With every online tournament comes the drawback of dealing with lag, disconnects, and other issues that can’t always be perfectly managed, meaning that players getting disqualified from events isn’t uncommon to see.
But a situation dealing with multiple lag tests during Pound 2020 online resulted in a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate player being double DQ’d from the $5,000 tournament despite winning the same set twice.
Grayson “Grayson” Ramosis a R.O.B. main that has competed in multiple high level tournaments, usually making it out of pools and competing against some of the bigger names in the scene. But his opponent in the top 32, Cosmos, is one of the top 25 players in the world and one of the favorites to win Pound Online.
Grayson ended up winning 2-0 over Cosmos in the match, in which he was the one hosting the games. But following the match, it was reported that both players experienced lag had hindered gameplay on either side.
One of the moderators, Cagt, asked both players to submit LAN and Speedtest results to try and find out which side was causing the issues. Here are the side by side results each player submitted.
| Cosmos | Grayson |
| Ping – 2 | Ping – 26 |
| Download – 93.53 Mbps | Download – 34.76 |
| Upload – 60.48 Mbps | Upload – 10.82 Mbps |
Seeing that neither side had an abysmal internet connection, Cagt had Grayson join a room he was hosting and proceeded to have him perform a standard button check to ensure no lag was present. After seeing that it was fine, Cosmos joined and the two re-played the set.
Grayson won the second set, though Cosmos once again reported that lag was impacting the game’s performance. A second speedtest by Grayson showed little change in his connection, and Cosmos was asked to host the third set.
After more lag interference, Cagt made the executive decision to not only DQ Grayson from the winner’s side match against Cosmos, but completely remove him from the tournament with a double disqualification.
Following the decision, Grayson revealed that he was sending in his speedtests from an untethered laptop connection, meanwhile his Nintendo Switch had been connected through LAN during the matches. This means that his provided speeds were actually slower than what he was playing on.
But even his untethered speeds shouldn’t have caused any issues with the games, since he had played without issue through the previous rounds earlier that weekend and today.
This led to many people in the community questioning if Cosmos was actually the cause, since he was streaming on Twitch and playing music while in the matches. Another belief speculated that Grayson was DQ’d simply because top player privilege came into the equation.
One of Cosmos’ roommates and content creator Cilvanis provided an image of his own speedtest, showing that while Cosmos and their other roommate Keitaro were both streaming, the connection was still high quality.
Community jokes aside, Cagt reached out hours later, offering to fly Grayson out to an event of his choosing once the coronavirus pandemic ends and LAN tournaments fire back up.
Cagt and Grayson have already buried whatever beef might have been stirring, and the prominent TO is going to spend time researching better ways to lag test for online tournaments, which should help other events run a lot smoother too.
