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.