Announcements

Introducing Live Support Beta & Improving Community Values

  • New in-game support system with live admin moderation
  • Starting with NA Insiders to be rolled out to all users in the upcoming month
  • Recommitment to community values and improving user experiences

Part 1: Introduction of Live Support Beta

Today we are extremely excited to announce the rollout of a key initiative we have been working on called Live Support.

The premise of Live Support is simple: if you are having an issue with another user in your game and it is a reportable offense, you can report that user and that ticket will be sent live to a team of admins on call who will come to your game, evaluate the situation, and issue any punishments that may be appropriate for the situation. Admins will have access to all chat logs, in-game comms, and game footage for the match in question.

We won’t lie, this change is a major undertaking. We had over 230,000 matches played on our platform last month and being able to monitor every single one will be a challenge. That is why as an introductory beta period, we are only releasing this today to North American Insiders. During the course of the next month, we expect to gradually expand the rollout to all Insiders, NA Premium, and eventually to all Premium users worldwide. We will separately announce each stage as they become live. Please note this staggered rollout is purely to ensure scalability and reliability, and will ultimately result in the best long-term experience for our entire community.

Once Live Support is fully released to all users we will be retiring the .kick system. Users will no longer be able to kick users from their games, instead an admin will have the ability to warn, kick or ban users once they are reported.

To use the report system, type .report username reason Once your report has been submitted, a live admin (if available) will accept the report and be spectating your server in no time. We will do our best to keep the support team staffed to allow for continuous coverage, but those playing in off hours may experience times where an admin is not available. This is something we will work to eliminate as we improve the system overall. We will also be continuing to hire more admins as we scale up, so keep an eye out on your inbox if you applied!

We hope you are as excited about this update as we are. We envision Live Support to be a major step forward in our efforts to continue to build and grow the best community in esports. However, we also recognize that this is only one piece of a larger community experience and there is a still a long way to go before we can be (if ever) satisfied with our obligation to create the best experience for all users.

Part 2: Improving Community Values

We would also like to take this opportunity to announce a much broader commitment to culture and transparency at ESEA. We have always been focused on maintaining an industry-leading anti-cheat, high performance game servers, and the most competitive games of CS:GO, but we’ll be the first to admit that we haven’t done the best job of fostering an inviting and inclusive atmosphere. While we have internally strived toward this goal for a while now, we are officially today committing to you, our community, that we can and will do better.

Over the course of the next weeks and months you’ll be seeing changes across the ESEA organization and updates coming to both the product and community guidelines. For visibility, we have outlined some of the key initiatives being worked on currently:

  • We are evaluating candidates both internally and externally to lead community relations. This individual will be responsible for setting the overall culture and direction of our community going forward. They also will be in charge of establishing and enforcing policies and procedures.
  • We are retraining all staff on proper and improper ways to deal with support and community interaction. We will also be bolstering our admin team for Live Support and other projects.
  • We are implementing both technological and process-driven approaches to improve the support ticket process for non-Live Support related issues.
  • We will be holding ourselves accountable toward meeting the goals of transparency and fairness. As a first step, we will be adding “admin abuse” as a reportable topic for support tickets.
  • We will be finding ways to involve the community more in being able to provide feedback on upcoming product changes and identify key areas of the platform that require improvement.

The above are initial steps we are taking to deliver the best experience possible for the entire community. There are many more product updates, community features, and cool projects to come.

To all our community members, we thank you for your loyalty to us all these years and hope you will see this as a positive new chapter in the history of ESEA.