The Mineski Pro Gaming League (MPGL) will be open for Southeast-Asian teams for the second year in a row. It will have a $21,000 prize pool across the different qualifiers throughout the year, not including the prize pool for the LAN finale.
MGPL SEA will be a monthly tournament spanning from March to September. It will be played across five different regional qualifiers: Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Myanmar and rest-of-Southeast Asia. The tournament will be held online, with the top finishers receiving a specific amount of cash prize and points depending on how well they finish. The teams with the highest accumulated points on the end of the October leg will have a chance to compete on the LAN finale.
Last year's regional qualifiers also included Vietnam and Indonesia, but it did not include Myanmar. This year, any other team outside the four specific qualifiers will have to enter the rest-of-SEA qualifier. There is a separate MPGL tournament in the Philippines which has started last January.
The first leg for MPGL SEA will be held on 1-2 March. The registration will start on 21 February on Mineski's website.
The $21,000 prize pool is allotted for the whole season. It will be divided across several months and across the different qualifiers, and thus each qualifier will have a prize pool of $700 each month. It does not yet include the prize pool on the grand finals, which will be held in the Philippines again this coming November.
There is a tournament ticket for DotaTV access available on the Dota 2 store. It costs $7.49 per ticket, and it comes with a Forest Faun courier. While the ticket is supposedly for the entire qualifiers, it may not be farfetched to assume that only a number of playoffs games will be shown given the expected number of teams who will be joining. A portion of the ticket sales will reportedly be added into the prize pool. BeyondTheSummit will be providing the English cast for the event.
While this is only MPGL SEA's second stint, Mineski has already been hosting the tournament in the Philippines for the past five years. Warcraft III's Defense of the Ancients (DotA) used to be its flagship game, but the event has passed on the spotlight into Dota 2 since last year.
GosuGamers was able to attend last year's grand finals, which was held on SM North Edsa's Skydome in the Philippines. The event was praised by the community and the players alike for the production and for the hospitality extended unto them. On his statement, MPGL's Commissioner Marlon 'Lon' Marcelo expressed that "We are excited to take things to a higher level and create an event that topples the MPGL SEA 2013 grand finals."
Mineski won last year's GMPGL SEA Grand Finals after sweeping Titan on the finals. Aside from the Malaysian team, three other foreign teams (Impervious, First Departure and Joenet) graced the event.
