4Game

First the positives, the standard of Dota played has generally been excellent, this is a great patch and the competition has been tight without any teams feeling like they didn’t belong there.

The inclusion of a Last Chance Qualifier was a great concept as it enabled us to have another hype tournament in the run up to TI, and to include 2 more great teams in Secret & Liquid who both generally perform better on LAN than online.

The talent have generally tried hard and have had to work against the clock (quite literally with the time zone difference and the number of games played). Personally I think 5 games at once is too much as I'm guaranteed to miss a lot of the ones I want to watch and I would like to have seen it spread out some more, particularly now that TI has so much elapsed time.

However, there have been a disappointing number of issues and the quality of this TI so far is below what we have come to expect from major tournaments run by other production companies.

Lets compare PGLs quality to a couple of other production companies, and I'm only talking group stages here, not the event ‘proper’.

Unfortunately Valve don’t seem to be big fans of Weplay and the only main events we have to judge their performance on is a minor and a major.

The Animajor however was in my opinion possibly the best major so far. The group stages had 'A' list talent on site, a strong theme, a great set, professional observers, comedy bits, custom intros and that was all before the main event.

Here's Holyhexxors vid from the time, the difference in quality between this and what pgl are serving up is night and day…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=u99hDn014eA

However for some reason Valve doesn't seem to want to work with them which is doubly disappointing considering the current Ukraine situation. You would think Valve would want to support them in these hard times but still….

Next we can look at ESL.

Recently they have run both the Stockholm Major and ESL Malaysia, both events with great talent, observers, audio, Slacks being Slacks and general production quality in both the group stages and main event.

Here’s Slacks tour of the group stage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvBmAvo19fc

But for some reason Valve keep getting into bed with PGL.

The Arlington Major had terrible production and people here were understandably upset. We love this game, we want it to be seen as a quality product. But PGL cheaped out on the talent, the production and even the piddly little screens in the stadium.

So it was not surprising people were worried about how involved PGL were coming into TI. And it has been proved that we were right to worry.

• The production has been barely existent

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• The graphics looked like they were done in mspaint

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• There were no comedy bits or interviews or other fill in pieces

• The audio was often not matched, not just between streams but often not even between casters on the same stream

• We didn’t have professional observers, it made the games look terrible and hard to watch. Half the action got missed and we we're lucky if we didn't get motion sickness from shaky-cam

• We had games crash and other bugs and taking multiple hours to fix

• There were zero 'A' list casters (I'm all for giving new talent a break but that's what the various dpc are for. The casters who prove themselves should get a shot amongst the ‘A’-listers at the Majors. If they prove they have what it takes there, then they might earn an invite to TI. We expect it for the players, why not the talent too?)

• Betting Sponsors – Betting is bad, Betting sponsors are bad, do you really want to be involved in something which is illegal in a large number of the countries you are broadcasting to? Do we really need to get into how it can ruin lives? Do we really want that to be the first thing people think of in regards to the game we love?

• The whole Russian situation and the fact that there streams are run by people on a actual international sanctions list (seriously you couldn't even make this stuff up its so bonkers)

• Lack of hype from the casters because you have made them get up in the middle of the night to cast games. How can you expect them to be at their best in that situation

• How can it make sense to fly Auzzie casters to Norway to cover an event in Singapore which is practically next door to Australia?

The tournaments from the other production companies just don't seem to have these issues, at least not at anything like the same level.

Valve please stop using PGL… I have worked in big business and I know how procurement works. I know how easy it can be to go with a big vendor, particularly when they are low-balling the competition. However in this situation, as is often the case in those scenarios, it is quality that suffers.

Please don’t skimp so hard on the quality by going with a vendor like PGL. We love this game and we want TI to be it at it's best, as something we can show people outside of our scene, something we can be proud of.