I understand it wasn't entirely ESA's fault but the open tournament was kinda shit.
There were not enough PCs, so you would have to pack up your stuff and then another team would have to set up theirs after every match until almost the very end of the day when there were almost no teams left. Because of this there was a TON of downtime between matches just waiting for things to happen. It was actually so terrible for some teams that TEZC (the euro team) was waiting legitimately 5 hours from the beginning of the event to set up their PCs and then another like hour and a half to start. Luckily the TEZCs crew didn't really seem like they cared too much since they didn't go to the event to play tf2, they just wanted to hang, but if it was any other team you would not of heard the end of it.
It was kinda lame that the tournament was BO1 double elim, because their were teams that just got a shitty pairing and then got knocked out after losing 2 games in a row to top 3 teams, and then other teams that they were better than seed higher.
Also some of the PCs there were like fucked. B3ar spent at least an hour and a half trying to fix his computer because it would just crash when he joined a game for no reason and had to get another one. A lot of the PCs would just delete TF2 and you would have to reinstall it after the computer was turned on. Some of the computers were just like super fucking slow and I can't confirm this but, my theory is that because they are using regular hard drives and they are constantly throwing their PCs around and re-configuring the arena for different console games and then back to PC games, and in the process some of the drives have been damaged. Like on day 2 after the open tournament was over I jacked b3ar's old PC because I heard pugs were happening and it took like 5-10 minutes to get to the home screen, another 5 minutes to open up the file explorer to get to the tf2 folder, realized tf2 had been deleted so another 10 minutes to open up steam and like 15 minutes to install tf2, then when tf2 finally got to 100% it got stuck their so I had to restart steam which took another 10 minutes and then launch tf2 which took 5 and then I could finally play, but pugs didn't happen anyway :(
Also idk what this guy's problem was, but one of the dudes that was at the front desk on Friday and Saturday gave me like this super shitty logitech headset to borrow when I asked for one because mine broke before the event and it was legitimately falling apart and the mic was terrible nobody could hear me but I saw a container full of kraken headsets behind the counter that he just decided not to let me use?
idk I had lots of fun at this event but very little of it was from the tournament itself and I understand that ESA is not at fault for all of these issues and that their priority was making the best invite tournament possible, but I hope these things can be fixed in the future and I am very much looking forward to another event here.