Ural Steel: Giving Away Prizes

Vallter: I would just like to advise you of some facts about the tournament to address Jeff's complains:
- according to the tournaments rules: "all players were to obtain their VISA themselves, they won't be reimbursed". Yes, we changed the rules. We contacted an agency and opened VISA's for players for them, paying the consular fees and quickening the process. We also reimbursed all players who opened VISA themselves. Just to help the players make this trip more possible. Players had only to fill in the form and send it via FedEx.
- for you and your brother we purchased the ticket from New-York to Moscow. According to the above mentioned rules, players had to pay for their own transport to the main departure hub. But we again decided to make this better for the US team members and reimbursed players in Moscow for taking an additional plane, for example, from Syracuse to New York. For you and your brother personally we purchased this ticket from Moscow and sent it to you, just because you stated that you won't go to the tournament in other manner.
This cost us something like 2500$. After that, our dear player Jeff728 felt disappointed with tournament (probably, because of the economic class), and just did not go. With VISA and tickets in his pocket. We said: "Hey, OK. This is his choice."
Yes, we had some issues with our sponsors "UralVagonZavod" and partners from travel agencies (I won't mention their names and companies). That is why the ticket purchasing and invitation making was so long. From our part we made everything possible to fix this (like Jeff stated himself, we paid 5 times more for the VISA and this is not near a 10% of what we've done). But still participants received their ticket 24-48 hours before the trip. We beg your pardon for this and do not blame those who did not end up coming to Moscow. We are very grateful to those, who found the bravery (or, may be, adventurism) to believe us in these circumstances.
Yes, we changed some rules for finals. And announced some of them just before the tournament (8 Tier Arty). But this is normal e-sport practice. The general set of rules (map, number of players etc.) was not changed.
Yes, we argued about the possibility of using TS and other VoIP services by our players up until the last minutes. I personally convinced Russian e-Sport Federation to allow you to use it and communicate with remote players.
This was our first tournament and next time, with the additional experience we have now, we will do many things differently in future. We will do better.
As all players could see, we did everything possible for all players. And they enjoyed the trip. I won't write anything about this, you can ask about them the time they spent in Moscow.
Also all American teams won their prizes as well. Each of participants will receive 15k gold within a week including substitutes.
When the US players arrived the first thing I asked them was: "Why did Jeff not come? He did so much organizational work (like any other captain) and earned this trip". And it was a pity to see Jeff's posts. But we said: "OK, he can be disappointed with the organization and loss. We won't take any measures". But he is near the border.
At the end I want to thank again everyone for coming. We all were very glad to see you and hope, that you will participate in the next tournament as well.