I hope you remember eGe from their 3rd place finish at CPL, because you won’t be seeing them at the Newegg LANFest.

It wasn’t their fault, though. They won the online qualifiers for the event, which awarded airline tickets to the event along with free lodging. For most teams, that’s really cool. For a team from Canada that had to spend $700 per plane ticket to get to the CPL, the free airfare is a divine gift.

If only they could have used it.

GotFrag has a small write-up about the issues in their LANFest preview, and I’ll post the eGe snippet here:

“The freshly crowned CEVO Main champions will not be in attendance despite winning Newegg's online qualifier and Jet Blue travel vouchers to attend the event. eGe was unable to redeem the flight coupons for flights out of Canada, because of restrictions on international travel. They also attempted to book a flight from Buffalo New York, but the travel vouchers were not valid for anything except a nonstop flight.”

This absolutely blows my mind. How is it in the best interest of LANFest to not have a great team attend? Especially when you consider their fan-base. eGe is one of the most popular Canadian teams, and having them at the tournament would certainly make it more appealing for our northern brethren. Isn’t it worth it for them to find some way to work around the issues? The vouchers weren’t even valid for a flight with a stop, which is less appealing than a non-stop flight. In other words, eGe wanted to inconvenience themselves and lower the overall value of the tickets, and they weren’t allowed to.

It’s stuff like this that drives me absolutely bonkers. It’s a very small thing for a company like Newegg to make sure that the best teams can attend. Out of all their revenues, the flight and lodging costs would be worth about a minute of profit from their website, and in return they reach a group of people that won’t pay as much attention to a LAN if one of their teams isn’t there. If there was a LAN hosted in Canada and 3D was the only American team to attend, but they couldn’t go due to some red tape, would anybody from the US pay attention? Maybe, but not nearly as many that would be interested if 3D did play.

Basically, it’s a lose-lose situation for eGe and Newegg. And, I think, one that could have been easily avoided.