ESL have responded to the Animal Planet and Optic disqualification. There has been a huge community furor about the teams being disqualified, which would rob the tournament of some quality team participation
Hello Dota-fans,
I told you earlier we would review and then address the situation with Optic and Animal Planet from yesterday. TL;DR is the DQs are upheld.
For those interested, the facts are these, according to what we found in our inquiry:
Animal Planet (AP) asked and got their match rescheduled by the ESL to accommodate a conflict of scheduling with PGL. After we granted that, there were no communication to us that they would be late for their match in the ESL qualifier.
Optic Gaming`s ESL match time did not conflict with their PGL schedule, and they did not raise any concern with us until 10 minutes prior to their ESL match. In the end, Optic did not show up in the lobby until 35 minutes past the starting time of the match. It is important to note that it was not a 5 minute delay as a player posted on Twitter. Anyway, here are the applicable rules in this situation:
“2.3. Failure to appear / No Show
Each team has 15 minutes to show up to a match. (Match date +15 minutes). Showing up after 15 minutes result in a default loss. The team that is waiting must open a protest ticket in order to request the default win.”
Now, while Optic gave some sort of heads up, and in that regard handled this a little differently than AP, the outcome has to be the same for both in order for the rules to mean anything.
I`d also like to address some rumors posted here that our admins were unreachable. That is simply not true. The admin working the qualifier and the matches was available to the teams in the respective Discord channel.
Finally: Don`t think for one second we like, or want to DQ teams. We understand that teams want to play as many tournaments as possible, as a former professional player myself (in CS) this is completely normal.
We also recognize that in the current environment, when organizers double-books dates, that it is difficult for teams and it places a burden on them. Going forward we are committed to working around this so there are windows between two qualifiers that are important to teams.
However, the teams that choose to participate still have to fulfill their commitments within the rules of each tournament they play in. Any differential treatment here from our end is unfair to every other team that competes in our tournaments.
Best regards,
Jonas “bsl” Vikan, ESL Tournament Director