“Meme Team” Takes up NA DPC slot, Highlighting Rule Issues

The DPC system has faced much criticism over the past year, from prize pool distribution, to to the way teams are knocked into the lower bracket. Recently, Valve released some changes to the system, but they have left some wanting more. In addition, a situation has arisen highlighting how the system can be abused.

As it stands now, the DPC slots belong to one person who owns the slot. Part of the reason for this is so that players and not orgs have control over their play. For example, a team couldn't get dropped by their org after making it to TI, just for the org to fill the slot with more players. However, because of this, one player on a team can universally kick the players they do not want to play with. With saw this issue with the Black and Yellow roster, where Jacky "EternaLEnVy" Mao sought to remove Daniel "zero" Yun and Andrew "Jubei" Evelyn from the roster.

The slot in question is the current slot for the Sadboys roster. According to the registration system, that slot no longer belongs to the original players on the team. The old Sadboys team gave the slot to these new players. The current roster of Sadboys now consists of players in the 3k MMR bracket rank of Dota. Many of them are streamer personalities including Papaya who released her own tweet about the situation. According to her, playing in the DPC was to highlight these types of abuses that the system encourages.

Part of the issue now is that it seems that practically anyone can play in the DPC. There are teams who ground their way through the open qualifiers in order to get the chance to play Dota at the pro level. Now it seems as though just anyone can get on a team without having done the work for it. Understandably, this has cast doubts on the competitive integrity of the DPC system.

But that's not where the controversy ends. The captain of the team, Maxwell "Hotaruz" Bateman, was accused of sexual abuse allegations several years ago. Hotaruz, the former manager for the San Francisco Shock Overwatch team, was fired from the org in 2017 after being accused of sexual assault by a Twitch streamer. As of now, he has not been convicted of a crime.

The Dota community has responded negatively to these developments and some appear to have taken their anger too far. Some have resorted to DMing Papaya and telling her to die as well as insulting her. One team has begun making fun of her statement with a copypasta replacing some of the words in the statement.

Valve has yet to take a position on these issues. Some in the community have offered possible solutions to abuses like this but Valve has not made any concrete decisions as of now. With the DPC season a week away now, it's unlikely however that Valve will implement any changes so quickly. One thing is for sure, we do not condone death threats or harassment of anyone involved in the Dota community.