In a blog post earlier today, popular Ukrainian caster Vitalii 'V1lat' Volochai stated, “online tournaments SUCK,” and fired shots at Esportal and Dotapit in particular. He criticized both tournaments for offering a poor viewer experience compared to LAN finals, citing lack of atmosphere, emotion, crowd participation, and interviews.
V1lat used football as an analogy to illustrate his point, asking if a match between Real Madrid and Barcelona would be as exciting if the teams were playing at a training camp. He went on to compare Dota 2 to other eSports which have largely left the online format behind for serious matches, including CS:GO, League of Legends, and Starcraft 2. Also problematic for V1lat was an apparent lack of posts concerning Esportal and the Dotapit LB finals on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook compared to a LAN event like ESL One Frankfurt. In his opinion, this points to an absence of enthusiasm in the community for these online events, despite their notable prize pools.
Volochai has historically been outspoken about his disapproval of online events, chiefly for their reliance on “hat” sales and their promotion of cosmetics as a source of funding for the scene. Multiple professional players shared his misgivings about online tournaments, and have been vocal about preferring LAN finals. Though he has been a controversial personality in the past, many on reddit embraced today’s blog post as candid and agreed with his views. However, some personalities, such as SkimGaming, argued that events like Dotapit are not representative of online tournaments as a format.
“I think when ppl talk about online tournaments and use dotapit as an example, they disregard the huge issue this tournament had: administration showed no firm hand whatsoever in terms of scheduling and thus it was extended for another 3 months - I'd bet Secret and EG wouldve never pulled out or complained that much if it hadn't been.
I'm not saying that the ping thing is not an issue, but at the same time it is something Secret knew from the very beginning when they signed onto this league (in fact they played the previous season as well) - so I personally think it is safe to say that the scheduling was the bigger issue, not so much the ping (still an issue, but they mad (sic) 1 1/2 seasons without complaining or withdrawing)”
Image by Na`Vi.
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