GBGL

The Explanaton of the gaming league

26th November 2008, 21:56

Dear all GBGL members,
Several months ago, GBGL, its website and pretty much all of its staff disappeared off the radar completely. Since then, no explanation whatsoever has been given as to why the website went offline, why it never came back and where all the staff went! I'm sure by far the majority of our users have since lost all faith (if they hadn't done so already) nor particularly care what we plan for the future, but for those still interested I have prepared an explanation for you.

Let me take you back to the summer of 2006. Myself and Alex (Trix) took hold of GBGL, neither of us with any real experience running gaming leagues, and promised the world. I won't deny that we did in fact promise the best gaming league the world had ever seen, or similar words to that effect. It sounds silly now but we were indeed very passionate about the project and dedicated hours and hours of our time to reaching our goals. We had the energy, the drive, the enthusiasm and sufficient technical skills to do so. And, in part, you can't deny we delivered. On my own I produced what was at the time the best gaming league website on the net – we launched it on schedule, everyone praised how great it looked, and most importantly it worked without any major bugs. Alex, with the help from a couple of others, managed to sign some of the best European CS and CZ teams for our tournaments. These things we did.

It didn't take long before cracks started to show. Our passion and enthusiasm remained pretty constant, we were dedicated to making it work but we soon realised that we couldn't do it on our own. GBGL quickly became big and not before long did we have to enlist the help of others. Now, before you jump on my back here I want to make clear that we had some excellent staff members, but many were accidents waiting to happen (and believe me, they did). GBGL had a bad name from the start (thanks to past owners who even now I still don't really know much about), so many well respected members of the gaming community never trusted us and I think it was this that contributed to our inability to find experienced admins. On top of this, time was never on our side and as much as we wanted to push people through a rigorous interviewing process we simply didn't have the resources nor time to do so. So, unfortunately, we resorted to picking up a few mediocre (and sometimes dire) admins to run important events. Simply put, we enlisted almost all of the responsibility of certain events into these admins. This was our first major downfall. We ourselves didn't have the experience to run successful events and more importantly nor did those who were enlisted to help. Many people we recruited noticed our lack of experience and took it upon themselves that because they had more experience than us, they thought they could push us around. Alex and I were never ones to be pushed around, but we didn't want to upset the few people who were such important assets to our league. As such, we had a catch 22 situation whereby we never really had healthy relationships with our admins. So, to summarise, failure number one, admins. As a sidenote though, we noticed this and tried our hardest to rectify the situation; in the process we stumbled across some excellent admins, who I'll talk about later on.

There are two other highly valuable assets to a gaming league that I am yet to mention. Anti-cheat and game servers. We were fortunate enough to get sponsorship from INX-Gaming. INX, notably the biggest GSP in UK and maybe even Europe, also had no real experience with dealing with gaming leagues nor ‘the scene'. Might I add that I quickly began to understand ‘the scene' and can provide you with my conclusion from working in it for over two years: it's full of moaning children who are never pleased with any of your efforts. INX were an excellent sponsor, always happy to provide us with anything we required. We had an extremely stable dedicated webserver that literally never went down. For our game servers however, whilst we were provided with stable equipment, INX did nothing more. And please don't blame them, they weren't to know any better. They were as inexperienced as myself and Alex. INX are excellent at what they do and part of the success of GBGL (yes, we were successful at times) had to be down to INX and the support they provided. Olly, thank you. Eventually we had some stable high-framerate servers, but it took us far too long and by the time everything was running, far too many people had lost respect for us.

Servers aside, we lacked an anti-cheat from the start. In hindsight I wish we never launched until it was ready, but you must understand my desire to kick-start our dream, especially given the website took us many months to complete. Our initial investment was conned out of us and Alex lost several hundred pounds of his own money (for more info Google search a chap called ‘Ryan Gentle'). Our second investment was wasted on an inexperienced programmer who never released a proper working product. Finally, however, over a year too late we stumbled across a developer by chance who ended up producing an excellent application. This was again, however, too late. May I stress though how hard we tried on this – it's a fact that anti-cheat developers are few and far between. We spent a fortune of our own hard earned cash on the few developers that we found and we got nowhere.

We had some successful seasons and I'd like to make it clear that it was thanks to the hard work of a bunch of excellent admins we accumulated over our two years in existence. Donna (Wilma), Joe (super), Bento (Fossil), Kieran (8Ball), Andrew (Randyandy), James (wrl), Matt and how could I forget Karl?! Thank you all. Whether you liked them or hated them (and I do believe a few people did), these guys worked their arses off for GBGL. (As a sidenote, some of them probably hate me right now!) That aside, by this point we'd failed the community too many times. Our past reputation, our current reputation, our lack of consistency, our website (which began to look dated)... etc. It would have been a mammoth job to restore faith in the league. Our lack of experience failed us, put simply. We had passion but we didn't really know what we were doing, despite how hard we tried. The amount of abuse and negative publicity we received, however, was at times demoralising but we never let it get to us. I could have gone mad and left GBGL if I spent my time reading what people thought about us on various websites around the net (and indeed I did), but I never gave up and nor did Alex for that matter.

Just to mention, for the hell of it, the gaming scene suddenly became very corporate. Enemydown was bought by TNWA and instantly had enough funding to buy our few good staff members off us. A dirty tactic indeed, but who could blame them? It was their business after all. TheSGL tied the knot with even better sponsors and partners, while still trying to hack/decompile any form of software we developed (be it an anti-cheat or parts of our website).

I spotted more recently a few reports on the Internet that INX pulled the plug on us. They didn't; let me explain. I became a little distracted from GBGL for a couple of months (you know, life, work, girls and so on) but I still checked up on everyone on a regular basis. Things started to slip though, at first it wasn't noticeable but soon it was obvious. Alex too was distracted, not because we lost faith but other things in life temporarily grabbed us. We had hoped that after over a year of nurturing GBGL could fend for itself, alas no. It was still very much in its infancy. One day, however, our webserver died. It had served us well for about two and a half years. It was a good piece of kit when it was new (about 4 years ago now) and still very usable when it was given to us, but time took its toll and the motherboard fried. We have had the hard disk recovered and the website and database is in our possession, but given the state of GBGL when the server went offline we decided it was definitely not worth putting back online. Things would only have gotten worse. So, to liken GBGL to a computer game, we have put it on pause. Read on (I'm surprised you've made it this far, but given you have you might as well hear me out!) to find out what our future plans are.

So, this brings us nicely to the present day. Ironically, Alex and I can confidently say we now have several years of experience running a gaming league and even though it was unsuccessful more times than it was successful, you can't put a price on experience. As all of the best business entrepreneurs will tell you, you only learn from your mistakes and we've made enough of them to be walking encyclopaedias. If we were to return, however, I still can't guarantee we'd make it work! If we did we'd do it under a new name, for certain. At present, we have some plans. When we come back, which we will eventually, we are not going to be your run-of-the-mill gaming league. There are already enough of them. You have Enemydown and TheSGL for starters, they're good enough – hats off to the guys who run them, it's harder than you think, take it from me!

When we return, we are going to offer something different. We want to offer a new dimension to the online gaming experience. This isn't just a load of old hype, please. The last thing I want to do is create hype or make false promises. I'm not promising you anything right now, I just want to make it clear that while GBGL itself is gone, Alex and I haven't. We have a few ideas at the moment (all are based on the fact that they've never been done before) and are working with INX-Gaming to develop them thoroughly before any work takes place and most importantly before anything is announced. I'm telling you right now, we're taking things slowly! Right now we're not looking for any help – we are approaching some close friends regarding this but we will update this page if there are any significant changes.

So there you are, the facts. No excuses, no promises. To all of you that supported us and worked with us, thank you. To those of you that slated us and particularly those of you who had ‘gbgl is dire' permanently copied in your Windows clipboard, thank you too. I would have become a major slacker if it wasn't for all that abuse.

And finally, to the future: ...

Carl

If you have any comments or wish to get in touch, you are welcome to PM me on the INX-Gaming forums.