second occasion, Muhammad ‘Bastiaan’ Rafly was denied his visa because he didn’t have enough money, despite the fact that he was being sponsored by EA to attend LAN. 🌃Salvatorez believes the VFS – the company which helps Indonesians apply for visas – is at fault here, not scanning multiple documents correctly and therefore causing issues and heartbreaking delays. EA told them that it was an error on the UK Visa Processing system.
However, he believes that Dewa’s absence co🐠uld have been avoided by EA. “If we have more time to🌠 complete the visa, I think we can go [to London].”
Dewa deserved to be at the Playoffs, the Indonesian squad qualified fair and square. It’s unfortunate that they could not compete, and what makes it worse for the players is that the eꦿrrors were completely avoidable. But Dewa didn’t just miss out on a chance to play on LAN and the opportunity to put their names on the board as serious ALGS contenders and win big prize money, the situation left them out of pocket,ꦐ too.
Salvatorez tells me the team lost “about £10,000”. EA pays for players a☂nd one coach to attend the event, but Dewa had booked three additional nights ahead of the tournament for its staff, as well as renting a bootcamp space to scrim at, none of which is refundable. Buying refundable tickets would have been a good idea in hindsight, but would cost more up front, and waiting until the visas arrived before booking these arrangements would have caused the prices to skyrocket. At a time when so many organisations are exiting the Apex Legends scene due to it being economically unviable, Dewa United is lucky to still be in business after these unexpected costs.
EA offered the advice to try to register for the visa from Thailand instead of from Indonesia, but would only cover the admin fees and not the costs of 💧travelling abroad and staying there overnight. With costs rapidly rising and no guarantee that they could even apply for a visa from abroad – Salvatorez had heard differently from a friend – it wasn’t an option for Dewa.
Between delays, holidays, and mistakes in both Indonesian and English visa centres, it’s incredibly difficult for teams from across the world to attend in-person esports tournaments at such short notice. While players like Max-Strafe would have never been allowed to go to the Split 1 Playoffs this year due to his country’s restrictions and ongoing war, more time and better planning may have allowed the like🌟s of Fire Beavers, Aurora, and Dewa United to attend.
While Salvatorez confirms that Dewa continues to fight its visa applications in the hopes that it can have a head start b🤡efore the Split 2 Playoffs, he mourns the delays that impacted his team’s chances of going to London. “If EA had processed the visa faster, it might not have happened like this.”