Breaking Down The 17-18 Competitive Circuit
At the beginning of July, Valve announced vast changes to the competitive Dota 2 landscape, introducing Minors and qualifying points, adding more transparency and clarity for invites to The International 2018. About a week ago, Valve added further details surrounding the new system, with an exact breakdown of qualifying points per tournament and even a rough overview of the upcoming events in this season.
The initial announcement in July had understandably little information and few details, as Valve still had to iron things out. Regardless there were valid questions to be asked about the potential for abuse of the new system, by both tournament organizers and players. The additional details revealed last week don’t exactly address those issues either. If anything, there are now more questions to be asked and once more it is on Valve to act. Though before we can get to that, we need to break down what the system actually looks like and why this system was introduced.
Qualifying Points
Thus far, invites to The International have been anything but transparent. Teams were left guessing until the very end and were never sure whether or not a tournament’s performance was worth an invite or not. In fact, in 2016 Fnatic did not receive an invite, despite placing well at the Manila Major, but their performance at ESL One Frankfurt, in combination with Na’Vi’s strong performance, seemed to edge them out of an invite for TI6. The lack of clarity and transparency needed to be addressed, as this directly affected the livelihood of many players and teams.
Now, teams can earn qualifying points and the requirements to participate at The International 2018 are straight forward: the eight teams with the highest point totals will be invited to TI8. There’s even a public leaderboard for fans to keep track of which teams and players currently hold sufficient qualifying points.
The breakdown of those qualifying points is quite simple as well: per $1,000 prize money, a Minor gets to award 1 qualifying point, meaning they award a minimum of 300 qualifying points, as there is $300,000 prize money minimum for Minors. Majors award 1.5 qualifying points per $1,000, thus a minimum of 1500 qualifying points ($1,000,000 prize money minimum).
For fans, players and organizations, the system seems much easier to follow, as every tournament has a clear purpose and adds to a bigger, easier to follow storyline. If Team Secret get invited to the next International, fans will be able to look back and see which tournaments and performances allowed them to get the invite.
3rd party events empowered
The Major system thus far, which saw Valve organize huge, $3,000,000 events, largely overshadowed third party events and teams that had secured invites for such Majors had only few incentives to participate in other events. Similarly, viewers would focus largely on those Majors as well and elevated standards at Majors forced third party events to invest more to compete with Valve Majors.
Now, organizations such as ESL, MarsMedia and DreamHack can run Majors themselves and players have to play in their events if they wish to earn qualifying points. While top teams can still choose to ignore Minors, those smaller tournaments still get a significant boost in importance for teams and viewers alike.
No Invite regulations
Four out of 10 teams at the Perfect World Masters will be Chinese
As great as the system may be in theory, there are questions left unanswered. When the changes were first announced, we highlighted that invites needed regulations, as several events would favor certain regions and potentially even teams. Perfect World Masters has now not only invited two Chinese teams, but also has two qualifier spots for them.
Naturally, an invite or additional qualifier spots don’t secure qualifying points, as only the top 4 teams receive those, but the more events a team gets invited to, the less qualifiers they have to play and the more qualifiers they can choose to participate in.
OpTic Gaming’s captain Peter ‘PPD’ Dager, formerly of EG, highlighted in a Twitlonger that “realistically if we qualify for all of these tournaments in October we will not have the time to play the qualifiers for tournaments in November because we will be attending these tournaments in Europe. 2nd/3rd/4th weeks of October”. Indeed, teams like The Dire or Natus Vincere that make it far in qualifiers have had long days, Na’Vi recently finished a bo3 at 02.30 am local time after having played for 10 hours, whereas TI7 runner-up Newbee has already been invited to four events, TI7 champion Liquid have been invited to 3 thus far, both of which have yet to play a single match since the finals.
While tournament organizers naturally look to provide the best entertainment and most intense competition they can, thus inviting the established teams, they ultimately also have a large impact on a team’s chances to qualify for The International. “Any team who is directly invited has a huge advantage of not only skipping the competitive qualifier but also allowing them to compete in other qualifiers for future tournaments”, so Dager, though he also admits to not have a direct solution for the problem.
A solution could be to impose requirements on the amount of teams necessary to host a Major. Currently, the only requirement is to run qualifiers across all six regions, leading to many 8 team events thus far. If events were forced to have more slots, that would allow more teams to fairly compete at LAN for the qualifying points.
The Fresh Wind We Needed
At the end of the day, the change to a more structured competitive circuit was long overdue. Esports organization Immortals already entered the Dota 2 scene and it isn’t unlikely that more brands with big investors could enter the space, as, from a mainstream perspective, the scene has become much more attractive. Teams can compete all year around and results have a meaning, something that was very difficult to gauge before.
Yes, there still are issues. The point system is still open for abuse, especially with the stand-in rule, tournament organizers can seed teams as they see fit and the qualifiers have proven to be a scheduling mess for non-established teams.
All of these issues however can and likely will be ironed out as the season progresses and witnessing the season progress has become a lot more exciting, as teams like OG, EG, LGD and more are forced to play more games than ever before. There's a reason why "El Clasico" remains the single most noteworthy rivalry in Dota 2 history thus far, as no other teams have any significant history of playing against one another. This could and likely will change as the season progresses.
Qualifying points, now there's an (kind of) objective way to measure which teams really deserve invitations. Let's hope it works out.
I dont agree
There could be a limit to how many minors a team can play every bimester/trimester. That way not every minor will have the same invited teams and there wouldn't be so much pressure on non-invited teams to participate on every single qualifier.
It is dumb the chinese tournament is rigging it when there are other much better teams that should get the spot. And Liquid should have to play for some tournaments not just get invited when they proably arent even good anymore
This invite system does need transparency, but it's unfair to say PW is rigging it . I mean Newbee and lfy placed 2nd and 3nd in TI7,which team do you expect them to invite(I'm pretty sure they invited liquid but TL refused because of schedule collision) they could have invited LGD(placed 4th in TI)instead of secret and say it's according to TI placement.
@Cheesehead
And Dreamhack has 4 places for EU and CIS. So what?
I, in Europe, don't care for Chinese and want to see more of 'my' stacks competing. And the same goes for Chinese, that's obvious.
It's dumb that the World Cup's host plays in his country, so is the fact that Real Madrid gets to play at Santiago Bernabeu, unfair advantage! U agree?
Edit: wording
@Isaías Cancino
THIS. Seems like the most sane solution suggested :D
why not just follow a league system. something similar to football, etc...
top 16 teams will qualify for the "champions league". This is through 1 year of battles..
of course there will be relegations and promotions.
Wtf does last paragraph even mean!Worst conclusion I have ever read!BTW nice post..
Skim's analysis of the 17/18 Pro Circuit is concise and detailed. The regional qualifier requirements have demonstrated unique drafts and changes in the meta. Traditional powerhouse teams are kept from complacency as they face strong competition from their regions. Securing invites and winning closed qualifiers is essential for teams at the moment as it will give them a strong edge at the start of the season.
Now this is feels like Tennis ATP and Opens
Currently, it's kinda like Tennis or MotoGP system, but need a better scheduling system.
Would be interesting too, if they apply something like Regional League system. Like how Champions League qualify team based on their Regional League ranking. We've got 4 Regions (EU, AM, CN, and SEA) with 2 Sub-regions (CIS and SA). Each team in every region fare against each other. And also the "League Cup" in football world, would be ESL One, or Dreamhack in esports context. That way, we could see which team is truly stable along the year. The current system isn't so bad too, as we haven't seen anything yet. But I do hope Valve could set a standard competitive system, a consistent one (like how European Champions League maintain their system for 10+ years.
There are a host of problems with the current system, two of which stick out most in my mind.
1. Points distribution is extremely stingy. Considering we have been seeing qualifiers for around a week with mostly bo3 and even bo5 'grand finals' just to QUALIFY, it feels like so much work that could still net you 0 points despite being 5th out of like 60 teams if you count qualifiers. I truly think teams will drop out of the majority of tournaments come January, with only the real contenders even trying anymore. Spread those points out a little more and you might see teams fight for spots a little more evenly.
2. The only way you can make the invites fair is to have 'carry over' rules in place. For instance, if SL-iLeague runs three tournaments each year, the first one has no direct invites. Whoever wins, and perhaps 2nd and 3rd place, gets an invite to the next tournament held by SL-iLeague. Valve would have to require organizations to hold multiple tournaments during the season for this to work, but that further solidifies the position of the league. As it stands, a little reduction in number of tournaments would be helpful anyway.
"It is dumb the chinese tournament is rigging it when there are other much better teams that should get the spot."
LOL NB and LFY got top 3 in Ti7, and CN teams got 4 of the top6, how is PW minor more 'rigged' comparing to DH major? They have 4 EU/CIS spots while only 2 EU/CIS teams made to top6 in Ti7.
Skim is so biased that he or she could not see things straight. The one tournament which is being rigged is DreamLeague that only gave CN region a total of one slot. It is unfair that CN region usually gets no more than one fourth of the slots when more than half of the competitive teams are Chinese teams.