Valve’s $3 million DOTA 2 Shanghai Major was, to put it lightly, a mess. True to form, it didn’t exactly end on a high note.
After Team Secret’s come-from-behind (the entire tournament) victory, GosuGamers reports that players of all teams awoke the next day to find cleared out practice rooms. These rooms housed precious gear like laptops and keyboards, and they were vacated (presumably by organizational staff) without warning. Where’d their contents end up? Nobody’s entirely sure.
Here are some tweets about the incident from the competing teams:
This is what all the teams have woken up to this morning. These are the practice rooms. What… https://t.co/hvM7UrPWo7
— Team Secret (@teamsecret) March 7, 2016
We're currently trying to locate a bunch of our gear. We just saved 1437's laptop charger which was bundled into a box with 100s of cables.
— Team Secret (@teamsecret) March 7, 2016
Teams are shouting at the staff here as the majority of everyone's gear has been either packed away, lost or stolen.
— Team Secret (@teamsecret) March 7, 2016
Goodbye keyboard and mouse 🙂 one day I'll return to China pubs to play versus my own peripherals. #fullcircle#headsupforthisplzXd
— Johan Sundstein (@OG_BDN0tail) March 7, 2016
We were lucky to be in our room before the PW and hotel staff began the tear down. We recovered all of our gear.#coLDota #ShanghaiMajor
— Kyle Bautista (@coL_Beef) March 7, 2016
In a darkly humorous twist, they even managed to lose Team Spirit player Roman “Ramzes666″ Kushnarev’s keyboard. Again.
Sidenote: somehow they lost Ramszes keyboard, AGAIN!
— Kyle Bautista (@coL_Beef) March 7, 2016
The Marriott hotel that hosted the players, meanwhile, apparently issued the following statement, as posted by the manager of OG
Marriott's official statement on the missing gear situation #ShanghaiMajor pic.twitter.com/fvs0sDKKoN
— Evany Chang (@the_evany) March 7, 2016
According to this record of events, the Marriott brought in a third party to clean out the rooms without consulting Perfect World (the company Valve partnered with to host the Major). Apparently the hotel plans to pay for the mysteriously missing gear, but man, what a bummer of an ending to a misfire of a tournament.
On the upside, Valve has acknowledged that a whole bunch of different parties dropped a veritable Chuck-E-Cheese pit of balls here. To correct this, they plan to be more hands-on in hosting future Majors:
“While there were amazing performances by all of the teams participating in the Shanghai Major, we recognize that the viewing experience and the overall execution of the event were very disappointing. Dota fans and professional players alike have high expectations for a Major event—expectations that we share—and it is ultimately our responsibility to make sure those expectations are met and exceeded… With that in mind, we will be increasing our involvement moving forward to ensure that future events deliver a high-quality experience.”
Here’s hoping the Shanghai Major goes down in DOTA 2 history as an all-time low, because I’m not sure how things could sink much lower.
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