Good and Bad News for Havana DotA Players

Kabir Vega Castellanos

HAVANA TIMES — In spite of the first DotA tournament in Cuba, organized by ADEC (Cuba’s eSports Group), being interrupted by Hurricane Irma, it has continued to take place at the Central I.T. Palace in Central Havana.

At this time, the second round is being played out, where the 16 teams who have already classified as Category A, will come head to head in a new elimination round. This is very similar to the first round: only the two winning teams in each group will be able to continue on in the competition.

The event is currently at its half-way point, the four teams that have managed to win can relax, however, the rest, impatient to start, are worried. Why? Well, for two reasons:

The new version of DotA was set up on the Playa server of the SNET network in the early morning of November 3rd. However, the tournament is still using the old version, which is causing a lot of inconvenience to teams taking part. As a result, many players no longer have any way to practice and they are reproaching the ADEC for not introducing the new version of the game into the competition. However, this is understandable as the new version needs to be studied; there are still a lot of glitches and imbalances in the game, which need to be corrected.

Nobody is to blame; this is just how events have unfolded unfortunately. However, the second reason is the organizers’ sole responsibility:

Everyone had accepted that the LCD’s (Cuban DotA League) first round would be a mass play-off where battles would be determined via a single match. Therefore, it was easy to quickly set apart the novices from the experienced players.

But now things are different. It’s already standard practice to have three or five rounds to determine the winner in face-offs that lead to elimination, at international tournaments. Well, in DotA, it’s crucial to analyze the opponent’s strategy during the game in order to counteract them later, as well as knowing how to change your own strategy for the same reason.

However, the ADEC has carried out this second round in the exact same way as the first: the team that loses twice, is eliminated. Therefore, it’s possible for the team that is really “the best of the best” to be knocked out, due to a trivial mistake made in one match that leads to them being eliminated.

Even though this tournament was received with a lot of enthusiasm by all DotA players in Cuba, this initial fervor has drastically vanished due to it being extended greatly, but especially because of the little participation it allows.

The fact that every team needs to wait a month or more just to play a match or two on the day that corresponds to them, greatly dilutes the high spirits of this DotA tournament.