The development history of Dota Pro Circuit, the ecological system of professional Dota 2

Over the years, Valve has very little to do with anything in Dota 2, except for The International. Until 2015…

Valve has been relatively quiet in the professional Dota 2 arena since beta until 2015, allowing the market to develop naturally. Gabe let the community make its own rules and organize their own prizes, at great risk. The community is forced to speak up: Twitter, blogs, interviews, newspapers and player meetings with Valve to demand that the developer need to intervene further.

Once things settled down, Valve said that change and improvement were needed with their structure and approach. Things played out during the troubled Dota 2 period: tournaments were unstable and saturated, teams were swapping players, and controversy swirled around teams trying to take advantage of a spot at The International. . Obviously, Valve has listened and understands the current status and impact of these issues on the future of the game.

Major System 2015-2017

Although Valve has applied the tournament system to CSGO since 2013, Valve only started doing the same with Dota 2 from The International 2015.

This is a huge turning point for players and fans in the history of Dota 2. Events bring in a $3 million prize pool and the winning team will be rewarded with up to $1 million. The new system introduces rules for closing the roster to prevent negative changes from taking place mid-season.

In its announcement, Valve said the following:

Today, we want to talk about our plan to improve the professional arena in general. As fans of the game, we also love watching teams compete in major tournaments, but Valve still believes that further improvements can be made to the current structure. The lack of roster stability and few key times of the year still have their own benefits, but at the expense of fan excitement as well as the stability of the players.

With the appearance of Major Dota 2 as well as a clear system with 4 major events as milestones, Valve has somewhat reduced the inadequacy in the selection of teams to attend The International. This method allows teams to make better decisions knowing their scores.

The system creates stability in the rules of the game at major events as well as expectations from the players. The tournament value is improved and the standard is raised higher, and at the same time, it brings a good reputation to the tournament organizers.

The final roster rule will hopefully put an end to the roster/shuffle issue that destabilizes teams and players.

While this change is a good sign for the long-term development of Dota 2, it still faces many problems and controversies.

Third-party tournaments

In the new system, Valve organizes 4 events per year (reduced to 3 the following year) and they are all prioritized by the players and set an extremely high quality standard for LAN tournaments. That means we have less time to hold larger LAN tournaments, and the top teams rarely participate in events that are not part of the Major system. Worse, Valve refused to communicate with the parties, sometimes causing the Major to coincide with an already announced and scheduled tournament. That case was the Boston Major, with the announcement being made just two months in advance of the event. This affects DreamLeague and The Summit. Although the date of the Kiev Major was announced before the Boston Major, Valve ultimately decided to change it, affecting the parties.

The gap between Tier 1 and the rest of the world

Many people realize that the Major system inadvertently creates a larger gap between the top teams and the semi-pro teams. The top teams at the Major often receive direct invitations to other tournaments, sometimes accounting for more than 50% of the participating teams. That makes the weaker teams have to compete for places from the qualifiers, not to mention the division for the regions is also unfair. Or worse, semi-pro players have almost no chance at offline events.

Dota Pro Circuit (DPC)

In the summer of 2017, everything changed. With The International 7 just a few weeks away, Valve announced some changes to the pro scene for the next season.

In just 6 weeks, the new world champion will appear in Seattle… But The International 2018 will take a new turn in the next competitive season.

In the last year, we’ve had two Valve Majors shape the pro scene ahead of The International. But from next year, we will take a more natural approach to developing the community’s ecosystem, working closely with third party organizers. Instead of the old Major system, Valve will choose many third-party organizers to directly sponsor. In addition, the players participating in this tournament will receive a Qualifying Point (QP) – the only factor determining an invitation to The International 2018.

Valve abandoned the Major system and replaced it with the Minor/Major system, which equates to two different types of tournaments. Instead of Valve sponsoring the Major, they will choose the third tournament organizers to sponsor and add bonuses. Regulations and requirements are quite simple.

• Majors must have at least $500k in prize money, Valve will support another $500k.
• Minors must have at least $150k in prize money, Valve will support another $150k.
• Major and Minor tournaments must have qualifiers for 6 regions: NA, SA, SEA, CN, EU and CIS.
• Every Major/Minor tournament must have a LAN Finals.

In addition, Valve introduced a QP point system for individual players and teams to accumulate points for The International. Every Major/Minor has bonus points for teams. Scores are adjusted based on prize money as well as when the organization is closer to TI: bigger prize pools and closer to TI get more points.

In the new system, each player will accumulate QP points and the sum of the three highest scoring players will be the team’s score. The total score is used to determine the teams invited to The International. According to Valve, this allows teams to change members, as players will retain their QP if they change teams during the transfer period.

The DPC system is designed with the goal of helping low tier teams and weak areas to develop more stably.

DPC Season 2017-2018

The first season has received a positive signal and is considered the right direction from Valve. However, later on, it was criticized more and more.

Imbalance

One season has too many awards and the non-DPC tournaments are left out. Since points can be earned at every DPC event, some teams like Evil Geniuses and Virtus.pro participate in nearly all tournaments to earn as many points as possible. That limits the participation of Tier 2 teams, as events usually only have 8-10 teams in attendance.

Taking advantage of QP . points

Since points are kept exclusively for players, some teams are accused of buying DPC points by recruiting players with high scores, like VP exchanging Ilya ‘Lil’ Ilyuk for Na’Vi for Vladimir ‘RodjER’ Nikogosyan.

Minor is not beneficial for all

Summary from last season’s Minor:

The Minors contribute 4,000 points out of the total 18,250 points of the DPC system. Despite accounting for 59% of all DPC tournaments, Minor events have less than 22% of total points. In addition to the roster changes, the DPC Minor affects the top 8 of the rankings: If the Major results are kept unchanged and the Minor points are not counted, perhaps OpTic Gaming is the invited team, not Newbee.

Minors do help increase the number of tournaments. However, the teams are not sure that they will receive enough points, so they are forced to participate in as many events as possible.

DPC Season 2018-2019

The 2017-2018 season became chaotic, not to mention that some teams also exploited holes in the system of distributing points and closing the list of matches to perform unsightly behaviors. Overall, DPC is the right direction, but the community as well as the players ask Valve to change and improve further.

Before the season ended, Valve took action to prepare for the next season, adding more adjustments after TI8.

Number of tournaments

One of the biggest changes is the reduction of DPC events, from 22 to just 10. Minor and Mjor go hand in hand and teams can only attend one event in each pair. The only exception is that the team that wins the Minor will qualify for the Major.

In addition, no team was directly invited to attend. All teams, regardless of their achievements or reputation, must qualify through the qualifying rounds. In theory, this allows multiple teams a chance to attend and avoid burnout from the tight schedule. Unfortunately, it still hasn’t eliminated the other problems. With teams having to attend qualifying for all, the schedule remains tight. In most regions, it also means that the top teams will win the Major, pushing the weaker teams out and sometimes even preventing them from even making the Minor, as in the case of Team Liquid winning the DreamLeague Minor, and OG attended the Bucharest Minor at the start of the season.

Score distribution

One of the biggest differences from the new system is the amount of points difference between the Major and the Minor. The Minor is seen as a tournament not to earn DPC points, but just a stepping stone for them to the Major, helping them gain more experience and build a reputation for growth and support.

Another change is that the organization will now keep points. Scores are no longer tied to the player. If the team changes the roster, the team will lose 20% of the points gained for each player changed. In addition, if the team uses a substitute, it will also be penalized at that event. This prevents the behavior of buying points, but when there is no longer a rule about locking the lineup, organizations change lineups much more this season. If last year only 10 players changed, this season, we have 52 changes in total.

Dividends for teams/regions

The DPC Minor is an 8-team tournament and the Major is a 16-team tournament. At first, the system was praised, but gradually, question marks were raised about the attendance slots determined by Valve at each event.

Criticize

As usual, the new changes have caused controversy and criticism.

Peter ‘PPD’ Dager has been the most vocal about the limitations and minuses of this season. In a recent interview in Split, Croatia, PPD believes that the allocation of slots is not good enough, as players ‘can travel the world’ to play for a region they want. He felt that the Minor did not live up to its intended purpose and was viewed as a qualifier for the Major, while the rewards were not properly distributed between the two events.

Schedules and qualifiers are two big areas that fans and players hope will change.

DPC Season 2019-2020

Usually, Valve will announce changes to the DPC a few weeks before or after TI. Two months ago, Valve announced a few changes that fans and players can expect.

After The International 2019, Valve will control the format of the Minor and the Major in the 2019-2020 DPC season.

The change came after the Dota Pit Minor format received a lot of criticism, with the group stage lasting 3 days and having little effect on seeding, followed by 3 rounds of BO1 knockouts in just 3 days. a single day.

It’s not just the OGA Dota Pit Minor being criticized. The community is also vocal in the qualifying rounds of tournaments where organizers invite different numbers of teams depending on the region and apply different formats to the same event.

Valve’s new announcement shows that DPC will still have 5 Minors and 5 Majors, but doesn’t give any information about further tweaking the system.

Fans and players will no doubt be waiting for the next changes in the next season, and while TI9 remains the focus for now, many are already starting to think ahead about the next season.

Since 2015, Valve has shown that they want to invest in developing a healthy and stable Dota 2 market. Unfortunately, the road is still thorny. Currently, this stretch of road is not completed, but it is still being adjusted and continues to change.

According to Gosugamer