EPTI don't understand why online dota tournaments are still marred by a plethora of easy to avoid issues. The annoyance caused by this is aggravated, for me at least, by the fact that professional players are always quick to criticise tournament orgs for not being professional enough, read: requiring the pros to be at the venue a couple hours in advance for photo shoots and the like or not serving them a three Michelin-star buffet, yet they are incapable of executing basic measures to insure that they are able to play without downtime.
Let's start with things every professional dota 2 player can and should do.
1) Get a backup PC or notebook which is capable of running dota. Make sure the dota client is patched and the whole thing is working once or twice a week. Play a game on your reserve set up just to check.
Seriously, this takes all of 15 minutes of work a week and will probably cost around ~£500. The vast majority of hardware issues could be avoided by just having a spare, if you're playing for several hundred thousand dollars you should be able to afford that or get it issued by your team.
2)Have some backup peripherals around.
Don't think this is nearly as big an issue, but you might as well chuck some in there, just in case.
3) Buy a decent UPS.
Again, for the cost of a few hundred currency units you are able to eliminate another risk factor to be able to at least play out a game currently in progress.
4) Rent some fucking TS servers, for God's sake.
It's absolutely mind blowing how inept players must be for voice comms to still be an issue at any point in time past 2007. a 10 slot server runs less than 2 quid a month. Just rent 3, each one with a different hosting company. Don't give their IP out to anyone who doesn't need to be on it, no, not your mum or the people you're clowning about in RMM, they're just for your games.
5) Get a VPN. Especially if your ISP assigns you a static IP.
This is a bit more costly than a TS server but also absolutely crucial, you don't want people with malicious intent to know your IP, take basic measures to cloak it.
And with that we suddenly have eliminated the vast majority of player side issues at a small cost, one that "professionals" really should invest in.
Now onto the elephant in the room, the much dreaded internet connection. Again, I have no clue as to how people in first world countries continually manage to not have a working connection as often as dota pros, especially when it's so crucial to their livelihood.
1) Get a business line with a SLA. Or at least 2 independent phone lines from different ISPs.
Yes, I know, this is expensive. But you're playing to win millions of dollars and you get a salary from your org. Fix your fucking internet.
2) Don't use your ISP provided router and/or modem, buy a good one for £100.
Just making sure you have equipment that won't fail if you look at it wrong.
3) Get LTE/fast wireless internet as a backup.
This isn't optimal but you can game on LTE with a reasonable ping, this should serve as a backup to your connections somehow go down and enable you to at least play out the current game.
In my opinions the big tournaments should really enforce and control for some kind of basic reliability hardening being done by the players. They're throwing around hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in price pools, yet the online stages of their tournaments deliver a consistently worse experience than TL Attack did back in 2008.
This is by no means a comprehensive guide or even a guide at all, just what was on my mind, but for fucks sake, if you're playing video games for a living make sure you're able to play the video games.
/rant
