EPTThis piece will not be about how good the tournament is overall, or the hype, the games or w/e. I will simply be mentioning specific things that are good or bad and that's it.
Honestly though after watching PPD's video I was like god damn that's a really positive out look and it made me not want to write this but then I remember how mad everyone was including Charlie Yang so LETs GOo.
Positives:
1. Living Space
The hotel and the area surrounding the hotel was optimal. There was a mall right next to the hotel with lots of really good food so western players had options. The hotel was really nice with a good breakfast. DAC also provided reimbursements for any laundry done by the teams. A very similar experience to TI. This is really good because it really helps to give players a relaxing stay when they are away from their homes for a long period of time (2 weeks i think?).
2. Staff to help us
Every team plus their managers were picked up at the airport. In general anything that helps us be less stressed out in a different country is nice. All foreign teams had a legit paid for translator with them which was never the case in China and its really helpful. The previous times I went to China as I explained in my blog, the translators were all voluteers who knew 0 english and basically everyone team just relied on Xiituzi except Alliance because Kelly Milkies speaks Mandarin.
3. The existence of MarsTV Mali
So there was this one white dude who I don't even think is that high up doing a bunch of shit for teams. He was pushing my chair to my play area half the time woOO. He helped organize a practice area for teams that arrived early to play (Secret/C9). In general if you needed any help you just go ask Mali who looked super stressed out and sweaty the entire event. At one point I felt bad but I was like fuck it I'm asking Mali for help anyway.
4. Ability to Adapt and make Decisions
This was amazing to me, it's very rare for a tournament to adjust things based on what players ask for while the tournament has already begun. There was a lot of adjustments that were made based on complaints by many players/managers (aka me ^_^). Will the adaptations where based on negatives so I'll be going over what happened later on. In general the staff were nice so when there are issues we could discuss it and they could help, the problem is that when they do help you can start seeing the inexperience and poor understanding of dota.
5. $
Everything was covered. Our flights, hotels, laundry and other shit. We were given food money. There was some problems later on in the tournament that EG/C9 solved with $$$$ and PW plans to reimburse us for it so yay. I'll be going over this in the negatives.
Alright the fun part Negatives
1. Practice/Play Area
So as I've said in some interviews the first 2 play days the chairs in both the practice area and the actual tournament area had no arm rests. Now I can understand not having that many decent chairs for the practice area with so many computers but not having it for the tournament is unacceptable. After the first 2 days they brought in DXRACERS so it was fine then though.
After seeing the chairs at the practice area I got worried so I asked the staff whether they would be using those hotel dinner chairs for the actual event in which they told me no. But as I've said in my blog, I've developed little faith in tournament staff so I ended up asking more staff till I realized everyone had a different answer. This is how I ended up deciding to just ask Mali every time because hes a man we can rely on :D... Anyway EG and C9 ended up buying desk chairs for all 10 players at Ikea and Conrad/Charlie built ALL our chairs Wow. We thought that the players would just be investing in increasing their chances to do well. After hearing that we did this PW said they would reimburse us so that's pretty legit.
Another problem was the size of the monitors were different from room to room. The practice area had these huge new technology curved monitors that were weird. The play rooms would have different monitors in some some rooms versus others but they usually weren't the bent shape.
Some rooms were just better to play in because of how the desks were positioned. Basically the play rooms were a bunch of desks put side by side. In some rooms the monitor would be centered at where two ends of the desks would meet. This meant that you would have two desk legs blocking the players legs. Some rooms didn't have any problems with this where as other rooms would have 2 players pretty fucked.
The smoking area was literally at the only entrance of the practice room. And it seems like people in China smoke a lot so there would be A LOT of smoke in the practice area. The smoking area after a few days was moved to a different area but it was still really close to the entrance.
A combination of all these problems made it so that I personally didn't play more than 2 pubs a day. I would just sit in my room looking at picks because if I hang around the practice area too much I would start having periodic small coughs. Plus I didn't feel like stressing out my arms for such a long tournament with no arm rests and practicing on curved monitors didn't really warm you up for the different monitors in the play room.
2. Schedule
The tournament had some interesting rules at first (told to us in a meeting the day before the tournament) such as coach being able to participate in draft and other shit. But due to Charlie Yang going crazy, some rules were changed. Charlie what a guy. Anyway I feel like rules should be given to teams way earlier than this, especially if its with rules that aren't present in any other tournament.
The schedule of the group stages or the main event weren't told to us till the day before hand. This made it really hard for teams to optimize their sleeping schedule. We were actually told that the shuttle to the main event was 7:30-8 am (i forgot) to the main event when everyone tried to sleep in to like 9-11 for the group stage games that didn't start till at least 12 (if your the first game) because games went to 2 am on the first day. I actually don't understand how they made their schedule last minute. Things got even more fucked up because each main event day would start at a different time and they refused to give us the schedule till the FINAL GAME OF EACH DAY was finished being played. This meant that when the schedule would be released some teams were already sleeping. What the fuck?
A few teams had days where they would start at noon and play their last match at mid night. This isn't really something that's been done before in any tournament but tournament organizers should really take some time to optimize their schedule to make it as low stress and possible for the teams. I don't feel like it should be that hard and it should be a priority. Vici Gaming who was jet lagged going to The Summit started the day with their game and also ended the day. These things are actually so easily avoidable if organizers just spent a bit more time to do some tedious work. Fata wanted to vent his frustrations to the admins (and I went along for fun) and basically the Admins were laughing and saying why are you complaining there are a few other teams getting fucked also. I just don't understand how you can justify one team getting fucked by another team also getting fucked its ridiculous. And they always say that the players job to play the games and deal with it. And its their fucking job to have a proper schedule for their tournament. Why should the players have to take responsibility for the fuck ups for the organizers. Anyway I'm not sure what happened that night but after more pressure from multiple teams and with our boy Mali doing some shit, the matches at 12 am were moved to the final day yay. Honestly though its rare for a tournament to change things for the better during it, and this happened many times this event so props to that.
3. Staff Incompetence
It honestly hurts me to say this because I feel like the staff were nice, but there was definitely a lack of competence in handling many things. In general the admins in the play rooms were sleeping through the games so when there are lag issues or w/e we have to wake them up then they go from this drowsy to panicky state.
Of course rooms would be hosted with the wrong team having FP then both teams would all leave and it would take a good 10-15 minutes to host the next lobby because no body paying attention.
I still get that same issue I've talked about in all other Chinese lans. I don't understand why in the coin toss they always ask the enemy team what they want (heads or tails) then they look at me and ask me the same fucking thing. When we both say we want heads they get so confused. At one point it goes from being cute to being infuriating.
We asked the admins to install Teamspeak 3 on the main stage computers and they said they would do it. Then we realized that it wasn't downloaded and we had to set it up ourselves which took 5-10 minutes which was our warm up time. We were then told to join the lobby or have penalty time for picks. I actually started raging at the admin there and we ended up getting some practice time. Then there ended up being even more delays because HGT didn't know they were suppose to be put on sound cancelling headsets for some reason. The booths weren't well made so things could still be heard. Big God didn't put on their sound cancelling head sets properly and for some reason the admins didn't notice or care.
During one of the games we had massive lag and some other issues so we wanted a new saved lobby. It literally took us like 30 minutes to rehost the lobby. Someone actually had to be on a phone call with the host to teach them how to host a saved lobby.
4. Format
I feel like with the amount of days in this tournament, a better format could have been made. The group stages didn't really matter as long as you were top 8. I feel like more thought could have been put into this so that the top 2 or even top 4 had different benefits. Perhaps they could have skipped a round which would free up some time for the lower bracket to have BO3s instead of BO1S which is super awful. You should never be eliminated from a tournament of this caliber from a BO1 that's a joke.
5. Game Hosting
Well I already talked about this a lot but I'm just adding some more information in that everyone was complaining about. The passwords used for the event were being evolved everyday. At first it was too simple so they changed the PW to something absolutely ridiculous like DASDdafsadfAEs. Then there would be problems where lobbies needed a rehost due to the wrong team having FP or w/e. First the game would take forever to be rehosted but when it did get rehosted they would start randomly so some casters like Starladder has said just missed out on being in the lobby. Eventually the PWs got changed to something more understanding.
In general I felt throughout the entire event that the organizers were inexperienced. I felt like a lot of these issues could have been solved if the organizers actually respected the opinions of the players or went to more experienced people for help. The players did give them a list of things we wanted and I feel like it was ignored (such as monitors being the same size, and chairs having arm rests). Well I really liked the idea behind DAC and it was overall a really successful event and I want more of these. So hopefully next time it will be even better.
I wrote this blog in like 30minutes which is infinitely less time than my other blogs so hopefully it doesn't suck. .-.
