The first day of the $50,000 Game Show is now in the books and will unfortunately be remembered as a day of pauses, remakes and delays. As far as results go, Virtus.pro and NVMI had the best starts.
The somewhat under-the-radar LAN tournament Game Show Dota 2 League started earlier today with six teams playing a round robin phase at CyberStadium in Moscow, Russia. Things have been rather quiet regarding it previously despite the prize pool not being too modest - $50,000 plus $30,000 in travel expenses. The first inaugural eight matches between mostly all aggressive teams did unfortunately not deliver as much action as expected. This not due to the teams but rather because of the vast amounts of delays occurring not only in between games but also in the middle of the games.
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Solo, XBOCT - photo by CyberStadium
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Multiple games had to be remade after not even drafting half of the bans and picks, the reason was because of players disconnecting. It would then take roughly half an hour before the game was up and running again. Similar technical issues kept going on between the games and more than once during the day, all ten players disconnected from the ongoing game. The reasons are said to be DDoS, referring to denial of service attacks where network resources are suspended due to overload. This did not only frustrate viewers, casters and organisers but also the players who had to wait for longer periods of times to resume their games.
Players pulled through however, with the goal in mind and showcased both interesting and exciting Dota, despite the technical problems. Virtus.pro were late to the party but played solid and won both their games today. The team had their matches scheduled at the end of the day since they were expected to arrive later than other teams. This was because they replaced Team Tinker on short notice who could not attend. Team Empire opened strong by taking down Natus Vincere but then later lost to Goblak's NVMI. Overall, all teams seemed evenly matched and performed well except for Hellraisers who unfortunately fell short in all three of their matches, mostly because of awkward laning and being shut down early.
At the end of the day, the schedule dragged behind as much as three hours and the last match (VP vs Na`Vi) had to be postponed to tomorrow where remaining group matches will be played. The top four teams will move on to play the single elimination playoffs on Saturday, finals taking place at Dreamhack Moscow. Hopefully day two will proceed smoother without as many interruptions.
