With a new competitive season come new rules and for the first time in eight years Valve puts an end to all the speculations and all the competition integrity question marks raised when an organization brings multiple teams to TI. In their latest rules released for the 2018-2019 Dota Pro Circuit Valve says the following:

“Looking ahead one year to The International 2019, in cases where one organization or person has ownership in multiple teams, only one of those teams will be eligible to compete in The International, regardless of DPC qualifying points. All teams can participate in the Pro Circuit Majors and Minors leading up to next year’s TI, but all ownership conflicts will need to be resolved prior to TI Regional Qualifiers. This includes cases in which players have financial ties to other teams.”

The new rule looks like a big hit or to the Chinese scene, which is by far the region with most organizations owning multiple teams.

Chinese Organizations with multiple teams:

Vici Gaming

– Vici Gaming (main team)

– VGJ. Thunder

– VGJ.Storm

– Vici Gaming Potential (inactive)

– Vici Gaming Reborn (inactive)

LGD Gaming

– PSG.LGD Gaming

– LGD Forever Young

– CDEC Gaming

– CDEC Youth (inactive)

– CDEC Avenger (inactive)

Invictus Gaming

– Invictus Gaming (main team)

– iG.Vitality

Newbee

– Newbee

– Newbee Young

EHOME

– EHOME (main team)

– EHOME.Immortal

KEEN

– Keen Gaming

– Keen Gaming.Luminous

MAX

– Team MAX

– MAX.Y

– MAX.X

If we would have to add the past years organizations which are now completely dormant, the list could go on and on, but for now we will resume at the ones that strike as the main competitors in the scene.

We reached to the PSG.LGD Gaming manager, Mister Pan Fei and asked him what are his first thoughts on Valve’s new set of rules as it is a bit obvious that the LGD organization will be the most impacted and this is what he had to tell us: “The new system is designed to address the overly aggressive scheduling problem for DPC tournaments and complicated player trade/transfer rules from this season. It offers more opportunity to less well-established teams to participate in the professional DOTA2 scene. However, restricting TI eligibility to one team per club/organization has some major impact on organizations such as us (LGD-Gaming with LGD, LFY, and CDEC) that have multiple competitive teams. Meanwhile, having DPC points attached to organizations rather than players feels like a good move – it avoids this year’s awkward situation where too many top-tier teams have to clash in the open qualifiers.”

Valve’s rule is not something new for the esports world. The same requirement was implemented in March last year for the organization members of the World Esports Association (WESA). Because of the WESA ruling Natus Vincere, for instance, decided to cut ownership ties with ESforce holding who also own Virtus.pro (and SK Gaming). Through the short history of Dota 2 competitive scene, there’s been a couple of instances where one could argue that the competition integrity could have been jeopardized. Back in the day Evil Geniuses and Alliance used to be owned by the same person, Alex Garfield. In 2014 Garfield sold his company, the Good Game Agency to Twitch but after TI6, he left Twitch and both Evil Geniuses and Alliance became player owned organizations.

In the Chinese scene, LGD Gaming have built an empire of their own as well. But truth to be told, if LGD Gaming’s owner hadn’t given a chance to the TI5 CDEC gaming players by providing them with all the tools needed to turn their passion into a professional career, meaning a salary, a training house, a team manager and all the logistics, we wouldn’t have seen them getting as far as second place at TI5.

The Chinese model of multi-teams ownership was implemented a couple of years back with the sole purpose of having a varsity team where the organisations would nourish and recruit players for the main teams. Perhaps the best example for this is Newbee’s Song “Sccc” Chun who has spent more than a year at Newbee.Young before being promoted to the main Newbee team. The key word is promoted and it applies to the PSG.LGD current carry player Wang “Ame” Chunyu who has been brought to the main team after a year spent at CDEC Youth where he trained and polished his skills. And the examples are multiple for the Chinese scene, IG and VG used their secondary teams in the same way. More recently, although extremely underdeveloped compared with any other big region, the South American scene has tried to do the same.

Infamous were somewhat pioneers in their region for that by creating Infamous.Young, where they tried to have young pub stars learning and developing under the guidance of the scene veteran Benjamín “Benjaz” Lanao Barrios. They even brought Jimmy “DeMoN” Ho to Peru for that project, but the problem was the same, lack of funds to continue something that could have truly helped the youngsters. Then we have the non-existent at this time South Korean scene, but a couple of years ago, in 2015, Jesse “JerAx” Vainikka was playing with MVP.Hot6ix which was the secondary team of MVP Phoenix. MVP was the only South Korean organization to enter the Dota 2 world and they gave us one of the most unique teams. MVP made it to TI5 with both of their teams and while Hot6ix featuring JerAx got eliminated in the first round of the lower bracket, the Phoenix squad finished top 8. A year later Phoenix was top 6 at TI and everyone was praising the Korean Overlords. JerAx moved back to Europe and joined a small project called 5Jungz later on acquired by Team Liquid. Liquid’s coach, Lee “Heen” Seung Gon was actively playing back in 2015 and was JerAx’s captain at Hot6ix. So, yes, having the option to run multiple teams was nothing but beneficial for the way Dota 2 competitive has developed so far. In the SEA scene Mineski have been running multiple teams as well for a long time, using their secondary squads as a place where new talents would develop.

The experimental first DPC season had a big impact on all these secondary teams. Twenty-two Minors and Majors shifted all the interest of tournament organizers to obtain Valve sponsorship for their events. Except for the Midas mode, we had no other online tournament and lower tier teams were forced to fight against the best of the best in the Minors and Majors qualifiers. It was only towards the end of the season when the top-ranked teams started to decline the invitations to some of the Minors, and those who weren’t invited chose not to play in the qualifiers. The new season has just five Minors and five Majors, and hopefully, this will bring back the online events and ideally more LANs not featured in the DPC season.

If this is what Valve intended by cutting down to half the number of DCP tournaments, then these secondary, varsity teams of any organization will have once again a competitive environment where to develop. In the next season the teams are allowed to make as many roster changes as they want and again this should only be in the varsity teams’ interest. If things go south in the main team, if the players don’t click together, if big personalities are clashing these Chinese organization with two, three or four teams should only be happy as they can rotate their players until they find the winning formula.

So, no, the new DPC rules should not be seen as a hit or a nerf to the Chinese scene or any other region for that matter. If the tournament organizers who will not be given a Minor or a Major will run online or outside DPC system LAN events, then the Dota 2 competitive scene should only see an increase in both viewers interest and organizations’ commitment in finding talented youngsters to prepare them for the big scene.