XSE addresses tech issues and malpractice allegations

The second season of 2026's competitive Counter-Strike kicked off last week in Guangzhou, China at XinSai Esports Pro League 2026. The tournament quickly drew attention due to its massive $1,000,000 USD prize pool and the list of teams at the event, including Cologne Major quarter-finalists BetBoom, among teams like FaZe, PARIVISION and so on.

From the get-go, things looked at shaky at XSE Pro League 2026- from bots spamming in live chat to hours and hours of unexplained delays. Even the production was getting out of hand, with multiple layers of audio tracks stacked on top of the other and random WeChat notification sounds every now and then. Last week, Dust2 India picked up various social media posts to compile a list of things that went wrong during the first couple of days at XSE Pro League 2026 ranging from account theft to trojans on tournament PCs.

Earlier today, XSE addressed various setbacks that plagued the initial days of their tournament through a post X, which confirms most of the issues reported earlier. "We were not adequately prepared", said the tournament organizer before taking full responsibilities for day 1's technical issues. XSE claimed that they fixed most of the issues by day 2 but an unexpected power outage added to the organizer's hurdles.

After confirming that a few PCs did not have Counter-Strike 2 installed on them, XSE pinned the problem on faulty SSDs. The tournament organizer also acknowledged that a player's (Magnojez's) Steam account was hacked but was recovered without any inventory loss. "The affected systems were wiped", said XSE, hinting that multiple systems had potentially unwanted software.

XSE partially denied the "unpaid labor" allegations. While the organizer claimed that their production staff were employed under paid arrangements, they did use "volunteers" for "peripheral event operations". After the initial couple of days, XSE Pro League 2026 had comparatively lesser delays and almost no significant technical issues.