DPC season leagues and Majors. What are the main issues of the new system?
Author: Hawk Live LLC
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In the beginning of this year Valve announced the new DPC season and it was great news for the community. Open and closed qualifications are going in all regions right now. Unfortunately a new DPC system has a lot of issues. One of them is the problem with the price pool.
There were two DPC seasons announced this year. Every season contain six regional leagues: CIS, EU, NA, SA, CN and SEA. All leagues are divided into upper and lower divisions with 8 teams in each. The season would last six weeks. And all matches will be BO3. But despite the rather long duration of the tournaments, each team will play, on average, only one match per week.
There was nothing unusual in the tournament format, but the prize pool was the main shock of this dpc season. The prize money will be almost equally divided among all teams. But the prize money itself is recordly low. The first place will receive $30,000, for example, the winner of the Chinese league China Dota2 Pro Cup Season 2 received the same amount, and this tournament is not even for DPC points.
The prize money from the majors has almost halved compared to previous years. For example, the prize pool of the last DPC tournament, DreamLeague Season 13, was $1,000,000. The prize money from the current Major is equal to the OMEGA League and EPIC League prize pools. Although they were held by private tournament organizers and were not DPC tournaments.
After such a significant cut of the prize money, compared to previous years, the only left motivation for players is getting DPC points. After all, there are no open qualifiers at The International now. And teams can only get there with a certain number of DPC points.
Talking about DPC, it's worth mentioning that the points distribution system has also changed. Now the 1st place in the Major and the 1st place in the league receive the same amount of points - 500. Thus, at least one strong team from each region, even if it is weak relative to other regions, has a guaranteed chance to get to The International.
12 teams will be invited to TI based on DPC points. And 6 more teams from the closed qualifiers, one from each region.
Naturally, such a system has caused a lot of questions and discussion in the community since the announcement.
Dota 2 commentator and Quincy Crew manager Jack «KBBQ» Chen noticed that according to the new DPC 2021 system, only the top 8 teams will receive major money. The rest will leave with nothing at all:
I wonder if this major format will be updated. Currently, 10 of 18 teams who go won't get any points or money. Looking at extreme possibilities, the 3rd best team from EU/CN could in theory start 24-0 (this on LAN vs solid competition), then lose the next 4 games and get nothing.
Also commentator and co-founder of the Maincast studio Vitaliy «v1lat» Volochay pointed out that this year, according to the new rules, there will be no open qualifiers for The International. And teams will be forced to play in DPC leagues:
There will be no open qualifiers at TI10.
Qualifiers will be in the CIS. For 1 slot at TI. But they will only include those teams that will participate in the first and second divisions at the end of the second season.
Therefore, it is critical to play in at least some division if you plan to try to qualify for TI.
The host and interviewer of the Maincast studio Mikhail «Olsior» Zverev shared his opinion on the new Dota Pro Circuit system:
It’s not the players, it’s Valve that made teams skip half a season and pass to TI. The players were in non-acquaintance for a year and did not know by what moment and what results should be shown. The system of invites to closed qualifiers is incomprehensible, the system is different everywhere (for example, in NA you can go from open qualifiers to the first division, but in the CIS not), the terms are very tight.
Why was it not possible to make an OQ to qualify for the league, instead of recruiting all the teams in a row for generally random reasons?
Valve and their leagues will be hurt by the system changing in a short time. And if suddenly Noone/RAMZES666/SumaiL will not be at The International, these are, of course, not Valve's problems, but TI and DPC without these guys, is a small but unpleasant problem. Especially considering the fact that OG became two-time champions, starting from nothing and open qualifications.
Analyst Ben «Noxville» Steenhuisen tough Valve and summed it up:
In summary:
- The Open Qualifiers format is absolute dogshit in every region. You can't do single elim to determine >1 spot.
- The lack of transparency, and the timing on invites is unacceptable.
- There's no info for what happens financially if the first major is cancelled
Whatever it was, many interesting matches await Dota fans. Already, a large number of spectators are watching the matches of the open and closed qualifiers. And then the games will go on regularly, in each region, in each time zone. At any time, you can turn on the broadcast and watch the matches of professional teams.
However, there is a downside. Due to the current situation, private tournament organizers will incur losses. This especially affected WePlay! and Epic Esports Events. According to rumors, they do not plan to hold tournaments until the fall. The reasons for this were: the long duration of the DPC season, the busy schedule of games and the busyness of the teams. It is unlikely that someone from the top division of the DPC league will play in a side tournament, risking the opportunity to get to the Major or TI.
Tier 2-3 teams will hardly go to participate in small regional tournaments, since in this case it will be more profitable for them to stay in the second divisions. This will be especially noticeable in Southeast Asia and South America. Since the tournament organizers in these regions will not be able to provide a sufficiently large prize pool.
Esports organizations are losing the opportunity to participate in tournaments other than the DPC league, and potentially earn additional prize money by waiting for the next DPC match. But during the league, 6 weeks, teams could take part in 1-3 small tournaments. Essentially Valve is forcing teams to play the DPC league.
For top tier 1 rosters, such as Team Secret, Nigma, OG, Virtus.pro, Natus Vincere, PSG.LGD and others, it will really be possible to get to major tournaments from Valve, get prize money and DPC points. And what about tier 2-3 teams?
Teams that have little chance of getting into the top division may start playing for their own profit rather than winning.Current conditions can lead to a lot of 322 matches, which can negatively affect the quality of games and Dota itself in general. Such an outcome of events is very likely, since such teams and stacks will need money to keep playing.
Small prize money, difficult earning DPC points, and a major is hard to reach. It will be unprofitable for organizations to keep Tier 2-3 Dota 2 rosters, and even new sponsors will not be able to fix it. In the current environment, this becomes inevitable. Sooner or later, someone may fall into a scandal related to fake matches.
But this is only the beginning. Many tier 2 teams have already been disbanded during the pandemic. And as many organizations say, the only normal way to make money with the Dota 2 roster is the prize pool of the tournament, which has been cut almost 2 times this year. According to Evgeny Zolotarev, General Director of Natus Vincere, even the Tier 1 Dota 2 roster is unprofitable. Since there are no additional sources of income in this discipline:
Dota is unprofitable, of course. And it will always be unprofitable until Valve changes its attitude towards clubs. They do not see value in clubs, and all discipline is tailored for the players.
In fact, Dota is just that discipline where there is no source of income for the clubs, except for the prize money. And most of the prize money goes to the players. It is also impossible to build a business model on prize money - this thing is practically unpredictable.
The new DPC system can also lead to a lack of motivation for new players to form teams. After all, now the path to the majors and TI is closed, and it is no longer possible to repeat the success of the famous OG. As a result, viewers will watch matches where the same teams play. It is worth remembering last year's winning streak of Team Secret in several tournaments in a row, where they won 3-0 in the final. After a while, everyone got tired of this and lost interest in the professional scene. And only after the successful reshuffles of some teams, the teried of the Puppey team and the appearance of new faces on the scene, returned the popularity of the pro scene again. People want a show, but in the current system, this is becoming unlikely.
What can be done with all this and how to fix the current situation.
One of the solutions is to create clear and understandable rules for teams inviting in the DPC season.
Talking about prize money the most logical and simple solution is to redistribute from the TI prize pool between majors. The International has an oversized prize pool and the rest of the tournaments suffer as a result. In the end, everything happens around TI and everything is done for him. And the motivation to play the $500,000 Major is nothing compared to the tens of millions at TI.
Part of The international prize money can be distributed evenly between the two Majors this year. Thus, there will be money for rewarding 9-18 places, and to increase the importance of the major. It will return motivation to the teams and they will perform their best. Valve can also increase and change the redistribution of prize money in both divisions of the DPC leagues. This will increase the competition in them, and the audience will receive even more spectacular matches. The main tournament of the year will not lose much from this, but the significance and value of the Major will grow. It will also solve the problems with the DPC prize money and the motivation of the players.
After the announcement of the rules for the new DPC tournament, Valve drastically cut the tier 2 scene. Since the leagues will last quite a long time and the tournaments will run in parallel, the only place where tier 2 teams can play will be tournaments from Valve. It is good for the SA region and Dota becomes more popular there. But in the EU and CIS regions, tier 2 stage will get serious losses. And as history shows, fake matches will begin. How to avoid this. As a possible solution, the DPC league schedule could be tightened up, which will increase the breaks between seasons and free the hands of tournament organizers. Since tier 1 teams will be preparing for the majors, tier 2 teams will mainly participate in such tournaments. So Valve will be able to kill two birds with one stone.
At first glance, the problem with registering for tournaments is solved quite simply, former RuHub analyst Yaroslav Vladimirovich «NS» Kuznetsov told about this on one of his streams, offering to make it possible for teams to register in the Dota 2 client itself.
To increase profits for clubs, Valve can create a monetization system where they can cover part of the wastes. A similar system already exists in CS:GO. In short, in CS:GO, tournament operators share profits with tier 1 teams, depending on the number of views of the matches of this team. Evgeny Zolotarev mentioned this in his interview.
But everything is not so simple, with a large amount of profit from Dota 2, almost no money is reinvested in it. The development staff is very small and it is hard to create new features in DotA. Also it is a lot of work due to problems with the current client. And the integration of the in-game tournament system is quite a difficult task. This is a very important problem that, unfortunately, only Valve can solve. Since only they have access to the source code of the game. The community really hopes that the promise to pay more attention to Dota 2 in 2021 will not be empty and Valve will optimize and improve the client itself.
