CEO Team Spirit about the situation around invites to @PGLesports Open Bucharest

Greetings everyone! My name is Nikita and I am CEO of an esports organization Team Spirit. With the following message I would like to draw community’s attention to the situation around the invites to closed CIS qualifications to PGL Open Bucharest.



07.09 PGL announced the list of invitations for the closed qualifications and my team was not there. Despite the fact that our results at the end of the previous season were very high, despite the fact that we have preserved the most part of our roster, despite the statistics of two most popular ratings of the discipline. I don’t want to discuss what teams to my mind do not deserve the invitation, but I’m definitely sure that my team does. All our attempts to contact PGL before and after the announcement were ignored. We see no logic and no reasons for that. And I can assume only two objective motives for such a behavior. The first one is that our Romanian colleagues neglect their direct duties and are guided by opinion of some questionable experts. The second reason looks like there may exist a fact of lobbying of someone’s interests, meaning that someone may have been concerned that my team didn’t get the direct invitation. This version sounds like some kind of a conspiracy theory and seems rather absurd, though I can’t wave it away. Howbeit, such situation can turn into a huge problem for the community, especially if left unnoticed. In their attempts to gain transparency during the compilation of the list of participants for the future International event, Valve totally shifted the responsibility for invitations and management of the key tournaments of the season to third party organizations, which can use that power as they see fit.



For those, who think “If you can’t pass through open qualification, then you don’t deserve to play in closed qualification” I will try to explain the fallaciousness of their judgments. Every Major and Minor tournament brings its participants some TI points. In the following season we are to face 22 tournaments, 11 of each type. The final goal of each and every team in Dota 2 is to get to the International and win it. Having this fact in mind, every team will have to play in as much tournaments, as they can to get those so wanted TI points. Most of the teams will have to face the qualifications first, just like we do. And that means we will have an incredibly busy season considering all the matches to be played. Starting with 11th of September our team will work 30 days without weekends. If we do fine during these matches, this marathon will be followed by the LAN parts with their exhausting transfers and qualifications. That is not a complaint - these are the realities we agree on and we are even happy to face them in some way. But add the necessity to play a mini marathon of open qualifications with BO1 format and that is going to become a much bigger problem. I can’t remain silent, if by a complete inequity my team has to put itself in a disadvantage. We would just skip the event, if it was just a simple tournament with a prize pool, but Valve gave the tournament organizers the power to influence the most important tournament of the season. That power should come with some responsibility.



The state of things can hardly be changed at this moment, we will play open qualifications for this tournament anyway. But I hope, that the community can draw the PGL’s attention to the situation at hand to prevent such incidents in the future. I ask other esport organizations to provide us an informational support, as any of you can find yourself in our situation.



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