It's a very exciting time of the year for Dota 2 fans, what with The International on its way soon. The DPC season just ended with the China Supermajor, and we know which teams will have direct invites to TI. Although, the direct invite teams are not the only teams that will be participating at TI. There are currently Open Qualifiers being played around the world to decide the final teams that will earn their spot at TI.
There are three slots available for the NA region, two slots for the CN region, two slots for the SEA Region, one slot for EU region, one slot for the CIS region, and one slot for the SA region. This means there are going to be a total of 18 teams fighting for the Aegis in Vancouver, Canada.
Tragically, there have been some catastrophic technical issues that have come up during the qualifiers. These problems have resulted in a lot of controversy surrounding how FACEIT and Perfect World have administrated the games.
North America Games? Don't Know What You're Talking About
If you were paying attention to the state of the NA qualifiers yesterday, you might have seen what looked like the manifestation of chaos and frustration. You see, Valve thought it would be a fantastic idea to release a patch for the new Underhollow game mode for the Battle Pass. This patch absolutely tore apart the Dota 2 game coordinator while the qualifier games were being played, and this resulted in mistaken communication from the FACEIT bots. Winning teams got eliminated, AFK teams made it through to the next round.
Now, FACEIT has decided that there was no solution to this besides making all of the games from yesterday completely null and void. If you want to fight for the NA open qualifier spot now, you need to register your team again today, play all of the day one games, and play all of the day two games. This means that some teams might have to find themselves playing upwards of 10 competitive Dota 2 games in a single day.
Also, while there were over 100 teams that registered for the open qualifier yesterday, only 45 teams so far have registered for the NA qualifier. How many teams do you think won their games yesterday, and are completely unaware that they didn't count? How many of those teams actually deserve to make it through to the closed qualifier? This situation is completely unacceptable on all fronts, but at least it doesn't feel malicious. Unlike our next controversy.
You Abused a Bug That Doesn't Exist, You Monsters
This next issue is one of principle and one that really gets me steamed up. You see, at the start of the Open Qualifiers, there was a game-breaking bug involving the Wildwing Ripper that prevented your enemies from moving if the Wildwing's tornado was on the enemy. It was decided that use of this ability on enemy heroes would be banned and result in disqualification for the offending team.
The issue is that swiftly after, the bug was hot-fixed, meaning the bug wasn't any sort of factor in the game anymore. Having received that announcement, Invictus Gaming Vitality rightly assumed that it would be okay to use the ability since there is no abuse anymore. The Perfect World tournament admins certainly didn't agree though, as Invictus Gaming Vitality was immediately disqualified for abusing a NON-EXISTENT BUG.
https://clips.twitch.tv/AnimatedGoldenQuailOhMyDog
The justification I've heard for this decision is that the rule was still in place even if the bug was patched out of the game. The rule banning the use of the tornado was still a part of the qualifier tournament. Here's my problem, the rule was only designed to prevent abuse of the bug that might result in an unfair advantage for either team. The rule serves no purpose if there is no bug to protect the teams from.
Does this mean the wildkin cyclone is fixed?
Meracle (@Meracleeeeee) June 15, 2018
What a Mess
Chinese poll
It feels so horrible being any of the affected players here. If you were in NA and had all of your hard work made irrelevant because of a poorly timed update demolishing the game coordinator. And I can't imagine being on Invictus Gaming getting disqualified for the stupidest reason possible. I'm still excited to see the games in the next few months, but I'll know in my heart that there is a lot of competitive integrity that was ripped out of this competition on June 14, 2018. Very disappointing work from Valve, FACEIT, and Perfect World.
I'm going to be keeping up to date with some of the open qualifiers and definitely all of the main event. I'll keep you guys posted on anything interesting that happens. Give me a follow if you want to know the fresh news on Dota 2.