It’s only been a week into November and already there are a lot of Dota 2 esports roster changes happening. Most of these are teams in the CIS region, with the biggest one being Virtus.pro signing a new roster. However, before we go into that we’ll first take a closer look at Evil Geniuses and the move to put RAMZES665 on inactive status.
Time to Look for New Members
EG started 2020 with a runner-up finish at DreamLeague Season 13. That put them in fourth place on the DPC Ranking before the pandemic put a stop to the competitive season. EG still managed to get a good showing after that, winning both ESL One Los Angeles 2020 – Online: North America and BTS Pro Series: Americas.
During this time, Roman "RAMZES666" Kushnarev and Abed Azel “Abed” L. Yusop weren't able to play and EG instead used stand-in players. By September, the team made the decision to move to Europe and join the OMEGA League: Europe Immortal Division. This move also let RAMZES666 play with the team again. EG later was dropped to the Lower Bracket by Team Secret in that tournament and then eliminated by Alliance.
The team hasn't been able to play in any tournaments since then. Thus it came as somewhat of a surprise when it was announced that RAMZES666 would be put on inactive status. Even more surprising was that EG didn’t give any additional information on the matter. We’ll see what happens in the coming days.
The Students are Now the Masters
The bigger news, however, was VP signing a new roster. It’s none other than the roster of VP.Prodigy. This was the second team developed by VP and has been showing promise. With this move, VP is now composed of:
- Egor “epileptick1d” Grigorenko
- Danil “gpk” Skutin
- Dmitry “DM” Dorokhin
- Vitaly “Save-“ Melnik (Captain)
- Illias “illias” Ganeev
While such moves are not really surprising in the Dota 2 esports scene, what makes this significant is that it marks the end of an era for Vladimir “No[o]ne” Minenko and VP. No[o]ne, along with Alexey “Solo” Berezin, had been with the team since 2016. However, for the 2019/2020 DPC Season, before it was suspended, VP hadn’t been performing that well. This eventually resulted in the organization making the Dota 2 team skip ESL One Germany and put the roster on inactive status.
In a statement, Virtus.pro CEO Sergey Glamazda said that the goal for creating VP.Prodigy was to give young players a chance to develop in the pro scene and, so far, the “team had already shown some phenomenal results by this moment: reached grand finals in five out of seven tournaments and won three of them.”
Glamazda went on to say that by the end of September the organization was faced with the decision to update the main roster or “invest in VP.Prodigy and put our faith in new blood.” Well, I guess we now know what route the organization took.
The original VP line-up hasn’t been released, but remains on inactive status. It should be worth mentioning that Igor "iLTW" Filatov is currently playing with new team Live to Win.
The question now is what’s next for No[o]ne? Well, according to rumors, EG has an open spot with RAMZES666 being benched. What do you think?
