Monkeys-forever expressed his opinion on the competitive Dota 2 scene
Author: Hawk Live LLC
Last updated:
Jaron «monkeys-forever» Clinton, the player from simply TOOBASED roster, expressed his opinion on the competitive scene and the development of Dota 2.
About patch 7.28
This patch definitely felt a lot fresher for me, considering how long Dota 2 kind of went without any big changes, and I found a lot of motivation again with all of the new Aghanim’s Shards and other in game things to test out. That’s part of what I’ve loved about Dota for the 17 years I’ve played it – it’s an ever-evolving game and things are always getting changed. So when a meta lasts for 9-10 months, I start to get really antsy for the next big change, which this patch definitely brought.
About the DPC system and the impact of the competitive scene on Dota 2
I think the DPC league system has a lot of positives, especially for the tier 2 and tier 3 scene in each region. The leagues have definitely helped saturate each scene and give a lot of newer players exposure that they wouldn’t have been able to get previously. But at the same time, the tier 1 and tier 1.5 teams took a huge hit, which feels silly. It always seems that with every good thing Valve does with one aspect, they unnecessarily punish the other aspects of the scene. For example, the bottom eight teams at each Major get zero extra prize money (no prize money on top of the DPC League money). So if you aren’t amongst the top eight teams in the world, your reward for qualifying to a major is just a LAN experience.
But personally, I’d love to see a prize pool cap on TI, maybe around $25-30 million dollars. That is still such an egregiously large prize pool, that the top teams will still play their hearts out and focus on it entirely, and Valve could use the remaining $10-15 million to fund the bottom eight major teams actually getting a monetary reward for being a top 16 team in the world, or to help put on the old Valve majors that had 3 million dollar prize pools, which were basically like mini-TIs. I know those Majors had their issues as well, but I definitely think that Dota being so TI-focused is quite literally killing the competitive scene, slowly but surely. It’s sad to watch.
