posted by Malystryx.GDS,
Tens of thousands have enjoyed D2CL but surprisingly little is known about the organization behind it. We caught up with D2CL Product Manager Artem "Fairon" Bykov, to find out what goes on behind the scenes. He also shared his thoughts on the recent DDOS attacks, the loss of their Chinese division and responded to criticism about prize money.
Artem Bykov, D2CL Product Manager
As far as I know the D2Cl is a kind of daughter company of Na'Vi and also has some link with Virtus Pro, can you explain how the D2CL came to be and what connection it has with these CIS organisations?


D2CL.Artem: Dota 2 Champions League launched in October 2013 as a project solely organized by Na`Vi and Virtus.Pro staff with no additional people involved. After first season, Na`Vi and VP founded a subsidiary, Dreamz Media Ltd., where they gathered a group of E-sports professionals from CIS scene to run the D2CL project. At the moment, Dreamz Media is working independently from both teams, but of course, we are still very close partners with both Na'Vi and Virtus.pro and always support each other if needed.


Can you tell us a bit about the people involved behind the scenes? Who keeps the machine running?


D2CL.Artem: The CEO of Dreamz Media is Alexander “ZeroGravity” Kokhanovsky, also known as CEO and founder of Natus Vincere. He was supervising our COO (Mark “Marchello” Averbukh) and Product Manager (me) a lot in the beginning of the year, sharing his experience and knowledge with us both. Now we are working independently, only sometimes asking Alex for his expertise.

In 2015 we are planning to carry over all management duties to our shoulders. Besides Mark and me, there are five people working on the league: Social Media Manager, League Head Admin, Statsman, Moviemaker and two Administrators.


The prize money for all four seasons has been identical, $50,000, do you think in the current atmosphere that is enough to keep teams interested? Why has the popularity of the D2CL not in turn created a bigger initial prize pool?


D2CL.Artem: First of all, keep in mind that $50,000 is only the basic prize pool, excluding the money added from tournament tickets sales. For example, total prize pool of Season 2 was ~$124,190 (~$74,190 added) and that is a very significant amount of money. I agree that number of online and LAN-tournaments has been rapidly increasing over the last 6 months, causing the overall rise of prize pools.

However, from my perspective, due to this glut of tournaments, professional teams became much more selective when choosing the tournament to play in, and the amount of money in the prize pool is far from being the key factor teams bear in mind. For many newcomers to the scene, organizing a tournament looks like an easy way to earn some cash using a great variety of tools created by Valve.

Unfortunately, quality of such tournaments leaves a lot to be desired. That is why teams will always put a tournament with professional attitude, high quality of organization and good reputation in the first place. To become a tournament like that will always be number one priority for us, rather than aiming for pointless extension of prize pools.


Season IV's current standingsfind out more


So the D2CL has decided to instead invest in making the tournament "the number one" rather than increasing the prize pool. How have the profits from the previous seasons helped expand the D2CL? Where can we see the fruits of your labour if not in an increased prize pool?


D2CL.Artem: We have nothing against the prize pool growth, but in this year, we have particular financial limits, which do not allow us to significantly increase the prize pool of D2CL seasons. Increase of the prize pool looks very attractive from the tournament growth point of view, but at the same time, it is the easiest way, yet not the most effective one. Regarding the D2CL expansion, in 2015 we are planning to launch the new web site, improve the video production quality, implement the flash interface and many other fruits. If we have some extra money left, the prize pool will be increased too.


How well do you think the current season of the D2CL has been received? Which areas have you been satisfied with and which areas still need improving?


D2CL.Artem: I think Season 4 is being very well received by the community and teams so far. However, it is too early to say if I am satisfied or not, since the biggest challenge of this season is yet to happen – our first LAN finals at DreamHack Masters 2014 Bucharest. The biggest upset is obviously the cancellation of the Chinese division, besides that, the quality of video production could be improved.


Previous Winners
Season 1: se AllianceRunner-up: world Speed-GamingSeason 2: ua Na'ViRunner-up: world Cloud9Season 3: ru Team Empire Runner-up: eu Fnatic
The D2CL has been involved in its fair share of drama, such as the Alliance Fnatic game back in February (screenshot), the loss of the Chinese division, as well as the recent DDOS attacks. Which one has been the most frustrating to deal with and why?


D2CL.Artem: The biggest difficulty we faced back in February was building a solid staff team from the scratch. As I already said, Na'Vi and VP hired core team (me and Mark) to gather staff members for future Dreamz Media projects. It is not a secret that finding well-qualified, reliable people for E-Sports project is a hell of a task. Nevertheless, we built a good team and guys are doing great job so far. Of course, in the beginning it was a big challenge to adjust the workflow for the team, not only because some of the members have never worked with tournaments this big before, but also because absolutely all of the members were working freelance. That caused a couple of issues during the Season 2, but I think we managed to deal with them in a very professional way.

Regarding all other "dramas" that happened during the last seasons I can only say one thing: unfortunately, too often people on the Internet judge and blame others without knowing the subject well enough or observing the problem from a very tiny perspective and not seeing both sides of the medal. That could be very frustrating, and to avoid that we always try to open the eyes of the public with statements that we post on our website. It is definitely not enough in some cases, but we do not want to cross the line and expose everything to the public or blame someone directly, in our opinion it is not professional.

For me personally, one of the most frustrating moments was when someone from the players started to blame us publically for not paying out the prize money for one of the seasons. Not everyone knows that all big tournament organizers suffered the issue when the prize pool money from ticket sales were not paid out in time. Because of that, we only paid the basic prize pool to the teams at the same time staying in a close contact with managers informing them about progress of the case. Perhaps better communication between managers and their players would avoid inaccurate information being spread across social media.

I understand their issues with the basic prize money being paid 2 months after the tournament concludes, but firstly, this is a standard practice for tournament organizers because of the way how sponsorship contracts work and secondly, we always point that out in the tournament invitation. In 2015 we are planning to change our payment schedules, so teams can receive their prize money right after the tournament’s end.




You tried to expand into China but it did not work out. Did you learn how to approach the situation in the future or will you go back to just sticking to EU and US in the next season?


D2CL.Artem: As you all may already know, LAN final of Season 4 overlaps with one of the biggest Chinese tournaments of the year, NEST, and there is nothing we can do about that. Such an unfortunate coincidence played a deciding role in Chinese division cancelation, so we do not blame ourselves.

However, we earned very important experience of working with Chinese organizations and we will prove it in Season 5. We will not stick to EU and US division, that's what I know for sure.


D2CL recently made an official statement that essentially said that problems of DDOS will be up to the players themselves to resolve, and will not be a valid excuse for a regame. You are the first organisers to do so publically as far as I know. Why did you decide to do so?


D2CL.Artem: Besides our usual motto “to keep viewers informed about decisions we make”, that was our natural response to the players who started to blame us internally. At the beginning of this DDOS madness we very extremely loyal to the teams and re-scheduled all the matches expecting managers and players to take some essential measures of internet protection.

Couple of days later we informed them that we are not able to change our schedule anymore because of DDOS attacks and received quite negative feedback in reply. At that point, we decided that we should make a statement, which will clearly explain all parties involved including D2CL viewers why teams are also responsible for the match disruption and why they should do their best to avoid those problems instead of blaming us for not allowing them to reschedule the games.


What exactly should players be doing to fix the DDOS issue? Why have they not done these things before?


D2CL.Artem: I am not an expert in internet security but I think if internet connection is an essential part of your profession, you have to know some preventative measures. Do you use skype? Never show it on stream and make sure that your skype login is not “Na`Vi.Dendi”. As an alternative – use TeamSpeak, Ventrilo or Mumble. Check if your provider allows dynamic IP address, if there is more than one internet provider available in your area – make sure to have an additional internet channel. Ask your team management for support.

I know that it is not so simple to deal with those issues, but it is player’s responsibility to avoid them. Why have they not done these things before? I think that is a nature of human behavior – usually people do not care about the problem until they actually face it.


What can people expect from the D2CL Final and the upcoming Season5?


D2CL.Artem: Both LAN finals at DreamHack Masters 2014 Bucharest and Season 5 will bring D2CL tournaments to a whole new level. We promise, you won't be disappointed.


You can catch up with the D2CL so far on our coverage page.

Artem Bykov is 21 years old student originally born and raised in Saint Petersburg but has lived for the last three years in Berlin. He is currently working for Dreamz Media Ltd, the company behind the D2CL. Before joining Dreamz Media he worked as the StarCraft 2 Team Manager for Natus Vincere and FXOpen, as well as being involved in different E-Sports projects such as mystarcraft.de and Meltdown Berlin.

This article was written by uk Lawrence Phillips, joinDOTA's Editor-in-Chief.Malystryx has been in eSports since 2004 working as eSports Editor for Razer and Editor-in-Chief of SK Gaming in the past. He misses the days of Warcraft3 but makes do with the world of DOTA 2.Location: Bristol, UKFollow him on @MalystryxGDS.

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