It's a paid service ($7/month) that lets you set up competitive matches of Counter-strike (and TF2 and LoL) with other ESEA players. It has it's own ranking system, it's own league/ladder, and anti-cheat system. It has over 20,000 subscribers. It's the most popular of such services for Counter-strike, and has been around for many years.
This incident is really serious. People have reported damaged hardware from this. Mining bitcoins can run quite hot if your system is not built for it. ESEA has been known for being scummy in the past - this is a huge breach of trust and security that I can't believe so many players are overlooking it.
The worst part is their response to all of this. They're playing it off like a joke and think it's no big deal. The $3600 they made came at the expense of far more than $3600 in electricity costs from the community. They lied about the whole thing, and keep changing their story as people figure out more of it. There's more discussion on this on the csgo subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dgad2/esea...
It's a paid service ($7/month) that lets you set up competitive matches of Counter-strike (and TF2 and LoL) with other ESEA players. It has it's own ranking system, it's own league/ladder, and anti-cheat system. It has over 20,000 subscribers. It's the most popular of such services for Counter-strike, and has been around for many years.
This incident is really serious. People have reported damaged hardware from this. Mining bitcoins can run quite hot if your system is not built for it. ESEA has been known for being scummy in the past - this is a huge breach of trust and security that I can't believe so many players are overlooking it.
The worst part is their response to all of this. They're playing it off like a joke and think it's no big deal. The $3600 they made came at the expense of far more than $3600 in electricity costs from the community. They lied about the whole thing, and keep changing their story as people figure out more of it. There's more discussion on this on the csgo subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dgad2/esea...