We got alot of criticism after giving away the finals to Blank.
People seems to write before knowing the facts, I´ve seen many stupid comments concerning our decision.
Before I go to bed I will explain and hopefully people will get our point of view.

First out, this might sound arrogant; we really consider ourselves as a team that should not need to qualify to the Swedish ESWC qualifier event, which will be held at Dreamhack in June.
The main reason for this is that we are the reigning champion, also we are a top team with tight schedule, I think we should let less known teams have a chance to qualfify for the final event, this would help the scene grow I think.

We tried to explain our situation to the admins but they had made their plans for this year - however, they will consider this matter for the upcoming seasons.
Fair enough...

Due to other tournaments it came down to the final pre-qualifier, which was hold at the internet cafe Inferno Online in Stockholm.
I just got back from this event after a really rough day, filled with delays and stress, since we need to get back the same day.

Before we went to Stockholm we asked the organizers at IO for the schedule, and were told that the tournament will end at 7pm.

For those of you guys who have been in esport are probably aware of that it´s very hard to say a precise time when the tournament is supposed to be finished.
This I can accept, one hour more or less is fine, but since we were told this time we decided to plan our departure from Stockholm, since its expensive and hard to find an hotel, also we are tired of travel since Kode5 and want to spend our nights at our homes.

The reader should also have in their minds that Inferno Online having hundreds of PCs, but decided to not use the amount of computers I reckon they should have assigned in order to keep the schedule.
Instead they used 4 stations(20 PCs) in the playoffs, where 8 teams were left. This caused more delays since 4 teams had to sit out and wait for their turn.

This caused frustration for us, first our group stage was delayed by approximatly 90 minutes, and now we had to sit and wait for our playoffs to start since they did not want to "spend" computers on us.

At this pre-qualifier two teams would qualify for the final qualifier, and you will secure your spot by winning the semi-final.

When we finished our semi-final against sChEnArEy.aTTaX we decided to give away the final, where team Blank awaited.
At this time the time was 10pm, 3 hours after scheduled finish, and as I said we had to leave in order to get back home.

The admins at IO confronted us when we announced our decision, and start threathing us with disqualification. I told them that the WC3 final was not played, also the previous pre-qualfier in Gothenburg ended in the same way - teams/players forfeited the final.

Finally, people should not consider our walk-over as somekind of manifestation of arrogance by us. I can only blame it on a misunderstanding in mail conversation we had with IO before this event.
If we had knew that tournament would have ended at approximatly 11pm as it would have today, we had decided to book hotel in Stockholm and stayed.
Now this wasn´t the case, we had our departure booked from Stockholm and felt that we rather go home instead of running around night time in Stockholm to find a place to sleep.

I hope this blog drew some more facts to the surface, and most important, that people understand why we did this decision.

Good night and see you at Dreamhack!