Twelve teams will qualify for the $1,500,000 WESG Global Grand Finals from China next year and some of the finest players in the scene teamed up with their National fellow players to represent their country at the second edition of World Electronic Sports Games.
I’m not sure when the time passed. It feels like only yesterday I was in China at the inaugural WESG edition. But that happened at the beginning of January and here we are now, towards the end of November 2017, in Barcelona, Spain at the European and CIS regional qualifiers LAN finals for the second edition. There’s plenty of players returning at the event but there’s also a bunch of new faces, yet so familiar to any Dota 2 fan. The huge prize pool for an event that’s outside the Valve sponsored Minors and Majors seems to be working wonders for WESG. The tournament and its Olympic format with only National rosters allowed to participate was discussed and debated at large last year and the overall finding was that such a format shouldn’t exist in esports, especially in Dota 2. Many were nearly convinced that WESG will not be able to survive in an extremely packed 2017-2018 competitive season where we have 11 Minors and 16 Majors already scheduled and officially announced. Yet here we are, at the WESG 2017-2018 EU and CIS regional qualifiers finals with teams featuring the likes of Notail, Ramzes, Solo, Handsken, W33, Loda, Rodjer, SingSing, Lil, No[o]ne, Era, and I could go on like this, writing a full page of incredibly accomplished players who in theory are only looking through the year at securing a spot at TI 8.
I strongly doubt that the prize pool is the only factor that motivates them to play for a spot in the 1.5M dollars Global Grand Finals. WESG, although a new tournament on the map, has a special feeling for everyone attending it. We have very few events that gather players from multiple game titles and, at least for Dota, it’s the only tournament that brings together Major Champions and players who are not even ready to really commit to a full competitive career. The player mix we witness at WESG is something worth watching, it gives a very good insight of why some countries don’t have strong players on the international scene (see for example, the British or Turkish players non-existence in tier one teams) and it also highlights youngsters that will end up joining the tier one teams sooner rather than later.
We are on the first day of EU and CIS regional qualifiers finals and the first two groups bring us many interesting match-ups. Those who are here, sort of split the participants in two big categories. We have teams to whom people are referring based on their leading star, such as “Team Notail”, “Team Loda” or “Team Solo” and then there are “the Greeks”, “the Finns”, The Serbians” and so on. Today we get to see in action Group B which already started, and Group A, which will commence at 16:00 CET. The group stage format is a round robin Bo1 affair with the top 3 teams from each group advancing to the Global Grand Finals from China next year. There will be 12 teams qualifying in total from the 20 attending ones, and we will be here to bring you the latest news from the event.
