Valve has announced that it will not use the Dota Pro Circuit system on the professional Dota 2 scene from 2024. The information the developers shared in a blog on the page of the game in Steam.
We started the Dota Pro Circuit in 2017 to answer a question that was coming up more and more frequently: How do you earn an invite to The International? Up until then, invitations were driven by a handful of regional qualifiers and “golden ticket” invites from Valve. Distribution of these invitations created an exciting moment every year for fans, but it was hard for pro players (and their fans) to know the exact path to The International. Understanding that every invitation system has trade-offs, we set out to create a system with more clarity and transparency.
When it came to that one limited goal, we succeeded. The DPC demystified the invitation criteria, and made it easier for pros to understand their path to The International. Unfortunately, the DPC brought with it a set of rules and regulations, and those have come with a cost that’s become clearer to us over time: The world of competitive Dota has grown less exciting, less varied, and ultimately much less fun.
By existing as the only official league, the DPC has a stranglehold on the event calendar for the year and what it’s filled with. Event organizers are innovating less, because that’s effectively what we’ve been asking them to do: Instead of competing for viewers and players by producing compelling and inventive tournaments, organizers now compete for compliance with Valve’s long list of rigid requirements (team count, broadcast languages, event format, and more).
Relaxing those requirements doesn’t help. No matter how well-intentioned our event specifications, or the actions of the event organizers in meeting them, it distracts from what the goals of these events used to be: showcasing Dota in the most entertaining way possible, enticing players to participate and the audience to watch. The best world is the one where event organizers aren’t competing for our attention, but for yours.
Before we introduced these constraints, the world of competitive Dota was healthier, more robust and more varied than the one we have now. Events used to be less rote and more creative, and there was more room in the calendar for them. Everything was open for exploration: event length and themed venues and team participation and even the basic assumptions of tournament design. There was a beautiful unregulated insanity to it all — casual house parties and oyster prize pools coexisted alongside the Dota Asia Championships and one-off invitationals. It would be too simplistic to say that the slow drift of the Dota competitive scene away from this focus on fun and creativity towards the sterile, near-monoculture of today is entirely the fault of the DPC, but the DPC has generated significant pressure and incentives that led us here. The Dota community has decades of grassroots experience coming up with innovative and entertaining events, and right now the DPC is getting in the way.
With that in mind, we’re ending the Dota Pro Circuit: 2023 will be the final DPC season.
Competitive Dota predates the DPC by many years and will continue long after. The International will continue as well — we’re already working on The International 2024, and next year we’ll be talking more about how invitations to that event will work. But for now, we’re going to return our focus to this year’s event — which, unbelievably, is only four short weeks away.
The Dota Pro Circuit was a system of regional Dota 2 leagues and tournaments in which DPC points were awarded. At the end of the season, the teams with the most points received slots in The International Championship Series. Other Dota Pro Circuit participants played for the remaining slots in the regional qualifiers.
Valve launched the DPC system after The International 2017. Previously, the Dota 2 developers themselves determined which teams would receive an invitation to the main tournament of the year.