(if you're familiar with Dota over the last few years, skip the first two sections)
So Valve is hosting a Major in Boston, MA, USA, with a prize pool of ~$3 million (just in case you hadn't heard).
As with all Valve events post-TI4, some teams are directly invited to the main event ("Direct Invites") and some are invited to the "Regional Qualifiers" (RQ). Every other team in the world (or random collective of 5 casters) can sign up for the "Open Qualifiers".
The Open Qualifiers came about in TI5 as a way to ensure that unknown/new teams (as well as established teams who made roster changes after a deadline) were able to qualify for the Valve events. The format has always been one or two qualifiers per region (when I say region here, I mean "America", "Europe", "China", "SEA"), each being bo1 until some point (normally quarterfinals) when they turn into bo3. Grinding your way through a 1024 team event is a massive challenge even for a very experienced and skilled team (even a team with a 90% chance to win each game has only a ~33% chance to win the entire qualifier), and so far only 4 teams have won an open qualifier and then gone on to qualify for the event through regionals:
- Unknown.xiu for The Frankfurt Major (tied 9th)
- Team Secret for TI6 (tied 13th)
- Evil Geniuses for TI6 (3rd)
- TNC for TI6 (tied 7th)
The recent furore in the Dota 2 scene has been related to these 'Open Qualifiers'. Some teams who are located in Europe (where there are more 'tier 1/tier 1.5' teams in the regional qualifiers) have decided to instead play in the Open Qualifiers for the Americas. Their perception is that, despite a ping of ~100ms higher than their ping to EU, beating the American teams will be easier. Some people have said outright that the rules are bad (suggesting that you should only play in your region: https://twitter.com/LodaBerg/status/790930174468558848), whilst others have hinted as much but haven't said it directly. As it stands, the only two possibilities to play in multiple regions is Americas/EU and SEA/China (for Koreans it's fine, for most of SEA it's problematic), and we have many cases of the Americas/EU crossover.
A narrative that many people have suggested is that its unfair to the other American teams (coL, NP, FDL, etc) that a European team would play in the "NA Open Qualifiers" and end up 'representing NA Dota' (https://twitter.com/MoonMeanderated/status/790964067762442240). This to me seems strange on two levels -
- Firstly, it's the "Americas Qualifiers", not the "NA Qualifiers". It's actually funny that it's been appropriated as the "NA Qualifiers" given that of the only 2 teams from any open qualifiers that has made it to regionals, one was from South America.
- It's a bit understandable for this mistake to occur given that FACEIT (the official partner that handles open qualifiers) calls it the "NA Open Qualifier" - but this is an obvious mistake on their part given many official Valve announcements clearly showing the region as "Americas".
- It's also a bit unreasonable that despite being called "Americas", many South American teams are still playing with very high ping because the default server location is USE (and can only be changed if both teams agree).
- That 'representation' is being argued as the key factor. Surely the people arguing for 'representation' should also advocate for South American, African, Indian; even Australian Qualifiers. The only times I've seen a big discussion/suggestions for a separate South American Qualifier (which was funnily enough just before The Frankfurt Open Qualifiers), the general consensus from professional players was that they should be part of the "NA Qualifiers", and that 'South America doesn't deserve it's own invite/qualifier'. Even now, it's quite a popular opinion that the CIS region should get it's own qualifiers.
Instead of a hard regionlock (how SC2 did WCS), the qualifiers don't necessarily need to be 2 slots per region - it could be 1 per region (at least), but be representative of the strength of the regions. In this case, you could give EU 3 slots (let's say).
This doesn't totally solve the problem however:
- It might turn out that teams still swap regions because of slightly different evaluations of the 'top teams' due to specific matchups (for example let's say Fnatic could instead play in Americas/EU qualifiers last season and they specifically wanted to dodge NaVi who are like 3-25 against them in the last 6 months - they might choose NA, even if NA only had 1 slot).
- There's a reward to sign up for qualifiers as late as possible (when you have the most information on where the other teams of your skill level are). This makes it difficult for organisers to arrange schedules or estimate how many teams will end up signing up. A minor bit of downtime for the server during a peak rush could be a disaster.
- [This point is actually quite long and so I made it as the final paragraph.]
The only other reasonable criticism of the system I've seen is from Nahaz (https://twitter.com/NahazDota/status/790940899391836166), who's saying that if you're attempting to play in multiple regions at the same time, you could have scheduling issues where you end up having to forfeit from one of the qualifiers to play in the other. To me this a minor concern - it happens so rarely and ends up allowing a team to move 1 spot futher in the bracket then they otherwise would. This happens very regularly in other tournaments where a team is playing in the qualifiers for an event (potentially knocking out a bunch of teams) and then ends up forfeiting in the final 8/4. It's not a huge concern there, it seems to me to be a reasonable action.
There are multiple regions who just have a shitty time getting to events. As mentioned above, South America is the key example here, as is South Africa (a scene I'm very familiar with). The argument is always "well, if they get better they can get a qualifier". How do people presume that these regions 'get good' given their isolation (both in terms of latency and in terms of access to international events)? The only three international events South African teams have attended are ESWC (http://wiki.teamliquid.net/dota2/Electronic_Sports_World_Cup_2013), MSI Beat It (http://wiki.teamliquid.net/dota2/MSI_Beat_IT_2014) and WESG (http://wiki.teamliquid.net/dota2/World_Electronic_Sports_Games/2016/Middle_East_and_Africa). At ESWC, they ended up getting beaten by 2 well known teams, and aAa who were one of the top French teams at the event); and won 2 against the other 2 teams from weak regions. At MSI Beat It, they got knocked out by CDEC (LMAO), Immunity (some N9/AL faces you'll notice) and ended up placing tied 5th with NaVi.US; taking a game off Immunity and beating Insidious Idol along the way. At WESG they topped their group 3-0 and then lost against the other 2 teams (coming 3rd, but qualifying for the main WESG event). I'm sure loads of other 'weak' regions have similar stories - limited but cool success internationally, with almost no experience. Without loads of experience, you can hardly expect results just to come with just 3 international events in 4 years. A lot of times I see stuff about "make UK Dota great", "when will a UK Dota team make it internationally" (if it's not very obvious, I do follow a lot of people from the UK and Northern Ireland) - and this is a reasonable question. But the last time UK and South African teams had a tournament (4 teams per event) South Africa won (http://challonge.com/bravado_brawl), despite playing with 200ms latency.