There and Back Again (on the DPC, scheduling, and more)

Back in the old days of DOTA yore, the International invite process was a mysterious beast. Teams would play every halfway decent event year-round. There was no DOTA Pro Circuit, there were no majors and minors, and there was no points system. You didn't know you had qualified until the Valve website revealed your team's logo and name on the fateful 'invite hype' announcement page.



Teams burnt out, and fans complained of oversaturation. "If I see Na'Vi and Alliance play 5 times a month, it's not special anymore!" These complaints eventually led to the formation of the Dota Pro Circuit, a series of 3 Valve-sponsored majors with much larger prizepools meant to serve as tentpole events for fans.



Yet teams STILL felt pressured to play every event. There was no points system back then, and unless you won a Major or consistently finished Top 2-3, you couldn't rest assured that you would qualify for a TI invite, especially if you made roster changes or had a week showing down the stretch in the spring months leading up to invites being announced.



So Valve did away with the Valve Majors and created the third party DPC we've had for the last two years. Every event was assigned points, and a leaderboard was built to follow the Road to the International. Valve even created rules and guidelines about how the inevitable roster changes we all know and love would affect points and qualification.



In other words, the entire DPC points system was literally created to remove the mystery of TI invites and ensure that teams have a clear roadmap to the International. It was created in very large part so that teams did NOT feel compelled to attend every big event. No longer are teams waiting for the countdown website to reveal invites one by one. They now mathematically know when they've made it.



Is there room for improvement in the scheduling of the DPC and its qualifiers? Absolutely, I don't think anyone would dispute that. The simplest solution would be doing away with Minor Qualifiers and just using the results of the Major Qualifier to determine qualifications for both the Major and the Minor. This has the unfortunate side effect of making it even less attractive to run a DPC Minor, but would immediately resolve most of the scheduling problems.



But replacing qualifiers with mass invites isn't the answer either. The "all teams must play qualifiers" system was created after last year specifically because fans rightly complained that mass invites were eliminating opportunities for up and coming T1.5-T2 teams to prove themselves.



In CS:GO, top teams have started to take events off to recuperate. There are two scheduled player breaks during the year where no major events can happen, something that they bargained for with the help of their players association. I'd like to see DOTA players work together with each other and Valve to accomplish something similar.



Frankly, this is the real solution as I see it. So long as TI remains the pinnacle of the DOTA esports scene, the system shouldn't be constructed so that Tier 1 teams can play every single DPC Major and as many other big prizepool LANs as possible besides them. It should be structured so that there is fair and clear path to The International with ample opportunities for any team from any region to compete and prove their worth.



Is it great to see the Tier 1 teams at every DPC Major? Absolutely. It's good for the events and it's good for viewers. But the system shouldn't be designed purely with their interests in mind. It should be designed with the interests of up & coming teams too, because those teams are the future of DOTA if this game we love is to last.

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