On TI7 Invites

First and foremost, congratulations to all of the talent invited to TI7. I know most of them personally and am genuinely excited for all of them.



I sent a tweet yesterday about Day 9 hosting. I think he is a great choice and will do an excellent job. There is no doubt in my mind the event will be better for him being there.



Part of me questioned (and still does) whether someone's first ever job at a Dota event should be hosting TI. Several people brought up Redeye, Chobra, and Kaci. Redeye and Chobra had hosted Dota events before (ESL One Frankfurt 2014 and 2015, respectively, were their first events) and Kaci is serving as stage host, completely different from desk host. All three did a terrific job at TI.



Adam Apicella of MLG had the best counterpoint. To paraphrase, as an event organizer, when you have a chance to get a "Lebron" level talent at your event, you're often going to take it. I think that's totally fair and at the end of the day I DO support Day 9 as a choice.



But I'm not going to lie, I'm still massively depressed. I look at the list of invites and it reads to me like a pretty clear statement. Valve and the majority of the community believe you have no business analyzing Dota unless you're a pro or former pro (Draskyl has never played Dota 2 professionally but was a HoN pro). Particularly with Noxville left off, it's hard to look at that list and see it as anything other than a repudiation of what I'm trying to do in Dota. Worse, it almost feels like an endorsement of the awful Reddit trope of "you're not a pro or 6k+ MMR, what can you possibly know about Dota?".



The answer, by the way, is a lot. I've Tweeted this before but arguably the best three managers in the three biggest U.S. pro sports- Joe Maddon, Bill Belichick, and Gregg Popovich, have played a total of ZERO games combined in their respective professional leagues. Yes there are plenty of former pros who've transitioned to successful analysts, but there are an equal number of great casters and analysts who never played professionally. The idea that you can't analyze Dota without being a pro, former pro, or having X MMR is fiction. Period.



To me, part of TI has been about recognizing people that work to make Dota events great the rest of the year. In particular, I'm elated that Lyrical is getting an opportunity. But it's really discouraging to me not to see Trent, KotLGuy, or others on the list. Look, I'm a Chicago economist guys. I'm all about free markets and merit based systems. You don't "earn" an invite to TI by doing more games or events than anybody else. You earn it by being GOOD. Frankly I don't think this particular concern applies at any other event.



But TI *is* different. Many people aren't aware of this but, as far as talent fees go, for a lot of people you make as much working TI as you do in talent fees the rest of the year. You also get looked at differently. I actually had multiple emails from event organizers last year asking me "Hey, what happened with TI6? Why weren't you invited?". In the months following, when they were sending out invites, it was me contacting them, when it had been the other way around.



Finally, it's really hard to look at this and not believe that Reddit essentially decides TI invites. Sure, there are a few deserving people like Lumi on the list who aren't Reddit favorites, but otherwise it's pretty much, "well, Reddit liked Aui and 1437 at Kiev, so let's get more pros".



I'm not sure where this leaves me personally. I'd pretty much decided to take a year off and do esports stuff, but with this kind of signal I'm really doubting myself. I'm turning 40 in two weeks. I love doing Dota stuff but I have a family to think about. When I blew up at Noxville a few weeks ago on Twitter it was largely because I'd just turned down multiple very lucrative consulting opportunities to spend more time on Dota/esports stuff. I was, pretty unusually for me, really insecure about myself on that particular day. The reaction from Reddit pretty much insured that I will never post to that particular forum again.



I'm not making any big decisions on the spur of the moment, but like I said it's hard not to take this as a huge negative signal about the long term potential for the analysis I do in Dota 2. We have better and more exciting data than any other esport. We're making huge breakthroughs in processing and analysis techniques. A month ago I actually thought data analysis in Dota, if done right, could become a model for other esports and other developers going forward. I even think some techniques could spill back over to some of my friends working in traditional sports as new data types become available there (I did baseball and college basketball statistics pretty seriously before I knew what Dota was, even spoke at a few conferences and such). It's just horribly depressing to me that, if anything, it feels like much of the community, including Valve has become LESS receptive to this over time.



TL;DR I'm really sad, both for me and for Noxville, Trent, KotLGuy, and lots of others. I've even been told Jack will be there solely as a translator, not an analyst (hopefully this is wrong). Unless something really big changes, I won't be at TI this year. Congratulations to all of those who were invited, and to those going, I wish you the best. It will be a great event.

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