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As organizers cluster in for a “Dota 2 month”, a repeat of last year’s Jeopardy June is already in motion.

“Get out of my way!”, the organizers seem to say to each other as we have not one, not two, but four freaking Dota 2 majors occurring in June 2015.

Remember when I said organizers needed to discuss about their schedules and play nice? Well, this is the exact opposite and even worse so that they decided the month right before Ti5 was a great month to saturate with major independent tournaments.

Ti 5 looks slated for a July – August timeframe as Valve, in a leaked email, told organizers “not to plan competitions between July 13 and August 13”.

This year, The International 4 was held July 18 – 21, thus making this month range the “International-ly Reserved” month very, very likely.

Insane when you look at it — 15 seasons in 4 years since the tail end of 2011.

We begin June with Starladder Season 13 (SL planned for FOUR seasons in 2015), the LAN Finals occuring 4th – 7th June 2015.

This would normally be fine, except Starladder occurs really, really often and the seasons don’t really serve any continuum, but rather are simply iterations of the same formula.

I hope in 2015, SL does something different to show that they are worthy of viewers.

SL has already begun to slip — from starladder 9 to starladder 10, the viewership on twitch alone has stagnated, even dropped lower than previous numbers. Starladder 9 on twitch peaked at around 60,000 while starladder 10 peaked at around 48,000.

Dreamhack plans their stuff 2 years in advance, so they’re the least guilty of crowding.

Dreamhack Summer 2015 is planned to run 13-16 June in Elmia, Jönköping, Sweden. In the previous Dreamhack Summer, Cloud 9 faced off against Alliance in a Grand Finals that attempted to recapture the glory days of Ti 2 Alliance domination.

Although Alliance won that final, it was a summit they should never have crested: Alliance’s performance would only go downhill from then onwards, to the point they were eliminated in only the group stages of Ti 4.

ESL one remains the most professional in terms of production amongst tournaments – they always value-add.

ESL Frankfurt 2015 runs June 20-21 in Commerzbank-Arena Frankfurt, Germany, with their feature event marked as “the second installment of the biggest Dota 2 tournament in Europe”, referring to the huge turnout that ESL Frankfurt 2014 enjoyed, filling the stadium with 12,500 fans and with “500,000 simultaneous viewers” online.

ESL will be aided by joinDota, who will be providing casters for the event.

The newest kid on the block – and also the one latest to the party, which explains the tail end date for their tournament.

MLG and joinDota will be running their new League, with the Season 2 Championship slated for June 26-28, citing scheduling problems with Ti and organizational demands as justifications for their dates.

The tournament is a part of MLG’s bid to promote MLG.tv and to initiate their foray into Dota 2. This league season will run for 3 seasons for the year of 2015, cumulating in a “World Championship” in October 16-18.

MrMLGAdam has answered on reddit regarding the rationale of putting their season 2 right smack into a busy month, saying

“Completely transparent answer as usual: Investing $565,000 into prizes and stipends for a game (not counting a penny of production, etc. in that #) is not an easy commitment for a 3rd party operator. The activity needs to be modeled out, pros and cons weighed, and ultimately it has to make sense for our business.

As a responsible business operator the only way it made sense for us to commit this much capital was for the activity to last the length we have it scheduled.

I understand there are reasons why it is not ideal, but I also think there are positives such as one cohesive story that will culminate at an end of year world championship (once we announce more details, you’ll see why that World championship could be massive), a book end to TI5 for 2015, and possibly (here goes wishful thinking) a reason for teams to potentially maintain stability post TI5.”

If MLG is to be taken with benefit of the doubt, their intention for a year-long continuous league is to encourage teams to stay together post TI5, as we have all seen how teams quickly disband and reform in the great “post-TI shuffle”.

This year alone, we had two new teams formed from players previously from tier 1 teams, Team Tinker and Secret Team.

iceiceice is such a sensational player that people follow him over the team that he plays for.

Reforming teams is not necessarily a bad thing, since spectators mostly just support the personalities in a team, rather than the organization behind the team.

More often than not, the community rallies around the players as their own talking points, instead referring to the organizations only when discussing about logistical or management issues.

From EternalEnvy fans to iceiceice fans, in-game items which are pegged to support players are much more popular than those that are organization-pegged.

Even though the item set looks nice, it doesn’t really represent the personalities viewers support explicitly

Viewers want to directly support players to allow them to keep playing so that they can keep watching them play — this recognition of player support from the viewers is very important as this is the main method in which organizations can convince viewers of their tournaments if they are wholly “player-friendly” and display that they always have the player’s welfare in mind.

Take “MrMLGAdam’s” reply on reddit. He ensures readers that discussions between organizers have been held and all predictable and possible concessions towards players have been made to accommodate the saturated month.

This is especially important since MLG is on their debut tournament: They need the goodwill and well, at least they’re on the right track, even if they are gaining some detractors already due to their scheduling in June.

In their vision that a “World Championship” would be played with their organization at the helm, they are trying very hard to place themselves as a centerpiece in the Dota 2 tournament scene. I’m all for competition, but viewers should be convinced by their product by simply watching it and seeing if they are worthy of such prestige.

They should not try to legitimize themselves, experienced or not in the e-sports scene, as a matter of capital. joinDota competes with BeyondTheSummit for viewers in a healthy way, but for MLG, they are trying a little too hard to take center stage according to their schedule, and I worry that their ambition will make them unlikeable.

I think that teams will simply space themselves out with regard to Jeopardy June. Each tournament will probably only have certain teams because teams want to avoid player fatigue before the biggest international Dota 2 competition.

Aui_2000 from Cloud 9, in his Q and A, has commented that “The state of the game (scene and climate) is not good, it’s not good for pro players right now…I’m not going to three of those. I don’t even think I’m going to two of those (tournaments).

I actually hate tournament organizers so much who do that so much (to compete with each other by scheduling close tournament dates)”. The reality is that the industry is so young that risks need to be taken in order to sense out the tolerance of viewers, but too much is being put at stake right now.

A normal schedule of DoTa 2 for the players to play the games if they all attend each tournament.

Personally, I can observe that the complaints are already beginning to pour in. EG had already forgone SL11 to rest, and Team Secret has recently also withdrawn from D2L due to scheduling conflicts, compounding the emerging problem of tournament scheduling and organization between independent tournaments.

Players, like the viewers, are human and will get tired if there is too much of anything. The moderation of tournaments is necessary for sustainability, and oversaturation does not grant stability, it makes things leak.

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Chen Yiji
The Gaming Ground