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Diversity Should Not Overshadow Competence: Why Valve Messed up the Rules for DPC 2021

The moment of truth is quickly approaching for a lot of great Dota 2 teams and players. Unfortunately for... Radu M. | 30. June 2021

The moment of truth is quickly approaching for a lot of great Dota 2 teams and players. Unfortunately for Western Europe, this year turned out to be much weaker than the previous ones. We had become accustomed to having teams like Secret, OG, and Liquid win Majors and getting a direct invite to The International at the end of the regular season. But this time, mainly because of the weird rules created by Valve for the Dota Pro Circuit 2021, a lot of strong teams missed the boat and will have to battle against each other for the one remaining TI 10 ticket.

Why The DPC 2021 Rules Were Problematic

Dota Pro Circuit features 6 regions: North America, South America, China, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe. But these regions are far from being of equal strength. In esports like League of Legends, where a similar situation exists, the people in charge are aware of this situation and they make the rules so that representation does not become a higher value than meritocracy.

Ideally, a world championship should feature the best teams in the world but also make room for diversity in order to attract the maximum number of viewers. However, when diversity ends up becoming more important than competence, the tournament loses credibility. Because think about it: how can it be the world championship if many of the world’s best teams don’t even get to compete?

International esports events should be a celebration of skill and diversity, not of diversity and skill. And now I come back to the rules of DPC 2021.

The main issue with these rules is that the regional events offered too many points relative to the number of points offered by the two Majors. If you can get 500 points for winning a regional tournament but you also receive just 500 points for winning a Major, this pretty much guarantees that your local dominance will grant you a ticket to The International regardless of how weak your region is relative to the other 5. And the result is visible.

For instance, this year there will be 3 South American teams and 3 Western European teams competing in The International. And these two regions are light years away from each other in terms of skill and past results.

Punishing the Strong Regions for Being Strong

Regions like Western Europe, where many of the world’s best teams happen to compete, get punished for having a lot of talented players. This is not normal. And it’s all a consequence of how the DPC 2021 rules were designed. Too much emphasis is placed on what happens regionally and this levels the playing field in an unhealthy way. If the same rules will be used in 2022, I’m pretty sure that many Western European teams will consider moving to another region, where there is far less competition.

The Solution

There are two approaches to bring the situation back to normal.

The first approach is to make the Majors what they used to be and ensure that the highest number of qualification points are offered by international events where the regions get to compete against each other. In my opinion, a Major should offer at least three times more points to the winner than a regional event does. And why reward just the top 8 teams? Reward everyone for being there to mark the fact that they were good enough to qualify!

The second approach is to make The International a bigger tournament. Instead of having just 18 participants, why not have 24? That way, you don’t leave a lot of important teams out of the race, the fans get what they want, and everybody’s happy. And you can either give direct invites to the top 18 instead of the top 12, or do things as before but allow 2 teams per region to qualify via regional qualifiers.

 

Photo credit: Valve