What Is A Region In Dota?
Valve’s annual Dota tournament, The International, is pitched as an Esports version of the World Cup. Yet, while the World Cup has restrictions on eligibility due to the citizenship of its competitors, the lines are a little foggy for competitive Dota (even when comparing to how countries can easily game the process with fast-track naturalizations).
Teams across four regions—Americas, Europe, China, and Southeast Asia—compete in local tournaments to qualify for TI or a Major. But the locality of these events is mostly online, save for China’s TI qualifiers. So teams are mostly restricted by ping and latency, and at the whim of Valve’s decisions when it comes to deciding who competes in their area qualifiers.
Regions, for Valve, have served more as a logistical means to separate the breadth of competing teams than a way to foster the growth of Dota around the world, by giving equal opportunity—the same number of qualifier slots—to each region. Teams can have a mix of nationalities or their organizations can be housed on a different continent. These factors can affect where a team’s home truly is, in Valve’s terms. CompLexity is a longstanding NA organization, but their TI team was host to three Swedes. Digital Chaos’ TI6 roster was a hodgepodge of nationalities: American, Ukranian, Syrian, Dane, and Macedonian. They’re both considered American teams.
Coming To America
The lines between regions are becoming more blurry as teams intentionally compete in other regions, namely Americas and Southeast Asia, in an effort to prevail against weaker competition.
“ It’s quite obvious. The competition is way lower and that’s really it, there’s no other reason. ”
In Singsing’s interview with Dotablast, he gave the honest truth about why his European team, Kaipi, had decided to compete in the Americas Open Qualifiers for the Boston Major. American teams are worse. He added, “The competition is lower. I mean, just look at it: there’s not even eight invited teams in the regionals.”
The low bar of competition in Americas is an open secret. Team ProDota announced about their intention to change regions from CIS to the Americas for the Boston Major qualifiers, citing flaws in the system, the excessive number of teams in Europe and CIS, and a “clear imbalance between the Europe and CIS region and the Americas.” They were talking about sheer numbers here, but having to face less teams is also less competition. ProDota went on to win the Open Qualifiers, eventually losing in the Round Robin of the Main Qualifiers.
Team Secret, for their TI6 run, also benefited from choice by competing in the Europe qualifiers. They could have opted for Americas, but they would have run into team Evil Geniuses. These were two extreme cases—two Tier 1 teams whose circumstances pushed them into the Open Qualifiers—but they are portentous signs for opponents of a region-less system.
Do We Still Need Regions?
The Open Qualifiers has an alluring promise that anyone has a chance to be at a Major or an International, like buying a lottery ticket. There’s a chance, but it’s near impossible for nearly everyone. The teams that make it out of the gauntlet of the qualifiers are Tier 2 teams and some Tier 1 teams, who were all left out of the invites for the main qualifiers. Sometimes it’s because Valve has deemed they weren’t good enough, but sometimes there also just isn’t enough spots, as team ProDota has stated.
So these teams saunter into the Open Qualifiers and quash the hopes of fledgling teams. Who knows how many dreams were dashed when Team Secret and Evil Geniuses tore through their Open Qualifier brackets? The question is: does it matter that those teams lost their chances because they lost to a team from outside the region?
Welcoming The Challenge
Competition should beget more competition. There’s a reason why regions that have been hamstrung by ping, SEA and South America, have fared worse in international LANs. It’s because they can only play against each other. Even Chinese teams, which have been historically insular, have started to appreciate the value of competing outside the country. Korean team, MVP, has become a staple SEA representative at international LANs over the past two years, and their skill has increased in the process (enough for Puppey to poach two of their players).
Dota is the same game, regardless of where it’s played, but it does evolve and mature differently depending on the region its played. Despite precedents set by teams crossing over from one region to the other, each region has still maintained an identity. This is obvious to anyone who has played pubs in different regions. Chinese teams have their way, EU teams another, and CIS teams do their own thing. Culture still confines and creates these regional metas, even if an online space can bridge those gaps.
Valve has recently addressed some of these issues. Americas is now split into North and South. Europe is now split into Europe and CIS. But “SEA” is still Malyasia, Phillippines, and Korea. Even if there are regional identities, it’s lost by the time Valve draws its boundaries.
For now, region matters when ping matters. Low ping is a requisite to compete in the Main Qualifiers, but a top team can get by with laggy connections during the Open Qualifiers. The state of Open Qualifiers now is a far cry from when it was first introduced, as if it were a golden ticket for any passerby Dota player. Instead, it’s become a patch for the consequent flaws of the current system: its imbalance of skill across regions, the distribution of teams across Europe, CIS, and Americas, and the loopholes for disqualified teams.
agreed
In the end better team qualifies so no problem
kaef)0 spasibo za post
First.
and i thought SEA is the worse region lol
good article ty
IP region lock with pub games. Russians play on Russia server. etc..
Region lock would be neat.
Different playstyles can be clearly felt between regions, and it can mess up the team play, not to mention communication
And here I am on SA server
It's amusing that Australia and New Zealand are literally never mentioned. We have servers of our own but I guess we fall, technically, into the SEA region?
That or we are just not good enough across the board.
I like the fact that WESG is attempting to bring Africa into the scene by flying teams out to lan in Dubai for the qualifiers.
Typed a MASSIVE STORY but deleted it because people will argue...
Anyway, MEA qualifiers for WESG are the best things to happen for African esports. It would be nice to see those in other premier events.
Yes, the skill cap in Africa is lower than most of the world but we are still very good. Teams here definitely deserve at least one qualifier spot in most major events. This skill difference is due to the lack of exposure to other regions. We just "pick up bad habits" from playing each other and easily beating low skill players and teams in the continent.
Another issue is the lack of ranked matchmaking happening in the South African server. You might find a ranked game after a few hours of searching if you're lucky. Most players in the country either calibrated and left it at that, don't play ranked at all, or play in EU with the ping. We've got a few players hitting leaderboards for a variety of things but none for MMR as far as I know. I do know that we have a lot of 4-6k players thanks to the International Ranked but it sort of died when that finished.
I don't know, I would just like to see more integration between Africa and the rest of the world when it comes to esports. We definitely need our own regional qualifiers because the only server (South Africa) is on the other side of the world to all of the closest servers.
Dota needs a region lock, I'm tired of people from other regions trying to play with high ping and ruining the game.
While we're at it, I personally would love an article explaining in more detail the above mentioned regional styles and their differences, i.e. How are Chinese, CIS and American teams different from each other. Please someone write one :-)
Just get peruvians who cant speak english out of na servers. thx.
^ agreed
WHAT REGION IN DOTA WHAT IS GAME COORDINATOR VALVE
@Sykys
this, I'm tired of being trash talked in spanish and portuguese.
There has been a huge influx of non-english speaking players on US East (and I think US West also). They can't coordinate anything with the english speakers on the team and will really frustrate everyone on the team.
They also tend to be a majority of the "practically afk player that jungles the whole game never helping the team". This can be a valid strategy in a evenly balanced game, or when the other team takes the same playstyle, but completely fails against an early hard hitting gank team on the other side. Not defending towers early causes your own team to lose a lot of space and is not a viable strategy.
azerbaijan 4ever
NA brokeBack
US East is a waste of time. Peruvian infestation is live and well.
I think the competition is lower in the US since Dota is not very popular. LoL has taken over.
Just let us report players who can't speak the language of the server
I do find it impressive that there are three other players from SA server's are posting here considering our relatively small player base but I do agree, what WESG did was great for our scene and I really hope more events will consider doing qualifiers for MEA as it will help grow our scene. we have some immensely talented people in the region, not just players but also talent, Look at Noxville and Scant.
all I can hope is that more events and people give us a shot.
nice post
plebs
What is CIS?
GO SA DOTA ! #Castaway is a LEGEND
WESG is more resemblant of the World Cup than the International. It requires all players of a team to be of the same nationality, it gives different qualifiers for each country/region, and it allots places for teams from all continents to the LAN finals. The International is more like the Club World Cup, or Champions League.
I believe they slowly have to find a way to unify servers, so that there is international exposure, not just region-locked styles of play, which as they mentioned leads to some regions lagging behind
why none cares about central america :(
PUTAMG INA MO
sometimes my playmate is from the same country IND
and sometimes i got English speaker with nice attitude.
korea and china should be together imo..
korea isn't even remotely near SEA lol
well the best solution is to GIT GUD. Honestly you cant forbid a team from joining another region's qualifiers. It's their choice to play in high ping in order to get a better chance qualifying
Consider what would region-block do to the in-between countries, in Europe for example - take Poland, Czech republic, Slovakia, Hungary etc. Probablity is that this countries would be locked in the east europe region. While lot of folks here can read cyrilics (to some extent)and are able to understand russian antics and style of gameplay, I would say that gameplay in this countries resembles western europe region more that eastern. And there is probably more situations like this worldwide (Im just talking about eastern europe from experience)
*Meanwhile / theyre speaking in their native language cause you guys are muted. And rage the fuck out of the mic. Well sometimes, people who doesnt speak play's morethan my mmr, it leads to communicate the simple action of this player; without even speaking to each other. A single ping would do it. Im actually pertaining to comments.
Well nice post! This is the most valuable post that i ever read , anyway i wanted aswell to see the difference of the playstyle by each region. It is really fact that if you are in SEA youll come worse flaming people. And whats the difference with other server? do they do it aswell? Thats not a playstyle but just a simple fact of difference between regions. MMR / Normal / ETC.
DC's TI6 squad did not have a Syrian player w33 is Romanian... Not sure how they get mixed up
P.S Also w33's dota quality is a B+ while the author of this article is an A. Good factually accurate stuff.
Look at Grand Prix F1. Each team consists of multi-national individuals - but then the team is registered in one country (team's choice) and from there they operate. So why can't DOTA implement the same?
sea is hard..
i'm in wuhan, i have <5 ping ever since they introduced wuhan server, center area of china, lots of universities, 430 among many other pros grew up here