The Dota Pro Circuit is finally returning. It has almost been a full year since the last official Valve tournament. The biggest news to come out in the new year is the banning of two teams, Newbee and Avengerls.
Not the first time
It almost took one full year for Valve to ban the two teams, this isn’t the first ban the Newbee organization. Back in May 2020, the Chinese DOTA2 Professional Association (CDA) and IMBA had informed Newbee they will receive a lifetime ban for match-fixing. They received enough information on the supposed match that was fixed, and it occurred during the StarLadder ImbaTV Minor.
Newbee had denied all allegations and asked for the information to be transparent, as CDA and IMBA claimed they have submitted all evidence to Valve and Perfect World.
Although we never saw the evidence beside re-watching the matches (Match 5248304670 and 5248349736) the two-match id are games 2 and 3, there are some suspicious activities, but it can be deduced to during the “moment” type of play because Dota 2 is a fast-paced game, especially during team fights. Valve and Perfect World must have some hard evidence for the bans, such as they have information of the players placing bets or paying the other team. Usually, the ones fixing the match are the ones who lose, but you can never rule out Newbee paying off Avengerls.
It’s such a shame, how a former International Champion has fallen so far. It has only been six years removed since Newbee captured TI-4 in Seattle with the death ball line up. It was boring from a fan’s perspective, but effective in the eyes of the players.
What makes this whole situation worse, it was called out by their former captain, Zhang “xiao8” Ning, who led the aforementioned Newbee to the TI-4 title.
Far from perfect
DPC was never perfect and it is still far from it; however, it now has six regions so the inclusion of more teams and players allows new talents to be discovered. With six regions it also bring new challenges and issues, since Valve contracted six different organizations running each regional leagues, they all have different closed qualifiers to determine the last four invited teams for the Upper Bracket.
Everyone harps on Valve for “having a year” to plan the 2021 DPC season and yet they didn’t come up with the perfect solution. You see players and fans arguing about how X is different or how Y should have been this. The simple solution should have aligned all organizers to have the same format to keep it consistent. That was one of the issues the next one should not really be an issue, the four invited teams are determined by Valve, instead invited based of the DPC standings from the 2019-2020 season, because the season was quickly halted. They invited teams for how long they’ve been together or how stable they’ve been. Throughout Dota 2 except for the inception of majors, it has always been like that so it should not have been a surprise to anyone.
Not enough games
The last topic to touch upon is the amount of games tier 1 teams will play. Jack “KBBQ” Chen, the manager for Quincy Crew has brought up a legitimate issue that will be addressed in due time. Chen said in his tweet,
“Like am I losing my mind here? For everyone, you get to play less competitive Dota that never with fewer chances to prove yourself. And if you actually are a very competitive team in your region, you get 2-3 [best-of-threes] that shape your entire season with no possibility of 3rd party tournaments]
The best thing as of right now for the schedule is Valve having a structure of what the schedule looks like, the bad thing is we do not exactly know who’s playing who. So, the Upper and Lower bracket is finalized the schedule will be formalized and there will be room for third-party tournaments and teams to play each other.
It would be a dumb reason for this past summer’s tournament that features a two-division system and not have it return when they advertise promotion and relegation. Fans and players should expect the return of the Epic League or the WePlay Pushka leagues to return during or even after the season if teams are afraid of playing so few games that “matter”.
For fans, expect a lot of Dota, like what we saw in 2020.
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