Dota 2 fans and professional teams have been left irritated and confused after a series of tiebreaker matches were unexpectedly announced in the European DPC, and have now been cancelled within 24 hours.
After six weeks of league play, ESL and DreamHack, the organisers of the European Dota Pro Circuit, unexpectedly announced that a series of tiebreaker matches would be played today. This news came as a surprise to everyone as the original ruleset said these ties would be resolved by head to head results from the league.
News first broke of the new tiebreaker matches yesterday, with four teams from Division 1 being informed unexpectedly that they would have to play another match. It was known that a tiebreaker between Entity and Brame would be played, as this was a tie for relegation and any ties that dictate major participation or relegation will feature a tiebreaker.
But OG and Gamin Gladiators were told they would have to play a tiebreaker for first place and Team Liquid and Tundra Esports were told they would have to play a third-place tiebreaker. Under the original ruleset, these ties should have been resolved through the head to head results from the two teams earlier in the season, meaning OG would take first and Tundra would take third. Needless to say, the players were not happy.
This sudden and unexpected rule change resulted in a lot of backlash from the community, most notably from the community wiki site Liquipedia. With the change to the rules, Liquipedia decided to remove the pages for the EU DPC as it broke their guidelines of what qualifies for a notable tournament.
“Liquipedia’s core purpose is to record the history of esports accurately,” reads a statement posted by the Liquidpedia admin team. “To this end, we work within certain limits, the notability guidelines. In Dota 2 specifically, these guidelines help us avoid devoting resources to competitions with dubious operations or questionable results. We have, after seeing issues in the Dota 2 scene, started to require a higher level of competitive integrity from tournament organizers. These higher standards protect the players, the contributors, and the spectators from potential harm.”
As well as the European DPC page, pages for the North American DPC, which is also run by ESL, and the Chinese DPC have also been removed.
After the backlash from both the teams and community, the non-relegation tiebreaker matches in Europe have now been cancelled. Kurtis "Aui_2000" Ling, the coach of Tundra Esports, first revealed the cancellation on Twitter, with other teams involved now also confirming the news.
At the time of writing, neither ESL nor DreamHack has made any kind of statement on the matter or responded to a request for comment.
