Professional Counter-Strike players have reportedly been subjected to dangerous living conditions as they head into the ESL Pro League Season 16 playoffs in Malta.
Throughout CS:GO’s history and esports as a whole, players have had to deal with constant travel, unreasonable working conditions, and poor living arrangements.
This, paired with matches sometimes going into the early hours of the morning and Counter-Strike talent being pushed to do multiple best-of-threes in a day, makes working in CS:GO an undeniably difficult task at times.
Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev took to Twitter to voice his outrage at the state of the hotel rooms that ESL had provided during his stay for Pro League.
The Ukrainian player shared that he had been moved in and out of rooms and had dealt with unhealthy accommodations overall. He took aim at ESL’s professionalism, tweeting “wake up and tell your employees to remember what professionalism is.”
The world’s number one player complained about ESL’s communication, sharing his anger at tournament organizers and the hotel they provided.
NAVI’s superstar player then shared images of the conditions in his hotel room, highlighting the incredibly unhealthy amount of mold he had to deal with.
S1mple complained of waking up “with ants” in his bed and mold covering areas near ventilation.
ESL’s Senior Vice President of Game Ecosystems, Ulrich “TheFlyingDJ” Schulze, responded to s1mple’s complaints in a Reddit thread, saying, “we have had a fairly active dialog with all teams and players since the start of EPL, working out solutions to various topics that were raised, so we had an active communication channel for those topics set up.”
Schulze later added that they were “still investigating” the issues and that s1mple was the only player to raise any complaints of all the players in 24 teams.
