Sharpen those pitchforks!
In addition to the massive drama fallout over 2GD’s dismissal, it seems that the Shanghai Major isn’t done providing us with rage fuel.
There is a laundry list of complaints with the event:
- English Stream is laggy/goes down constantly (try watching Dota2RUHub when this happens, the Russians seem to have a more stable stream).
- Games have been delayed for hours. Dota events often experience delays, but these have been ridiculous. KOTL guy and company did a great job trying to keep everyone entertained on the English panel, but even they were running out of stuff to talk about after an hour and a half.
- Apparently the arena kicked everyone out with several matches yet to play. Fans were told they had an hour to leave the venue as it was “closing down for cleaning.”
- The organizers lost a keyboard belonging to Spirit.Ramzes666 and thus delayed Spirit vs. Complexity for an hour. [At Valve events, players can use their own peripherals but have to turn over their gear to organizers as part of an anti-cheating deal.]
- According to CoL.Swindlezz, the Chinese casters are clearly audible in the players’ booths. This is an issue that’s come up in the past at non-Valve sponsored tournaments, I’d expect better from an event that Valve is putting on. UPDATE: Apparently this has been addressed now.
- The DotaTV games have had poor audio/messed up audio on several occasions (possibly a client issue, not production though).
- This ‘VIP’ room is sad. Also from the same source, the analyst desk was apparently told they couldn’t have any internet at first.
- The English production is being directed by a single person – Props to Bonnie for doing the best she can despite terrible conditions.
There’s even more bizarre complaints such as literal laundry issues and no practice area for teams. Other tournaments have definitely had a number of complaints levied against them, but Shanghai is by far the worst tournament I’ve ever seen in terms of production and operation. It’s a shame too – the meta right now is exciting, there have been a couple of upsets, and my favorite teams and players are in attendance.
After the Fall Major in Frankfurt went on without any issues (despite being the first installment in the new Majors format), we all expected better of Shanghai. Shanghai Shitshow indeed. I’m not sure how Valve’s going to respond to this, but if Dota wants to continue growing and being taken seriously, screw-ups of this magnitude cannot be tolerated.