In a recent blog post, Eternal Envy writes about his thoughts on the current state of things in tournaments. Topics discussed include the oversaturation of tournaments and the failures of different tournaments.
The blog post by Jacky 'Eternal Envy' Mao, starts with the problems of tournament oversaturation in the Dota2 scene. The result of oversaturation is the lack of motivation for many players and casters. Following this, Eternal Envy moves on to discuss the low quality planning of various tournaments, from poor flying conditions for the players to scheduling issues of the tournament.
The next topic talked about is the issues with the current ticketing system for DotaTV; it encourages the tournament organizers to put as much content as possible into the ticket which results in tournament organizers all opting to use qualifiers to invite teams in order to give buyers of the ticket more content.
The topic of the ticketing system then leads into how casting has been affected by this over load of games and tournaments. Eternal Envy feels that the casting scene has not improved at all since last year and that casters are caring less about the games they cast due to having too many games to cast. The sheer amount of games has also led to constant rescheduling due to conflicting schedules, which inhibits the casters from being able to bring on professional players as a co-caster, hence affecting casting quality.
Eternal Envy on...
...tournament oversaturation:
In order to enforce the idea that the results of games are meaning less and less to the pro players, EE talks about a conversation he had with Arteezy after Evil Geniuses lost to Complexity Gaming and how lightly Artour 'Arteezy' Babaev took the lost. He builds on this example and wrote "Winning a bo3 2-0 against a top team of the world should mean something. But instead we just get a situation where its hard to tell whether the match had any meaning."
...low quality tournament management:
Eternal Envy brings up different problems he and other teams met while traveling to and attending tournaments.
"The official reason to why Secret couldn't attend WEC was due to "visa issues,"...They decided not to attend because WEC booked EVERY secret player flights with 12-24 hour layovers."
"When we (Cloud9) got ddosed at DH, instead of pausing the game and switching IPs and solving the problem first before we started playing again. We were told to try again and get ddossed again and then one more time before they finally realized that things needed to be changed."
"It's usually extremely frustrating to solve these simple problems (game hosting issues)at Chinese events because of incompetence and language. At WCA instead of hiring proper translators they get volunteers from local universities who took english courses (the students barely spoke english)."
"iLeague isn’t going to have any translators so were currently in negotiations to hire Xiituzi (a translator) for the event, China without being able to speak the language is hell."
...in game ticketing system:
"The more games a tournament has the more worthwhile it is to buy the ticket. Thus, tournaments have all started having long group stages so that people would find more value in their ticket."
"All of these tournaments are gambling (by having qualifiers) that the top teams will qualify anyway, and even though they want these teams to qualify they won’t directly invite them."
...quality of casts:
"The casters have stopped caring. I mean how could they? Matches are being rescheduled non-stop (because theres TOO MANY things start clashing), no one knows what is happening."
"The level of professionalism is low as well. I understand a fun cast here and there but casts nowadays are in general way too casual...they (players from under performing teams) disappear from the scene, are kicked from their team, flamed by the community, flamed by themselves, their teammates, and in general its such a shitty situation."
To read the entire blog post, click here
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