Hi everyone,

there has been a little update to our ÜBERFEST shop.

As we will likely have a few spare PCs at ÜBERFEST, we would love to offer everyone who is interested the option to purchase an individual player ticket as we have done in the 2024 iteration.

This ticket will come with:

- A high power PC for the entire duration of the event (Thursday to Sunday) for you to use to play with your friends on site
- Access to all event areas
- Everything included in the community ticket (no need to buy both!)
- Access to our B-tournament if you find a group of like-minded people on side that also have a player ticket

The price for the ticket will be 155€ (the price of our team ticket / 6 so that everyone pays exactly the same).

Important addition: If anyone who has already purchased a community ticket would like to upgrade to a player ticket, please reach out and we will give you a coupon code that will take the price of the community ticket off of the player ticket (so you won't have to cancel your order and purchase again!)

Get your ÜBERFEST Tickets here: https://buytickets.at/beingesports/2168575

Hi everyone - I would like to share this here as well:

Today, we're thrilled to share some exciting news about ÜBERFEST 2026!

As many of you know, the ability to award official in-game medals for major community events was discontinued several years ago. However, after a series of productive discussions between KritzKast and Valve, we're delighted to announce that there will be official in-game medals for ÜBERFEST 2026.

While we can't reveal the final medal designs just yet (they're currently being worked on), we can already confirm that medals will be awarded to:

- The event champions
- The second- and third-place teams
- All event attendees

The attendee medal will be awarded to everyone involved in the event, including players, community ticket holders, talent, and staff members.

We'll be sharing more details about the medal distribution process in the coming days, but rest assured—we're making it as simple and straightforward as possible.

Finally, we'd like to extend a huge thank you to KritzKast and Valve for helping make this possible. Their support allows us to recognize and celebrate everyone who helps make ÜBERFEST such a special event.

While that is of course saddening to hear, we want to thank you for letting us know through these posts.

We wish you nothing but the best and thank you for attending our other events.

While I strongly believe that what you assume is quite accurate, I hope that we will be able to help making occurances like this impossible in the future by implementing a better process and working together with the other TOs.

I hope there will be many more events for this community to enjoy and grow together through - even if they are not ÜBERFESTS. That is literally (even though some might not believe me unfortunately) the one main thing we seek to achieve.

Without knowing how much any of the two "sides" want to actually know more information, I would like to also state this here, where it might help the silent majority to come to an informed conclusion.

I am Jannik or Gideon, the person that made the final call, not to ban the two individuals at question.

The following information is factual and can be confirmed by either myself, the people involved or admins of poLANd or ETF2L.

1. No investigation of any sorts beyond the personal recollections of three people has been used to warrant the ban of both Roticher and Nicky. They have not been (to this day) talked to by any admin of the two organisations. While we applaud both organisations for their amazing work, that in itself is not acceptable and should never be allowed to happen. Due process must ALWAYS involve all sides of each case as no just verdict can be made otherwise.

2. We have spoken to all "sides" of this case in depth and in addition worked through a little more than 100 pages of text with screenshots of DMs and personal recollections. Many of these recollections line up, however in crucial situations, even the recollections of the accusing side don't line up. In one person's recollection someone was invited to join a group going to a restaurant, in the other it wasn't. In one person's recollection someone from the two accused directly harrased someone outside the person, while everyone else confirms it was actually someone unrelated. In one person's collection someone was clearly told to "step away" while the harmed person itself says that had not taken place.

This list goes on and on as there were more than 20 different accounts of important moments that don't line up.

In short: There simply is no conclusive evidence that either all of the reported behavior has taken place and/or that it was actually properly and clearly addressed on site. Many of the accusers seem to believe that somebody else had "clearly adressed the issue" while it is hard to find any proof for that.

We are NOT saying that anyone is lying here. All we are saying is that we are quite convinced that the accusers both believe that other people had confronted more than they actually have and that more things took place than have actually taken place.

This whole situation could have likely been solved by approaching an admin on site and by better and clearler communication on site. But sadly both seem to have never happened.

3. Since AFTER the unban, we have been met with the personal recollection of other people who attended poLANd stating that they also have their doubts about the recollection of the accusing people actually being 100% correct. For those wondering why this was not heard beforehand: This has happened AFTER the unban since none of this was made public before and since there was no investigation before, so just as the banned people still have not been met with the full allegations, these other people could not have shared their point of view.

Important: This has NOT been used to warrant not mirroring the bans (but it would have had it happened before).

These individuals clearly stated that they don't want to say these things in public at this moment in time as they fear being attacked which based on what happened to me and what happened to ÜBERFEST sadly has to be confirmed as a reasonable point of view.

4. There are talks about CCTV footage from on site. To our knowledge that CCTV footage is "beyond inconclusive" as yes it shows the accused walk past or stand close to the person that was alledgedly harmed but given the venue size of poLANd it is simply impossible not to do that.

5. It was confirmed that there has been no sexual harrassment, no physical component involved or anything else along those lines. The accusers confirm that the only misbehavior is "being too much in the personal space of somebody else" and "asking weird questions or making weird comments (non-sexual)".

All of this combined did lead us to the conclusion of not mirroring the ban. Considering what happened after our unban we actually strongly hope that ETF2L and poLANd will follow suit and also change their verdict on the situation as a ban is simply not warranted. I am saying this as a person that has hosted events and leagues across 10 different titles for over 10 years now. We have banned or otherwise excluded a lot of people from participation (including in TF2) but this is not a ban that has any foundation whatsoever.

A good share of this community seems to believe that ideology trumps over investigation and evidence and I want to close by saying that you are following down a dangerous and horrible path by doing so. It will be sooner than you might believe that you will be the banned person based on no apparent evidence if this is the community you want to live in.

Hi @Lupus,

we are in active communication with several teams for our invite bracket. So far there is no team that we can confirm but I assume that will happen soon.

Hello everyone!

The second wave of team tickets for ÜBERFEST is now live. There are five remaining team tickets.

As we would technically have the opportunity to increase the available team spots by another two with a bit of an investment from our end, it would be very interesting to hear how many teams are still actively debating whether they will attend our 2026 iteration or not.

Lastly, if high plane fare prices are currently avoiding you from making the decision to come to Germany due to budget restrictions, please feel free to get in touch through Discord (BE_Gideon). We might be able to help you a little bit in that regard.

To the event's ticket shop
To the event's discord

cu@

Can't wait to meet you crazy people again. cu@

Super beautiful tradition and after meeting you all, I am not suprised that a community like this has a such a tradition :D

I will do my best to not forget anyone:

For starters, thank you to the TF2 community and especially those trusting us an entirely new organizer to actually come to our event. This would have not been possible without you and it warms my heart that it worked out so amazingly well in the end. I am not overexagarating when I say that I NEVER thought, people would be so open, kind, amazing and warm this weekend.

The biggest thank you MUST go to the huge row of people that worked their ass of before and during the event. DCS, JMax, Wiethoofd, Beater, CanFo, Samus, Antimation, Agro, Supra, Benpl, Decaf, Jakeowaty, Surny, Lucky, wandum, eepily, Notsteven and Chiers. Without them basically working for food and hotel this would not be possible and I hope everyone understands and appreciates that.

Also huge thank you to our team at BEING ESPORTS Kevin, Lukas, Paul, Nathalie, Axl, and Benni for almost making me obsolete by doing their job so freakin well both on site and before the event. Seeing us grow makes me su fuck*n proud of you all.

Thank you to BaseStack for giving us a home and trusting that we would make the event work without having any idea of the number of people that would attend. I am happy it all worked out in the end and can't wait for next year.

Thank you to KritzKast for letting us use their channel for the broadcast.

Thank you to Valve for the amazing shipment of prizes and valuable merchandise.

Thank you to Memory PC for the stage setup - we wouldn't have had without PCs to do it without you.

Thank you to be quiet! for reducing our cost for lanyards and snacks and for providing prizes for our side events.

Thank you to my amazing girlfriend for not only putting up with me constantly working at events but actually joining in on the fun.

Thank you for all the kind words after and during the event. I got teary eyed more than once on the way back thinking about these.

Also thank you to my immune system for not making me get sick this time around (YES! :D)

If I forgot anyone - please don't hate me. I love you. See you in 2025.

I fully agree with all your points and I promise that we will do better in the future (in fact the refund process has already been worked on and a different shop page is being used for our next event at BaseStack so that refunds willl be a matter of days at most).

We didn't take any offense by your statement and it wasn't that harsh to be honest. Nonetheless, I am happy that we were able to resolve it and that your money was refunded now.

After reading all of this, I must say that I am at least a bit confused. Let me address all of the points individually:

1. "not having ticket reservation for teams with a set number of them going to the top invite teams."

This is exactly what we did. We had reserved up to 8 tickets for invited teams and only started opening more for open bracket teams when it became clear that not enough invite teams would be present. I am not sure what communication part went wrong here that potentially made some top teams not notice but it is not that there weren't enough tickets for top teams reserved to have a strong invite bracket.

2. having the 1st wave be not even 2 weeks after the LAN was announced to the community.

This was in fact totally my mistake and I promise I have learned from it. Future events will have a longer wait period between announcement and first wave of tickets (always under the contingency that there will be future events) to give teams time to form. All I can say in our defense is that we have hosted events for 7 different esports titles now and that TF2 is the first one where having tickets sold early on was a problem and where 2 weeks of wait time was deemed not enough. We know now and will keep it in mind.

3. as I am sure you know there are many other examples not just Tekszi.

I am aware of one additional person that is currently waiting for a refund (which will be handled shortly). All other requests have already been worked on. So if you are aware of additional people that are waiting, it might be good for them to reach out again as they probably used the wrong way so far.

Also, I am happy to confirm that (and once again, I promise entirely unrelated.) the refund was actually worked on one day before the original post was made and the money has already reached the account of tekszi by the time I am writing this post.

Hi, Gideon from BEING ESPORTS (the organizer behind ÜBERFEST) here!

I would just love to clarify a few things from our side to make sure that no false impressions are generated.

Number one and most importantly:

It is entirely correct that tekszi has been waiting for a refund for an unfortunately long time and we are really sorry for this being the case. Before I explain more I want to say that of course everyone, who created a refund request with adequate time before the event takes place will be fully refunded and there are (as you can see in this thread) already multiple people who have received such a refund.

The reasons for refunds taking long are multiple:

1. Neither we nor BaseStack have a dedicated person for working in refunds. As both companies are rather small still, there is no dedicated person handling event sales and refunds must always be done manually by somebody knowledgable (which is exactly one person who has a lot of other responsibilities).

2. While this might sound harsh and maybe even boastful - it is not normal for these kinds of tickets to be refundable. If you look at concerts, conventions and other events similar to our type of event, they usually have a no refund clause as refunds create not only a lot of manual work but also book-keeping challenges for smaller companies. Most other event organizers simply forbid refunds and oversell their events expecting a couple of people not to show up. We don't want to do that for the sake of our community.

3. There was a very unfortunate connection of me (the person passing information to BaseStack) being on vacation and then immediately after that the finance person in charge at BaseStack being on vacation. So pretty much nothing happened for almost a month.

4. The shop solution used for Überfest was VERY subpar (and we are super sorry for it). We have already found a solution for all future events but this made it very time consuming to find individual bookings quickly.

All of these are only explanations but still not good reasons for waiting long time for a refund so I want to say again - we are very sorry for the duration but still promise that the refund will be fully sent asap.

Regarding the criticism towards our ticket sale format:

Pretty much all I want to say is: We agree that the first wave of ticket sales was not optimal. We together with the amazing people from the TF2 community that helped us anticipated people to form teams more quickly but we now see and agree that only selling team tickets would have been much better. We promise that this format was designed with good intentions as our idea was to not give 20 people all the power in deciding who can go to ÜBERFEST and who can't. But in the end, we see that the downsides outweighed the benefits quite strongly.

Should there be another ÜBERFEST (which we hope for very much), this will be done in a much better way.

Finally, I would like to say one thing regarding an indirect point made in the original post (If anyone did in fact read this far):

To cite: "to get my 125 euros back which is more than some VIP stadium concert tickets"

This indirectly says (at least for me) that the price of ÜBERFEST is considered expensive. While that obviously can be decided by every individual (and I wouldn't want to change that) I would like to say, that we strongly disagree with this statement.

Yes, 125€ is potentially more than some concert tickets (while the mentioned stadium VIP tickets are more around 200-400€ nowadays but that is not the point), but we urge everyone to weigh this against what the service actually is. For 125€ you get:

- 3 Days of an event not 3 hours
- A PC and a space for your team for 3 days
- Access to a tournamet that if you get top 3 in will actually give you more money back than you paid
- Access to a b-tournament with hardware prizes
- Security and an admin and production staff of omre than 15 people working on all three days (and more if you count preparation and cleaning)

At the same time, tickets for similar events such as Gamescom Lan and Insomnia are a good bit more expensive without giving you the luxury of having your own PC included in the prize.

To be transparent: The ticket sales will amount so somewhere slightly below 18.000€ for this event. If you add up staff, prize money, production cost, preparation work (which is entirely unpaid but should normally be) and all the small things such as trophies, badges, hotels for talent and staff, we will be a good bit over 20.000€ in cost.

This means that tickets should actually be a bit more expensive (and likely will have to be in the future) and not cheaper from an organizational standpoint and that only if the bar revenue is strong, the event will be financially stable enough to plan future iterations.

I hope this was informational enough and understandable. If anyone has questions - please let me know. Also via discord (BE_Gideon) my dms are always open.