The East vs West matchup
This will be the first meeting between the top teams in the Eastern and Western regions since DAC. The West will be represented by Alliance, Cloud 9, Team Secret, London Conspiracy and Team Tinker while ViCi Gaming, Invictus Gaming and Team Malaysia will represent the East.
A lot has changed since their last meeting in terms of roster. iG and VG are looking dominant with their recent pickups and the new Team Malaysia has been dominating the SEA scene since their formation. On the other hand Western teams have also had a few roster changes, Clould 9 have finally hit their stride and are looking dominant in the past few weeks having won 13 out of their last 15 matches. Team Secret are arguably the most consistent team in the world, are perennial title contenders and will look to add the StarLadder XII title to their list of accolades.
It's not in Kiev, Ukraine
This season will not be held in Kiev, Ukraine this time around after the organizers decided to switch it up after a total of 16 LAN seasons in the country. DreamHack is the world's largest digital festival, a LAN gathering with live concerts and competitions in digital art and eSports, the event usually has about 25,000 attendees.
While the The StarLadder XII CS:GO event remained in the Cyberarena, the Dota 2 tournament has made the move away from Ukraine to Romania following a series of issues that forced Chinese teams to pull out of the event for the two previous LAN finals and reports of prize money not getting paid to the teams. This marks the first StarLadder event with Chinese teams since Season 9 back in April 2014. The organizers decided to host their LAN finals at DreamHack Bucharest, which was home to last year's DreamHack Bucharest Invitational in Spring and the D2CL Season 4 finals.
First LAN for London Conspiracy and Team MY
This will be the first LAN event attended by London Conspiracy (other than Insomnia 54 in UK in 2014), Team Malaysia and Alliance's new roster. London Conspiracy will finally get a shot at playing at a big LAN tournament, after playing in a countless number of first phase of LAN Qualifiers they’ve finally managed to make it through to the end. They won more games than Team Empire and Virtus Pro in the second phase of the group stage and sneaked in through to the final stage, this will be a perfect opportunity for them to at least secure invites to future qualifiers. It'll be hard for them to continue their Cinderella story in the event as they face Chinese Heavyweights Vici Gaming in their first match.
Alliance on the other hand will be attending their first LAN since October 2014 (StarLadder 10) but it'll be the first for this new roster. The Swedes still don't look like their TI3 selves but the team is still very good, under 7ckngMad's leadership the team has been performing well in online tournaments/qualifiers and have also qualified for the third edition of i-League. StarLadder will also be a great platform for the team since this is the last LAN before the The International invites are announced, it Alliance are able to grab a respectable position, they might snag an invite from Virtus Pro Polar or the Ninjas In Pyjamas.
Team MY have been dominating the South East Asian scene just like Titan used to back in 2014, the team has secured qualification for Red Bull Battle Grounds and i-League Season 3. The team has a record of 45-6 since their inception and have lost just one series yet. It'll be interesting to see how they perform against top tier competition here in a LAN environment though.
Last LAN event before the next patch
This will be the last LAN to be played on version 6.83 after IceFrog revealed in a forum post that version 6.84 will be launched after this event. The current meta-game has been a subject of discussion among amateur and professional players alike, due to the newly introduced kill bounties and seemingly overpowered heroes like Sniper and Troll Warlord. While the teams have started relying on creative picks to deal with these factors (resulting in many entertaining matches), the community is mostly negative towards the current game state, and drastic changes are bound to come.
StarLadder XII might be the last tournament where we'll see a Sniper or a Troll in almost every game. We might be looking at this tournament after a few years just to celebrate Troll and Sniper.
Headline image from the SLTV Facebook page.
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