BSJ · @BananaSlamJamma
11th Apr 2023 from TwitLonger
Update for Fart Studios
For those of you who don't know, Fart Studios, a DIV 2 NA team consisting of Jenkins, Monkeysforever, Newsham, Iannihilate, and myself received a def loss yesterday in our match against Sand King Gomez. The reason for this is because of the following rule:
For a team to be eligible to compete in a region, 3 or more players MUST be physically located in the region in which they are competing.
While we are 5 players from the USA and Canada, Jenkins and I are in EU paneling for Dreamleague and Iannihilate is in Brazil for personal reasons. Therefore, we did not meet the requirements for the above rule and received our def loss. Our locations were the same during the first series we played against Alpha so we also retroactively received a def loss for that series as well.
During our stent on Arkosh, we had dealt with similar issues due to Jenkins and I often traveling. Unfortunately, there was a miscommunication within our team where the people that knew about the rule did not know Iannihilate was physically outside the region and Iannihilate was not aware of the rule. For this oversight, we accept full culpability
Due to the infeasibility of any of us 3 returning to NA during this season, if we wish to continue we would need to use a standin for 4 of the remaining 5 series (that's how many standins you are allowed) and accept a def loss for the 5th. We believe for competitive integrity that it is unfair to the rest of the teams that we gave 2 free wins away at the beginning of the season and will have to choose one more team to forfeit against. This will leave 4 of the teams at an unfair disadvantage, not to mention to the randomness of which standin we use in each series resulting in us not really having a team. Because of this, we have chosen to forfeit the rest of the DPC season.
Before I go any further, we as a team want everyone to know that we understand that these are the rules and that we must follow them like anyone else. However, we are hoping that this post can shed some light on the situation and hopefully lead to future changes for the better.
Fart Studios is a team of 5 formerly competitive players that turned to content creation as a primary source of income due to the instability and unreliability of that competitive Dota 2 paycheck. If you are a Div 2 Dota player, the most you can make from a single DPC season is $3400 per person. There are three seasons per year thus netting you approximately $10,000 annually. This is not news to most people involved in the Dota scene that you do not make a livable wage playing Div 2 Dota.
As a team of content creators, we are often critiqued by people saying that "we do not care". This is factually wrong. We do care, a lot. We love this game and we love competing and playing with each other. But, we also each have our own reasons for not being fully committed to competitive.
Now the question I pose to you is this: Was the above stated rule created in order to target the situation that we are in?
Our answer is that we do not believe that it was. We believe that this rule was created to promote the growth of the NA scene by not letting people region hop and win "easy" qualifiers.
This is something that our team is clearly not doing because we are all North Americans. While being a content team may not be very competitive, we believe that we are healthy for the scene.
Let us clarify that we have no problem with people flying into NA to compete. We just think people who are obviously American not being able to play because they are working out of country is not even close to the intended purpose of this rule.
Jenkins has only left NA in order to work an international Dota 2 event, after which he will promptly return home to Canada. We are not the only ones affected by the current DPC layout. If you are a Div 2 competitive Dota player you cannot participate in 3rd party tournaments because they are all scheduled during the Div 2 season. Our situation is one of many examples of how stunting the current system is for any aspiring pros or non Tier 1 Dota players trying to make a living in the game. If we wish to have a healthy ecosystem, rules like the one above must be modified to promote growth within the scene.
With this we propose the following change to the rule:
3 out of 5 members of the team must be physically located in the region, or have had their players located in the region for more than half of the year.
If competitive Dota does not provide a sustainable income, it does not benefit the scene to make players choose between it and other opportunities.
To all of the Fart Studios fans out there, we thank you for all of your support and for all of the memes. We can only hope that you had as much fun watching our matches as we did playing them. Hopefully this was only game 1 for us as a team because in the wise words of Jenkins, "There is always a game 2."