Let’s talk about “Professionalism” in DoTA 2 now that the qualifying teams are set in stone and the North American qualifiers begin on Monday May 12th 2014.
During this past week, we saw Revenge Esports flip-flopping though the qualifying slots. If anybody remembers when The International 3 invitations were released LGD.CN changed a roster and Valve punished LGD.CN by dropping them into the qualifiers for The International 3. Revenge did the exact same thing but they were in a qualifying spot so the Admins (Starladder Admins in charge of NA/EU qualifiers) dropped Revenge and invited Isurus Gaming for the opportunity to play for a spot at The International 4.
This is the fourth year that the International has been running, yet Valve has not been transparent at all. Sure the fans want to know the official process of selecting the invited teams, but what is really important are the rules and guidelines. Had Valve been transparent, after the LGD.CN incident this would have most likely been avoidable and fans would be more understandable.
After getting booted from the qualifier spot, Revenge Esports had made news on the Peru newspaper and things just spiraled out-of-control. Freddy ‘SmAsH’ Sina quit the team.
Excerpt taken from SmAsH’s translated FB page
Because of all the actions taken on the computer I decided today to take a step back and stop being part of Revenge eSports.
Without going into the full timeline of the breakdown, Revenge tried to replace their carry player, Benjamin ‘Benjaz’ Lanao Barros with their former carry Iwo ‘Iwo’ Bejar who’s the captain of Union Gaming who originally left Revenge due to commitment issue.
A few email exchanges later, Valve has decided to re-allow Revenge back into the qualifiers only with the original invited team.
Hi Ricardo,
We would love for your team to be able to participate and would be willing to extend the qualifiers to 11 teams to make it work. However, we can only do this if you keep your previous roster without Iwo. Does this work for you guys?
Now the question is, should Valve and Icefrog allowed them to re-participate after kicking them and Revenge probably known the rules when invited.
The point is, have the term “professionalism” completely lost its meaning? Even if the rules and guidelines were not publically. All teams should have gotten the memo.
Looking back at the scene when I first start watching DoTA, there was not much professionalism besides joinDota and various other language studios. The game had a niche community, people would cast out of their bedrooms like streamers, but it gave off a good vibe. However, now that everyone’s gotten into studios it feels that a certain level of professionalism should be met. Now that level has been kept fairly high but in the recent months some casters blurb out adjectives that are usually used describe sexual actions. I know that casters have their casting style, but using sexual innuendos for DoTA play that doesn’t fit the action going on at all really takes the spectator out of it. However, the chat goes wild; then again the chat goes wild for everything.
In the end the term “Professionalism” is continuously losing its meaning due to the prevalent revealing players and casters. However, a company like Valve should show a level and enforce their rules. If Revenge is allowed back in, a lot of teams in the future Internationals will take the chance to change rosters without consequence.
Sources: r/dota2, respective facebook fan pages.
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