I get a 404 on that url... Anyone else?

fixed

CEVO has never put up anything even close to the ~13,000 USD pool that invite will be receiving this season

I don't think they should see jail time for this, but you cannot tell me they weren't aware of the consequences of what they were doing - and of course its the TF2 and CS communities will suffer if it all comes tumbling down.

Queue IT heads for a largish company somewhere mining away on workstations at night

16:06 < aethr> i guess they didnt think the esea community would ... mined

This would have been a cool idea to raise funds if they'd actually been public about it and allowed people to opt in or out, but they dropped the ball massively by making it all shady.

We did? Where?

Edit: Oh you had to have Premium already. :/

What ESEA did was a gross breach of trust. As a developer, I'm disgusted by their response to this news. I'd suggest contacting the Better Business Bureau and also all of ESEA's sponsors.

And all that bullshit about being covered by a ToS, don't bother suing, doesn't hold water at all, especially in Europe. I don't know if the EFF would be interested in this, but they might help with publicity https://www.eff.org/about/contact

well yeah, no joke for them. Bitcoin mining takes up almost 100% of your GPU and a lot of people in the CS scene use ESEA as a pugging solution so many of them leave the client open like a lot of you leave the IRC TF2 channels open all day. So very many of their GPUs got friend, and it isn't like the pricey ones don't shit out either after 15 days of 100% use. Thank god almost none of us use that client.

it would have been one thing to have the clients mine and then leave that to be. But there were "updates" every single day that would basically sweep and collect whatever the GPUs had mined and sent them back to ESEA. Weren't aware is a huge understatement.

this seems to be getting a lot of public attention. If ESEA gets destroyed by this I would be so happy.

yeah it'd be a great thing for competitive TF2 to basically die as an e-sport wooo...

I don't understand much about how bitcoin mining works. What I'm getting from this thread is

1) ESEA was using their client to make money without the users' knowledge.

2) There was code in the client that put users' hardware at known risk of permanent failure.

3) ESEA spokespeople recognize that their actions were wrong, and are attempting to reconcile by adding said profit to the prize pool for next season.

Please correct me or elaborate on any of these. If these are all true, I suppose the question really is

Are subscribers willing to continue to trust ESEA and their client? And if not, where should these subscribers turn for comparable service?

What I'm worried about, if ESEA does go down due to this, is you're talking about entirely losing a season and the prize pool that went with it, yeah everybody could move over to CEVO but that's a $9,000 cash pool that suddenly goes poof.

Look at it this way: CS 1.6 and Source are both dead games, LoL wouldn't give two bits and CSGO probably would be picked up as a title elsewhere. Where does that leave TF? Holding the empty bag of promises.

Look on the bright side. This may become a big news story in the gaming community and we might get some real publicity. ANY NEWS IS GOOD NEWS!

NATF2L PLZ

This is seriously fucked up, I'd love to see ESEA get in some deep shit but I defiantly would hate to TF2 fail as an E-Sport. In all honesty it would break my wee heart to see TF2 go down like that.

>defiantly
I don't know if it would fail as an E-Sport, but it's definitely a make or break thing. ESEA has an amazing north american following for FPS games that a lot of other E-sport leagues would love to pick up. The only thing left would be to see if someone would pick up TF2. I think it could even motivate some new TF2 leagues to get started and y'know, that wouldn't be half bad (prize pool size or not [unless it was prizeless]) considering ESEA is the only thing decent to higher level teams even consider dedicating themselves to and theres a whole lot of flaw with that when you consider, "Well, is TF2 ever gonna get big? Why doesn't anyone become a full-time FPS gamer?"

But yea, if no one came in fast, I'm afraid we would probably just drift into obscurity

A couple seasons ago I left my ESEA client open by mistake for several days while I was out of town, I came back to find one of my 480gtx's fried.

nvidia took care of it for me so I didn't pay anything out of pocket but I wonder if it had anything to due with this...

For ESEA to knowingly use us like this is a complete joke. Pay to play in their league, not just monthly for premium, but the entry fee as well. So they charge us money on top of using us in secret to make money. That's unreal. I honestly wouldn't care as much if ESEA was totally free to play and they used all the bitcoin money to fund the league in various ways, including the LAN, and prizes but this is bullshit.

ESEA should really step up and give all teams (in all divisions, for all games) an entirely free season. They should even pay for all LAN teams travel expenses this time. They REALLY fucked up...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEbE3fGfF-o

MLG TF2

Eric Thunberg taking rank among infamous e-sports moguls like Scott Valencia and Angel Munoz. How reassuring to see that ESEA is owned by a child. What a scumbag.

I will not deny that ESEA props north american TF2 on its back with its prize pools and an actual LAN, but I am not bending over for some rich douche who finds it perfectly acceptable to even allow this "bitcoin mining joke" to have even been considered, not to mention actually implementing it and having it leak (lol whoops guys 'our bad').[/b]

Should I bend over for this asshole in the name of north american TF2? Not even fucking likely. Fuck ESEA, and fuck if they ever receive a dime from me ever again.

http://www.twitch.tv/ggty886/b/397871712

just going to say they half admitted this was illegal

starts at about 5:20 for the admission

Actually I think they may still be within legal boundaries. Bitcoin isn't a currency in the same way as dollars or pounds. It doesn't get its value from government regulation and law. Basically someone created it and attached a value to it, and everyone went with it. It's essentially made up money.

As for the miners embedded within the clients, everyone who installed the client gave their consent to allow the application and everything it comes with onto their computers. There's probably a few clauses in the terms of use allowing for that too.

The biggest concern would be the claims of damaged GPUs. But for that to go anywhere you'd have to make the case that the GPU was damaged by the bitcoin miner specifically. That would be pretty hard I think, given the volatile nature of computer parts, especially in custom builds (I'm not saying it wasn't caused by the miner, just that it would be hard to prove legally).

According to Wikipedia:

I'm not sure if this has any relevance to this debacle with ESEA, but from what I've read, it's the only real link the government has to Bitcoins.

---

All in all I think it's weird as hell. I'm a little floored by the amount of money they made in such a short time, and relieved that it's going to the prize pots. Their reasons for it do seem convenient but it doesn't mean they can't be true. The CS community seems to be reacting a lot more strongly to this than we are, and given what we know about them, our reaction is probably the more reasonable one.

As shitty as it was, I don't see anything actually happening to them because of it.

It's actually an ingenious idea (gamers usually have powerful gpus), but, as turts pointed out, the implementation is terrible. If an opt-in situation to generate income for themselves and the prize pots was provided, ESEA would still have my limited respect, but the fact that his bitcoin code slipped into the mainstream ESEA client build and was distributed to the public reveals a very spotty moral code that I would contend he (Eric Thunberg - or lpkane) is trying to mask by claiming amateur mistakes - despite the organization developing this software for some time.

Basically, I feel, especially as a software developer myself, that this is a breach of trust that will never be mended. It makes me especially wary of what else ESEA client is doing while it runs in the background.

Historically, 'esport' gamers have made lousy activists when it comes to their own hobby. Everyone just wants to play games, and that's fine, since it's not like ESEA being a shitty business with sketchy software practices is going to put little Jimmy from team Exigent into poverty because they took advantage of his computer. But it does make us as a group less powerful and less persuasive if this sort of behavior is tolerated.

TF2 and ESEA have always gone hand-in-hand since I started playing despite shitty servers, subscription fees, broken client after a TF2 patch, and voting that only includes the subset of players that pay subscription fees during offseason. I just think 6v6 TF2 could be better, but it would take solidarity to draw-out any change from ESEA, and, if that did not play out, a lot of unpaid work to create a reasonable alternative.

In closing, I will point out that ETF2L is a good counter-example to the argument that if ESEA dies, then TF2 dies with it. I'm not saying that it is a good league, but that it serves as a decent example of marked popularity without the presence of a LAN at the end of the rainbow.

Let me play devils advocate:

If I'm understanding lpkane's reasons, then the bitcoin miners nested inside the client were part of an experimental update (likely thinking along the same lines as you, with an opt-in system) that accidentally found its way into the publicly released version. I could buy that. It's not a very satisfying explanation but it is a feasible one.

Really I think a lot of this could be the result of bad PR. lpkane shouldn't have made his first post until he'd confirmed the numbers he ended up with in his second post. It called the legitimacy of his explanation and the severity of the infraction into question. His glib responses to the outrage aren't helping much either, but, once again I have to sympathize with him when confronted with the torrent of angry, profanity filled comments from CS players.

I find the idea that ESEA was secretly hijacking their customer's computers to farm bitcoins to be unlikely. There was no way it wouldn't be discovered, not when the people they're deceiving are so highly computer literate. It would only cause permanent damage to the company for a relatively small gain. Why would a company that's been around as long as ESEA have throw their customer base away like that?

tl;dr:

Maybe the bitcoin miners were from an experimental opt-in program that got mixed into the public client,

Maybe bad PR obfuscated ESEA's defense, and cast them in a bad light,

The cost for ESEA if they attempted to hijack customers' PCs for mineing would have been exponentially higher than the payoff, so doing so makes little sense considering how established ESEA is.

--

I'd like to consider myself completely neutral, since I wasn't affected by this at all, and didn't even know what a bitcoin was until this happened and I went and read up on it. This is just my interpretation of ESEA's defense.

That is a very reasonable point, and one, I suspect, would hold up in court very well for him if he had to appear there. It is indeed a very strange situation they landed themselves; I am happy to be parting ways with them.

kinda wonder what's happening with playigl.com

This makes me glad to be an EU player.