India’s Dota 2 Team at Loggerheads With ESFI Once Again

Moin "NO_Chanc3" Ejaz the captain of India’s Commonwealth Bronze Medal Winning Dota 2 team will be representing the country in the regional qualifiers of the Global Esports Games (GEG) this month after his team, Team Whoops, resoundingly won in the national qualifiers.

A win at the regional qualifiers will grant the Indian Dota 2 team a ticket to Istanbul, Turkey where the Global Esports Games (GEG), the flagship event of the Global Esports Federation (GEF), is scheduled to take place between 14th and 18th December.

The tournament is an international, multi-title esports tournament that shines a light on the dynamic celebration of esports culture and entertainment. The Esports Federation of India (ESFI) recently conducted the national qualifiers for Dota 2 – the National Esports Championship 2022 (NESC) on 30th September and Team Whoops captained by NO_Chanc3 won the final best-of-three series.

The team will be playing the regional qualifiers against qualified teams from various regions like Bangladesh, Guam, and Australia. However, the relationship between the Dota 2 team and the Electronic Sports Federation of India (ESFI) continues to be troubled ahead of yet another international tournament.

In a conversation with AFK Gaming, NO_Chanc3 talked about the events leading up to the national open qualifiers and the communication that took place between the team and the ESFI soon after.

ESFI changes its stance on hosting open qualifiers

This year, the ESFI hosted only one single qualifier tournament for selecting the Indian representative for Dota 2 tournaments, originally for the Asian Games 2022. However, after the postponement of the Asian Games to 2023, ESFI selected the same roster for the Commonwealth Games 2022 in Birmingham, England. Earlier in August, Ejaz publicly stated that ESFI was forcing the team to stick with the same medal-winning roster through multiple international events to prepare for the Asian Games.

However, in a complete turn of events, the ESFI organized an open national qualifier called the National Esports Championship (NESC) 2022 to pick the best Dota 2 team to represent India at the Global Esports Games.

Perhaps this turn of events happened after ESFI did not manage to finalize a roster for the IESF International Esports Federation (IESF) World Esports Championship (WEC) 2022 happening in Bali, Indonesia..

Ejaz revealed that the ESFI was disorganized and was not able to finalize a team for the IESF WEC 2022 in time, despite all esports teams and Dota 2 athletes requesting them to host open qualifiers for a fair chance at participation. He claimed that the ESFI ignored the request of the players and simply asked them to form new teams with mixed rosters for the WEC 2022.

Additionally, Ejaz pointed out that the ESFI was discussing rosters until a day before the submission deadline, and “because of this mass level of misconduct and professional inefficiency of ESFI, India missed the opportunity to participate in the WEC for Dota 2.” NO_Chanc3 added, “So I guess that's the reason they decided to host an open qualifier since there was no team for them to send to the WEC.”

Concurring, Vedant “Kaneki” Patil, who plays for team Avengers that recently participated in the open national qualifier (NESC 2022), also revealed that ESFI failed to host a qualifier for the IESF World Esports Championship.

Disconnect between Team Whoops & ESFI

All the procedures that followed Team Whoops’ qualification were intimated at the eleventh hour by the ESFI, said the Dota 2 squad. Team Whoops reportedly received an email seeking confirmation of its participation in the GEG Regional Qualifiers on 1st October. NO_Chanc3 claimed that the team was given only a few hours' notice to confirm its participation, failing which the team would have had to forgo its hard-earned spot.

He added that this notice was sent via email (initially with a two-hour deadline), which one of the team members happened to stumble upon by chance. NO_Chanc3 said, “For GEG Istanbul 2022 they only communicated with us through emails and not notifying us anywhere else be it WhatsApp or Discord.”

Additionally, NO_Chanc3 alleged that ESFI gave the team no time to keep the important documents ready to submit to the Global Esports Federation. He claimed that the team was asked to submit all documents including the passports and other IDs within a couple of hours without any prior reminder on 1st October.

In an email correspondence with ESFI, NO_Chanc3 explained the difficulty of collecting all the information within a short time frame and asked ESFI to give them at least 12 hours of time to get everything ready. Replying to this, the federation noted, “ESFI had well informed via its social media that timeline for ESFI to submit the details to the GEF is 1st Oct, please be aware that this was an extension which ESFI had got.” Notably, ESFI had posted an incorrect schedule for the GEG national qualifiers with the wrong dates initially and had to make a correction post with the right dates.

ESFI reportedly stated that the players should have had these documents ready by then. A question that loomed while discussing this was whether the squad was unprepared when it came to the documentation process. Answering this, NO_Chanc3 said, “We were not unprepared but ESFI required the documents on immediate notice without any prior intimation. All of us have other work and we were not available at the exact moment that they wanted the documents. Even then we managed to submit the documents on time after they gave us two hours extension to submit them.”

The Dota 2 captain claimed that the faults that ESFI was finding with the documents were not about the documents themselves but had to do with how they were labeled, dated, and formatted. “The open qualifiers finished a day before the submission, they could have informed the team of the required documents.”

Additionally, ESFI reportedly insisted that the documents be collated and submitted by the Dota 2 captain despite him informing the ESFI team that he was sick. NO_Chanc3 further alleged that ESFI proceeded to submit the wrong set of documents to the GEF despite one of the team members flagging it as incorrect via email.

NO_Chanc3 painted a picture of the communication pattern between the players and the ESFI to AFK Gaming. According to him, communication “is always broken and haphazard.” He tabled that the ESFI ignored the players’ queries most times and that the federation would often ignore them for days until they wrote back to it. “They don't plan anything and don't give adequate time for players to respond and then threaten players that they would be disqualified and spam us with emails that the ESFI is not responsible for it.”

Another team also had difficulties with ESFI

Team Avengers player Kaneki also talked about the issues with ESFI’s communication of fixtures and schedules. Kaneki stated that ESFI usually gives the teams the bracket and match schedule a day before they start, ignoring the fact that most players have full-time jobs.

He added that despite being informed about the GEG open national qualifiers (NESC 2022) a week in advance, ESFI released the fixtures a day before the first match commenced. “And our match was on a Thursday (29th September). Two of our players work and because of the last-minute schedule, we could not take a day off from work and ESFI did not even agree to reschedule the match for the next day.”

Kaneki stated that they had to give a walk-over to Stylish Gamers in the best-of-three series. “Our opponent team Stylish Gamers was on time at 5.30 PM. By the time our player left the office and got home, it was around 7.30 PM and the opponents were not ready to play the game the next day stating that the flow of the game will be ruined. Since they had to go at 9.30 PM, we ended up giving a walkover.”

The Dota 2 team shared that it is stressed and burdened by the actions and the methods of communication employed by the ESFI as it is gearing up for the GEG regional qualifier that kicks off today on 8th October.

This is not the first time the two parties have locked horns. The Dota 2 players who competed and won at the Commonwealth Games faced issues with sponsorships and are awaiting reimbursement for visa processes, among other roster-related woes. They placed ESFI at the heart of most of the issues and have been vocal about not wanting the federation to be the official organization in charge of all esports matters in India.

AFK Gaming has reached out to ESFI to clarify the allegations made by NO_Chanc3, who claimed to have been stressed out by the federation’s actions. The article will be updated if and when the ESFI responds.