ESL Criticised for Disqualifying ESL Meisterschaft Teams With Players in the DPC

Although the restart of DPC has immensely pleased the players as well as the fans, some issues related to the qualifiers have been emerging in almost every region. This time, tournament operator, ESL, has come under scrutiny. According to several allegations, ESL will disqualify ESL Meisterschaft players who are competing in the DPC, but with different teams.

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ESL Reportedly To Disqualify Teams From ESL Meisterschaft That Participate With Different Roster In DPC Qualifiers 

German Dota 2 player, Damian "Ascendancy" Kostorz, revealed through a series of tweets how ESL intended to disqualify a player’s team from the ESL Meisterschaft tournament if he played with a different five-man roster at the DPC EU qualifiers. 

One of Ascendancy’s teammates, who plays for the European team: hehe united at ESL Meisterschaft, had asked an ESL admin if they could play in the EU DPC qualifiers. The admin reportedly responded to him only two minutes prior before the tournament began, stating that they would be disqualified from the regional tournament if they did not participate in the DPC with the same roster. 

According to ESL’s tournaments rule book, players are not allowed to play in multiple ESL tournaments with different rosters. Since the CIS Regional League is being operated by ESL, players participating in ESL events like ESL Meisterschaft knew that they could not compete in the qualifiers of the CIS region with a different roster 

However, since ESL and DreamHack merged in 2020, DreamHack events are also being considered as ESL events. So players playing in ESL Meisterschaft will also not be able to compete in the EU DPC qualifiers which are being held by DreamHack.

Ascendancy put out an update on this matter stating that the teams were inflicted with a 180 days ban from ESL Meisterschaft events if they competed with a different roster in the EU DPC open qualifiers. 

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ESL is yet to make an official comment on this situation.

Author’s Opinion: While ESL is fully within their rights to impose such rules to maintain the integrity of the tournament, it is certainly an arbitrary and strange ruling.

Considering that the teams only get to play one or two matches each week in the DPC, they will have plenty of time to compete in other online tournaments like the ESL Meisterschaft. We hope that ESL makes some changes to their rules allowing players the option of playing in either tournament with different rosters.