The smoke has cleared and Team Secret grabbed the championship during the recently concluded MDL Disneyland Paris Major. Currently, Dota 2 teams are gearing up for the qualifiers of the EPICENTER Major, the last major tournament before The International 2019.
While the Dota 2 community was treated to excellent matches, there was a different issue brewing behind the scenes at the event itself.
In a post on Reddit early this week, a user by the name of Quelzam revealed his personal experience at the actual event. He started by saying that when the tournament was announced, he was more than thrilled. In order to get to the event, he paid €420 for a pair of premium tickets, booked a hotel for six days, and took a week off from work. He also had to travel seven hours.
When he reached the tournament venue, disappointment was not enough to describe what he felt. For starters, Quelzam revealed that the venue was a tent with white plastic chairs. While the premium seats were closer to the screens, it was around one meter in front of the regular tickets. There were no goodie bags at the start of the tournament, and it appeared that the organizers only released them due to complaints.
Making it worse was the fact that most of the time the audience needed to leave the venue to buy their own food and drinks, which was not cheap considering they were inside Disneyland. Quelzam also observed that players and audience made use of the same public toilets. This meant that players had to walk through the fans to get to the bathrooms.
While it would be easy to dismiss such complaints as a possible outlier, Quelzam's experience was confirmed by other users. User Lockeid, for example, said that the production value of the tournament was really good, but the experience of being at the tournament that was bad. Lockeid confirmed the sad state of the chairs. He added that there was no announcement or schedule for any signing sessions. The goodie bag looked hastily made and appeared to have been made due to the negative feedback. He said that the reason he may not have felt cheated was because he was from Paris.
A user named 345tom also chimed in and gave excellent observations. While the tournament was in Paris, it was organized by Mars Media, a Chinese production company. In terms of the Disney factor, it looked as if the organizers used that theme to get approval for a tournament but didn't really lean into it to make it matter.
Most of the comments in the original post cited that Dota 2 tournaments are generally better when done by ESL One. ESL One, however, faced criticism after it banned individual streams of the matches during ESL One Genting 2018. That time, Valve had to step in to address the concerns of the community. It is also possible that ESL One may have decided to put up non-DPC tournaments as it gave them more control, especially in the financial aspect.
So far, neither Valve or Mars Media have released any comment related to the concerns revealed in the Reddit post. With a new tournament on the way, let’s just hope that those who do manage to watch the games live get treated well and are not being scammed out of their money.
