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State of the WCG

Single Nationality Issue

Picture by World Cyber Games

Fixing the Issue

Looking to the Future

This may sound like an odd opening to an article, and that’s because I chose not to write a newspost about this event. This was largely because it was what I would characterise as a one-liner of an article. “”. That’s all the content there was to be had from it, because that’s how irrelevant WCG had become to the current state of the competitive scene.You might argue that one could have waxed nostalgic about the years when WCG was a real competition in Dota 2, when teams from all over the world would gather to fight for King, President or Party Chairman and Country. But it would probably have sounded more than a bit hollow.The honest truth is that even if WCG had handled the production value better, not had poor League of Legends casters commentating the WCG 2012 Bronze finals from a tiny screen where they couldn’t see what was going on properly, even if they had known what actually was going on, while the on-site Dota 2 commentator was casting FIFA, even if they none of this had happened, WCG no longer fit the Dota 2 community.WCG is about nations fighting nations. While there’s plenty to be said about how they select which nations get to participate (by the nation in question buying the rights to hold a qualifier and then paying their countries representatives costs in order to attend the competition), the problem lies in the fact that the WCG is the e-Sports equivalent of the World Cup, but e-Sports is nothing like the world of Football.WCG requires teams to be of a single nationality. While this has at times been an attainable prospect, today there’s not that many high level teams in Dota 2 which still fit the bill. In North America, every team is a mix between U.S. and Canadian citizens, while in the CIS onlyare actually entirely Russian, and their inclusion as a “high level” team is somewhat questionable, for all that they are promising. In fact the only high level team in Europe which is of a single nationality is, as evenis these days a mixed team.So right off the bat, any teams composed from most major Dota 2 countries in the west would be at a disadvantage. But the truth is, it’s not that much better for the East. Singapore no longer has a high level representative, withtaking on two Malaysian players. Whileandare still eligible, the major player would be China. But then what about China?Last yearsecured the win at WCG, but in order to do so they had to play with a stand-in. While certainly China does flaunt the broadest selection of single nationality teams, the truth is that the Dota 2 landscape is hardly conducive to an interesting WCG tournament. They are in fact better off going with League, where they can field teams from South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, Poland, Russia and the U.S.But this doesn’t mean that some national team style of play wouldn’t be interesting for Dota 2, from a fan point of view. However, as a team sport, we’d need to amend the rules in order to force over the emphasis to making a true national team, as otherwise synergy and the ability to freely practice together would always override the potential of combining great individuals from different teams. What we would need, is a maximum players rule, which would limit any national team to no more than 3 players from one professional team.With such a rule, both the United States and Canada could field strong teams. Europe would be represented by Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Ukraine and Russia. Singapore might not produce the strongest of teams with so many big names having left the scene for League, but certainly there would be the makings of a decent team at the very least, while Malaysia could probably put together a highly talented, if as is traditional for World Cups, highly dysfunctional team. And naturally the Chinese could field quite the fan service team, combining iG and, with the option for extra spices from other teams.The problem naturally is that there is nobody who would be willing to run such a tournament, at least not at this moment. But as the scene is growing at a rapid pace, the pressure to differentiate will be there. Great storylines draw people in, and as people hear the same spiel about “” enough times, they will at some point get desensitized to it; they will ask for more. Production values will step up, tournaments will be moved offline, but in the end, these are all imitable factors once the monetary backing is there. At some point, they’ll need to figure out something more.And that is when someone will think of restarting a “World Cup of Dota 2”. And maybe they’ll have read this opinion piece, and will look at the competitive field in Europe and in North America, and realize that things won’t have changed, they’ll have only gotten more complicated as the lines between Europe and CIS and Europe and North America continue to blurr. And so they’ll put in a maximum players rule, and at that point, we’ll get the World Cup that WCG no longer could be for us.And that is why I personally am glad to see WCG leave, because they are making way for someone else to come in at a future date, and do things right.