South Africans making waves in the international esports arena should always be celebrated, but sometimes it doesn't all go according to plan - especially when competing from SA in international tournaments.
South Africa's Vinco Gaming found out the hard way recently what it truly means to be playing against some of the best PlayerUnknown's Battleground during the IEM Katowice European open qualifiers.
The team managed to beat off all competitors in the European open qualifiers up until the Round 3 (Best-of-32), where Vinco Gaming was unceremoniously kicked out of the qualifiers - for living in South Africa.
But before being up in arms about being disqualified purely for their geographical location and making it that far in the qualifiers, the team did know that it was taking a chance.
"We had read through the rules and taken note of which countries were allowed to play in it. Four of the five members of our team have EU passports which would have been a requirement if they asked for proof of nationality, so in the end it was our physical location that was our downfall," ViNCO team member James 'Waxxie' Tully, told GoodLuckHaveFun in an interview.
Tully further explained that the team did kind of expect to be disqualified at some point.
"Having passports and being able to attend the LAN final was one of the reasons we decided to compete despite the rules. However when we started we knew that, should we make it fairly far in the qualifiers, we would probably be disqualified. So it came as no surprise to us," he said.
Disqualification aside, it does raise an interesting question: how do South African teams stack up against international players?
"It felt quite surreal. We hadn't expected to make it through round two of the qualifiers at first because of the skill level and the performance stats of some of the players we were up against. The best moment for us was during round three of the qualifiers when we won game two with 14 kills while Deadmau5 was casting our game," Tully explained.
If Vinco Gaming could make it into the top 32 for Europe, could South Africa have really strong PUBG teams?
Or is it just a question of the ping being in our favour, as some of the online forum posters have suggested?
South Africa won't know the true strength of its PUBG teams until it legitimately competes on an equal footing, but the future does look bright.