ESL, EMS One and DotA 2

ESL’s first major DotA 2 finals event is coming this weekend (RaidCall EMS One) and I feel like there we’ve got some clearing up to do. Clearly certain communities don’t know enough about us.

(For those of you that don’t know what RaidCall EMS One is: http://de.dota2.raidcall-emsone.com/season-spring-2013/finals/)

WHY ISN’T THE EMS ONE FINAL IN ESL TV STUDIOS?

It seemed like people thought it was a downgrade for DotA 2 that the finals event won’t take place inside the ESL TV studios in Cologne (like for EMS One for CS:GO). There are two reasons for that.

I assume this is a fact not known to enough people, but ESL TV does not only have studios in Germany but also in Poland. The Polish studio isn’t known yet because so far it’s only hosted Polish events. Check out some photos, though:

DotA 2 finals were planned to be produced by ESL Poland (the guys that produced, among others, the European Battle.net Invitational for SC2 in 2011 and Intel Extreme Masters Katowice in 2012, they got the FIFA Interactive World Cup as well).

The reason we’re not producing the EMS One finals for DotA 2 from this particular studio is because it doesn’t have audience space and we wanted a few dozen people to be there. A studio with an audience is actually being built for DotA 2 and other games in Poland.

For now the decision was to build a studio-sized standalone event, one that our budgets allowed. I’m confident it will be just as cool as the studio event we had for CS:GO.

DID RIOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH TAKING DOTA 2 TO POLAND?

The answer is no. We were not asked not to run DotA 2 events by Riot (as evidenced by us creating a league with 150K+ prize money). We were not asked to push DotA 2 out of our Cologne studios.

In fact, if we hadn’t been confident that ESL Poland can run a great event, we would never have moved EMS One to Poland. Make no mistake: we want to deliver the best quality that our budgets can afford.

The reason we put DotA 2 in Poland was because of the quality of events we run there. We never planned to hold the entire work load of EMS One in the ESL HQ in Cologne. We want such finals to travel to countries like Poland, France and Spain and major events like Gamescom in the future.

A secondary concern was mixing two communities in one building that don’t love each other much (we do have weekly LoL events at the studios). But it wasn’t a big one.

WHY IS THE TOURNAMENT SYSTEM AS IT IS?

This is the first season of EMS One. It is an innovative season structure and system (at least for us) and we are not done tweaking it. We needed a starting point.

Please don’t forget that part of the reason the bracket isn’t the best was because two top teams messed up and finished second, thus changing the seeding.

For sure two teams from the same group will not be able to meet each other in the playoffs until the finals. Maybe we will add another group phase. Maybe the existing group phase before the playoffs will be best of 3. It remains to be seen. Be patient with us. We will make improvements for the second season based on the learnings of the first.

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Thanks a lot for reading this. I hope you’ll enjoy the EMS One finals! The crew’s got every intention to improve it every season.