I am fed up with BaseStack and Überfest

#1

tekszi

0 Frags – +

The issue has been resolved.

Hey all, I'm not happy that things turned out like this but I am tired of playing nice after more than a month with this issue so I am making it public. Besides me not getting refunded I will also give a few words on my issues with how this whole event was organized as it had a major role in my case.

Let's start from the beginning:
When the lan was announced I called together a bunch of friends who I've been to i69 with and some others I knew from the previous season or other places. From the first batch of tickets we were able to secure all but one (this will be important later).
Some time later, around late June- early July one of my players leaves the team for reasons that do not matter so we are looking to trial people but there are several problems:

We do not know who has tickets
We do not know how the sale of the 2nd batch will take place
We preferred to trial people who played at our level (D2/1)

So we struggle to find players.

At this point the 2nd batch of ticket sales are approaching and here is where I made a mistake, although I do think this could have been prevented by the organizers too. I did not let the admins know that besides us, we had 1 player still without tickets so securing that was high priority. This said player was also going out there way to find a ticket through the exchange.

I am very critical of the process for the 2nd batch as many people likely were able to get tickets secured which led to them being sold out in hours leaving my one player with no tickets still without one. I should have let the organizers know directly (I did indirectly) that my team needed to secure a ticket to be on track. While I could have done better, why was there no official query about how many teams existed at the time?

Time goes on and we try to get the ticket while also looking out for trials and we end up finding a player for our team. An announcement comes from the organizers to let them know about teams missing tickets and so I do.

No response for 2 weeks, only acknowledgement. I ask for an update and I am being told the staff went on vacation. Now normally I would be understanding but at this point we are approaching October and we need to still finalize our travel costs, accommodation and other expenses that may come. I think this "understanding" part needs to go both ways, the lan was announced before the Summer had even started and we are still at a point where we could not finalize anything.
The uncertainty (and possibly other reasons) leads to one of my teammates quitting; starting trials again with 1 month before lan and nothing secured we decided to call it quits.

Throughout this whole lan there have been many complaints when it comes to organizing and not catering the event properly for the target audience; there have been many excuses given but I do not get the feeling that they are being taking into account and you might be able to see why I think so after the next part.

And now to my refund...

Date: 09/23/2024
All of my teammates have dealt with passing on their tickets their own way but I decided to ask for a refund if it was possible through the support ticket system on the lan's Discord. After a few days I've got confirmation that it will be processed and I gave my payment information and everything else required to start the process. I was told the process can be about 2 weeks-ish.

Date: 10/07/2024
More than 2 weeks pass, almost reaching 3. I ask for an update and I receive an apology with a defense and I was told it was urgently sent to BaseStack employees responsible.

"The original call was not fixed two weeks but "2 weeks ish" and that these refunds all have to be manually worked on by a person that did not anticipate so many refunds taking place."

I was almost enraged by this response since you do not need to be a genius to do the math that it's almost been 3 weeks by this point and i do not know about others but 2 weeks ish for me is 2 week +- 2 days. And the reasoning that it is being done by people does not make any difference since if you do not count weekends into the time that had passed by now it would make the situation look even worse.

A few days later I respond, asking to let me know if any of the information required is missing.

Date: 10/29/2024

Last week I asked for an update but this is the day I am writing this and I still haven't received any of my refund nor have I've been given any updates on the process and I feel I am being actively ghosted while the BaseStack admins are constantly active in other channels. I think it is due time I make this post, I have been patient enough, arguably way too patient.

Who do I blame for this? The staff and organizers from the side of BaseStack, as far as I know the tournament organizers have no responsibility.
What do I seek? To create awareness about my issue to put pressure on the organizers and obviously to get my 125 euros back which is more than some VIP stadium concert tickets...
What I do NOT want People outside of the organizers offering me ANYTHING to make up for what BaseStack is doing, any alternative from BaseStack as repayment.

I am not going to attend any event organized at a venue of Basestack be it Überfest or PoLANd. I have screenshots of everything being said here but unless people question me I wont be posting any, the dates should be enough proof.

Thank you!

[b]The issue has been resolved.[/b]

Hey all, I'm not happy that things turned out like this but I am tired of playing nice after more than a month with this issue so I am making it public. Besides me not getting refunded I will also give a few words on my issues with how this whole event was organized as it had a major role in my case.
[b]
Let's start from the beginning:[/b]
When the lan was announced I called together a bunch of friends who I've been to i69 with and some others I knew from the previous season or other places. From the first batch of tickets we were able to secure all but one (this will be important later).
Some time later, around late June- early July one of my players leaves the team for reasons that do not matter so we are looking to trial people but there are several problems:
[list]
[*] We do not know who has tickets
[*] We do not know how the sale of the 2nd batch will take place
[*] We preferred to trial people who played at our level (D2/1)
[/list]
So we struggle to find players.

At this point the 2nd batch of ticket sales are approaching and here is where I made a mistake, although I do think this could have been prevented by the organizers too. I did not let the admins know that besides us, we had 1 player still without tickets so securing that was high priority. This said player was also going out there way to find a ticket through the exchange.

I am very critical of the process for the 2nd batch as many people likely were able to get tickets secured which led to them being sold out in hours leaving my one player with no tickets still without one.[b] I should have let the organizers know directly (I did indirectly) that my team needed to secure a ticket to be on track.[/b] While I could have done better, why was there no official query about how many teams existed at the time?

Time goes on and we try to get the ticket while also looking out for trials and we end up finding a player for our team. An announcement comes from the organizers to let them know about teams missing tickets and so I do.

No response for 2 weeks, only acknowledgement. I ask for an update and I am being told the staff went on vacation. Now normally I would be understanding but at this point [b]we are approaching October and we need to still finalize our travel costs, accommodation and other expenses that may come.[/b] I think this "understanding" part needs to go both ways, the lan was announced before the Summer had even started and we are still at a point where we could not finalize anything.
[b]The uncertainty (and possibly other reasons) leads to one of my teammates quitting; starting trials again with 1 month before lan and nothing secured we decided to call it quits. [/b]

Throughout this whole lan there have been many complaints when it comes to organizing and not catering the event properly for the target audience; there have been many excuses given but I do not get the feeling that they are being taking into account and you might be able to see why I think so after the next part.

[b]And now to my refund...[/b]

Date: 09/23/2024
All of my teammates have dealt with passing on their tickets their own way but I decided to ask for a refund if it was possible through the support ticket system on the lan's Discord. After a few days I've got confirmation that it will be processed and I gave my payment information and everything else required to start the process. I was told the process can be about 2 weeks-ish.

Date: 10/07/2024
More than 2 weeks pass, almost reaching 3. I ask for an update and I receive an apology with a defense and I was told it was urgently sent to BaseStack employees responsible.

"The original call was not fixed two weeks but "2 weeks ish" and that these refunds all have to be manually worked on by a person that did not anticipate so many refunds taking place."

I was almost enraged by this response since you do not need to be a genius to do the math that it's almost been 3 weeks by this point and i do not know about others but 2 weeks ish for me is 2 week +- 2 days. And the reasoning that it is being done by people does not make any difference since if you do not count weekends into the time that had passed by now it would make the situation look even worse.

A few days later I respond, asking to let me know if any of the information required is missing.

Date: 10/29/2024

Last week I asked for an update but this is the day I am writing this and I still haven't received any of my refund nor have I've been given any updates on the process and I feel I am being actively ghosted while the BaseStack admins are constantly active in other channels. I think it is due time I make this post, I have been patient enough, arguably way too patient.

[b]Who do I blame for this?[/b] [b]The staff and organizers from the side of BaseStack, as far as I know the tournament organizers have no responsibility.[/b]
[b]What do I seek?[/b] To create awareness about my issue to put pressure on the organizers and obviously to get my 125 euros back which is more than some VIP stadium concert tickets...
[b]What I do NOT want[/b] People outside of the organizers offering me ANYTHING to make up for what BaseStack is doing, any alternative from BaseStack as repayment.

I am not going to attend any event organized at a venue of Basestack be it Überfest or PoLANd. I have screenshots of everything being said here but unless people question me I wont be posting any, the dates should be enough proof.

Thank you!

#2

mhu

-9 Frags – +

https://youtu.be/YJAKnSvAs8Y?si=51QMladfJw6Ul7lD

#3

gedu

-5 Frags – +

which months are numbered 23 and 29?

#4

yak404

17 Frags – +

Whilst there have been issues with regards to the initial allocation of tickets for this LAN I think the way the admins/tournament organisers/staff dealt with the second allocation was a very good solution and has led to quite a lot of high+ teams being able to attend, which is a good thing. To be fair to the organisers I don't think they realised that there would be such a high level of interest for people attending and they probably should have not allowed people to sign up without having a team sorted.

When my team was able to acquire a team ticket I asked for a refund on the two player tickets I had purchased. I think it took over a month for it to happen but I didn't really care, I wasn't paying too much attention to it.

The thing I'm left wondering is how do you "indirectly" let organisers know that you needed one ticket? They repeatedly posted on the discord to let them know if teams were missing a ticket and to get in touch ASAP, this seemed relatively simple to do and now you've tried to sort a refund.This honestly seems like bad organisation on your/your team's part. Some life advice: Admins/people in general do not tend to know what you want unless you directly tell them what you want from them.

Whilst there have been issues with regards to the initial allocation of tickets for this LAN I think the way the admins/tournament organisers/staff dealt with the second allocation was a very good solution and has led to quite a lot of high+ teams being able to attend, which is a good thing. To be fair to the organisers I don't think they realised that there would be such a high level of interest for people attending and they probably should have not allowed people to sign up without having a team sorted.

When my team was able to acquire a team ticket I asked for a refund on the two player tickets I had purchased. I think it took over a month for it to happen but I didn't really care, I wasn't paying too much attention to it.

The thing I'm left wondering is how do you "indirectly" let organisers know that you needed one ticket? They repeatedly posted on the discord to let them know if teams were missing a ticket and to get in touch ASAP, this seemed relatively simple to do and now you've tried to sort a refund.This honestly seems like bad organisation on your/your team's part. Some life advice: Admins/people in general do not tend to know what you want unless you directly tell them what you want from them.

#5

tekszi

-1 Frags – +

yak404Whilst there have been issues with regards to the initial allocation of tickets for this LAN I think the way the admins/tournament organisers/staff dealt with the second allocation was a very good solution and has led to quite a lot of high+ teams being able to attend, which is a good thing. To be fair to the organisers I don't think they realised that there would be such a high level of interest for people attending and they probably should have not allowed people to sign up without having a team sorted.

When my team was able to acquire a team ticket I asked for a refund on the two player tickets I had purchased. I think it took over a month for it to happen but I didn't really care, I wasn't paying too much attention to it.

The thing I'm left wondering is how do you "indirectly" let organisers know that you needed one ticket? They repeatedly posted on the discord to let them know if teams were missing a ticket and to get in touch ASAP, this seemed relatively simple to do and now you've tried to sort a refund.This honestly seems like bad organisation on your/your team's part. Some life advice: Admins/people in general do not tend to know what you want unless you directly tell them what you want from them.

By indirectly, I meant that I only let them know during a conversion in a reply in one of the public channels where this very same problem was discussed instead of opening a ticket. I did not think it would be remembered, rather I was hoping for a measure to be announced since it was a concern of many. This was my mistake, I should have done the latter. Seeing your refund took as long as it did I am hopeful and I agree that with the rest of what you said. If this gets resolved I am deleting this thread.

[quote=yak404]Whilst there have been issues with regards to the initial allocation of tickets for this LAN I think the way the admins/tournament organisers/staff dealt with the second allocation was a very good solution and has led to quite a lot of high+ teams being able to attend, which is a good thing. To be fair to the organisers I don't think they realised that there would be such a high level of interest for people attending and they probably should have not allowed people to sign up without having a team sorted.

When my team was able to acquire a team ticket I asked for a refund on the two player tickets I had purchased. I think it took over a month for it to happen but I didn't really care, I wasn't paying too much attention to it.

The thing I'm left wondering is how do you "indirectly" let organisers know that you needed one ticket? They repeatedly posted on the discord to let them know if teams were missing a ticket and to get in touch ASAP, this seemed relatively simple to do and now you've tried to sort a refund.This honestly seems like bad organisation on your/your team's part. Some life advice: Admins/people in general do not tend to know what you want unless you directly tell them what you want from them.[/quote]

By indirectly, I meant that I only let them know during a conversion in a reply in one of the public channels where this very same problem was discussed instead of opening a ticket. I did not think it would be remembered, rather I was hoping for a measure to be announced since it was a concern of many. This was my mistake, I should have done the latter. Seeing your refund took as long as it did I am hopeful and I agree that with the rest of what you said. If this gets resolved I am deleting this thread.

#6

Whip

16 Frags – +

I appreciate you highlighting your personal responsibility in the post, and hope you get your money back.

I think the uberfest organisers / backstack dortmund made one large mistake in under-estimating the level of demand for the lan, I think it was reasonable for them to expect a high level based on Poland.tf in the summer. Since this point I think they have done their best to rectify the situation.

I will say, if I remember hearing correctly, the Polish and German basestacks are very seperate businesses and generally poland.tf was very well organised and ran, so I wouldn't write off the Polish guys based on your experience with this.

I appreciate you highlighting your personal responsibility in the post, and hope you get your money back.

I think the uberfest organisers / backstack dortmund made one large mistake in under-estimating the level of demand for the lan, I think it was reasonable for them to expect a high level based on Poland.tf in the summer. Since this point I think they have done their best to rectify the situation.

I will say, if I remember hearing correctly, the Polish and German basestacks are very seperate businesses and generally poland.tf was very well organised and ran, so I wouldn't write off the Polish guys based on your experience with this.

#7

BE_Gideon

Being Esports

5 Frags – +

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.

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.

[b]Number one and most importantly:[/b]

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.

[b]Regarding the criticism towards our ticket sale format:[/b]

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.

#8

Lupus

12 Frags – +

I think you are missing the point of Tekszis post a little bit here. He isn't saying that your prices are steep he is just saying that it's not an insignificant summ of money that he can just say "aw well unlucky" and forget about it when he has been waiting for a refund for so long.

Secondly the way the first wave of ticket sales was handled is agreed to be one of the biggest mismanagements of ticket alocation in the history of tf2 lans. So trying to say it was "not optimal" is a big understatement. There are a lot of people that are not going to go this lan because of this and if this was thought out correctly there could have been so many different ways of handling this, the biggest mistakes i see were as follows:
-not having ticket reservation for teams with a set number of them going to the top invite teams.
-having the 1st wave be not even 2 weeks after the LAN was announced to the community.

Seeing as how I've only ever attended LANs and never actually done anything to help organize one there are surely many other things that go into managing events like this that I am missing info on, that however is no excuse for sub par handling of peoples hard earned (for most) cash when they have paid you for a given service. For the future I suggest giving yourselves some more time to think things through before rushing into the decission making process so as to avoid situations of backlash such as this as I am sure you know there are many other examples not just Tekszi.

Cheers

I think you are missing the point of Tekszis post a little bit here. He isn't saying that your prices are steep he is just saying that it's not an insignificant summ of money that he can just say "aw well unlucky" and forget about it when he has been waiting for a refund for so long.

Secondly the way the first wave of ticket sales was handled is agreed to be one of the biggest mismanagements of ticket alocation in the history of tf2 lans. So trying to say it was "not optimal" is a big understatement. There are a lot of people that are not going to go this lan because of this and if this was thought out correctly there could have been so many different ways of handling this, the biggest mistakes i see were as follows:
-not having ticket reservation for teams with a set number of them going to the top invite teams.
-having the 1st wave be not even 2 weeks after the LAN was announced to the community.

Seeing as how I've only ever attended LANs and never actually done anything to help organize one there are surely many other things that go into managing events like this that I am missing info on, that however is no excuse for sub par handling of peoples hard earned (for most) cash when they have paid you for a given service. For the future I suggest giving yourselves some more time to think things through before rushing into the decission making process so as to avoid situations of backlash such as this as I am sure you know there are many other examples not just Tekszi.

Cheers

#9

BE_Gideon

Being Esports

0 Frags – +

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

#10

tekszi

6 Frags – +

BE_GideonHi, 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.

Thank you for clarifying a lot of things! I agree that your refund process is generous although if it as a problem to deal with declining requests should also be an option to consider for you for future events. We have other channels where we can work things out as players but since in my case the refund was promised a while ago I felt putting up a post on the exchange channel when I cant even promise a ticket is a waste.

As for the pricing of the ticket, I agree we are getting a lot and it was not a point I was trying to argue. Actually I was even impressed since i69 had similar pricing without any PCs guaranteed (we had to rent them separately). It's much rather the argument that Lupus is making where I feel that 125 euros are a significant amount of money to just forget about.

All in all, I am thankful for your and the rest of the admin's swift communication in recent days and that the refund got issued today. I apologize again if my post came across harsh when it comes to criticism because at the end of the day the game needs people like you and organizations such as BaseStack for it's future yet I still think my feelings were justified.

[quote=BE_Gideon]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.

[b]Number one and most importantly:[/b]

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.

[b]Regarding the criticism towards our ticket sale format:[/b]

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.[/quote]

Thank you for clarifying a lot of things! I agree that your refund process is generous although if it as a problem to deal with declining requests should also be an option to consider for you for future events. We have other channels where we can work things out as players but since in my case the refund was promised a while ago I felt putting up a post on the exchange channel when I cant even promise a ticket is a waste.

As for the pricing of the ticket, I agree we are getting a lot and it was not a point I was trying to argue. Actually I was even impressed since i69 had similar pricing without any PCs guaranteed (we had to rent them separately). It's much rather the argument that Lupus is making where I feel that 125 euros are a significant amount of money to just forget about.

All in all, I am thankful for your and the rest of the admin's swift communication in recent days and that the refund got issued today. I apologize again if my post came across harsh when it comes to criticism because at the end of the day the game needs people like you and organizations such as BaseStack for it's future yet I still think my feelings were justified.

#11

BE_Gideon

Being Esports

13 Frags – +

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.

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.