Peter Anders · @hiimpanders
12th Jan 2022 from TwitLonger
2022 Major cancellation and communication
I don’t have a following so to add context I am the current manager of EG, I previously managed Undying.
Seeing the major cancelled, through a single blog post with no further communication, is painful and disheartening. I have seen first hand the time, effort, and sacrifice that players make to compete professionally in Dota. There are lots of ideas on how the prize pool, DPC points, schedule, etc should be changed to make this whole issue more fair. What I want to address though, is the larger issue at hand, which is the complete silence and lack of communication from Valve.
At TI10, Valve held a meeting with all the teams. After explaining to us the schedule of next years DPC, two points were very clearly made.
1. When teams have problems, they should stop going directly to public platforms, and should instead communicate with Valve.
2. Valve sees TI as a passion project. They don’t gain much revenue from TI compared to the time out in, and when teams go straight to public platforms to complain about issues, it makes Valve less motivated to keep running TI.
In an ideal, and I believe achievable, world there is no problem with this. Teams should be able to go directly to valve with problems that they have, and those problems can be acknowledged, and either solved or managed in a way to create a harmonious relationship. However there is still no way for teams to communicate directly with Valve, and no information being given to teams.
As an example PuckChamp, a CIS team in good standings to qualify for the major, has players in Kazakhstan. Because of the current political situation of the country, the team and players needed to know information about the major as soon as possible, as leaving and re entering the country was not a guarantee. Their manager has been desperately trying to get in contact with Valve for weeks about this, and hasn’t received any response.
I have no call to action or solutions to suggest, because it’s all been brought up countless times. Community managers, larger hired staff, weekly updates, they’ve all been discussed in the past. Lack of communication is far from a new issue. But with the DPC system, Valve has told players that if they want to qualify to TI, their road will be far longer, more constant, with smaller prize pools than the pre DPC majors. The least we could ask for in return is open communication from Valve.