Noxville on DPC failure

DPC is changing. Kinda funny looking back:

Year 0: come up with basic plan, no room for significant suggestions before it starts
Year 1: make no changes, despite widespread pleas for changes
Year 2: make 1 change in scheduling
Year 3: cancelled

This is sorta par for the course for Valve experiments - and the approach can be effective. You don't want to come up with too many constraints because it might prevent you iterating into the right direction.

On the other hand, choosing an obviously bad starting position is bad.

To me the biggest failure was the year 0 ->1 transition: basically everyone in the scene (fans, TOs, players, teams) were saying "hey this schedule is really really bad" and yet there were no changes.
IMO if you start in a basic state then you need to iterate/converge faster.

My core belief is that the DPC was a great idea which helped a lot of pros (even the tier 2 pros!), but the execution was very poor. 
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits from removing the DPC is that the ecosystem will be less fragile and reliant on Valve to manage everything.

Also, I love the use of the word "monoculture" in the blogpost. I do agree that events started feeling 'the same' - but this is because of how homogenized the leagues in the DPC became.

One TO had effectively 3 regions by the end (could nearly build a hotel on each property). So few of the leagues had in-studio casts or unique productions. The same pool of talent were shared between multiple regions.

The reason that the regional leagues felt "the same" was because of a lack of regulation from Valve -- regional leagues would take the cheapest option which was to share resources (including talent, production stuff, etc) between multiple events.

There's obviously some economies of scale here - but this just accelerated the rate of homogenization. Maybe it just was never financially viable (even from the start), but the promise of 6 different regional leagues with their own styles and talent was what I felt the dream was.

It also felt that there was no reward for "doing a good regional league". There weren't financial rewards (I mean, rumors have it some TOs had to sell their vehicles to fund the events), and it wasn't like doing a great regional league secured you a TI contract.