Professional gaming can be a ruthless business.
The Dota 2 community has been in full drama ever since the end of this year’s The International. The end of an annual tournament has always involved a certain amount of chopping and changing, as teams reflect and re-evaluate.
But this year’s has been even more intense after Kurtis “Aui_2000” Ling was booted from Evil Geniuses days after the event. Days after winning the event; days after becoming a millionaire.
i have been kicked from eg after winning ti. i actually hate people
— Aui 2000 (@Aui_2000) August 15, 2015
Ling has since been replaced with Canadian player Artour “Arteezy” Babaev, although it’s since been alleged by fellow player and popular Dota 2 streamer WehSing “SingSing” Yuen that the decision to remove Ling was set in stone days in the middle of Valve’s immense tournament.
“Actually the kick itself wasn’t weird, the weird part was like two or three days before TI ended, someone told me, ‘Oh, EG’s gonna get rid of Aui_2000 no matter what the result is’,” Yuen said in a recent broadcast.
“Then they win TI and then like, ‘Mmm, probably not going to kick anyone.’ And then [unknown] confirmed that at the after party that he’s out of it. And the funniest part is that [Aui_2000] didn’t even know until two days after he was home or something.”
“So somehow I knew, more people knew two days before TI ended before [Aui knew he was being kicked] … but not my problem. Nothing I can do about it,” Yuen added.
My experience has taught me that people will be as ruthless as necessary if they think it will help them win. And when the amount of money on the line reaches stratospheric proportions, these kind of decisions will only occur more often.
Ling announced earlier this morning that he’s done a reasonably long interview with Duncan Shields and has finalised a new roster. That’s also spawned a reply from Ling’s former EG teammate Peter “ppd” Dager, who simply replied, “Waiting for the official announcement Kappa?”
@Aui_2000 waiting for the official announcement Kappa?
— Peter Dager (@ppdDota) August 18, 2015
It’s a brutal game, eSports.
Comments
16 responses to “Evil Geniuses Decided To Kick One Of Their New Millionaires Before The International Finished”
A lot of the post-TI shuffle gets planned during TI. It’s the only chance a lot of the teams and managers get to sit together.
I think Team Secret formed before all of the relevant players were eliminated last year.
I don’t quite understand why arteezy is swapping aui. Dudes that do different role. I assume sumail is still position 1 and artz will be position 2 now pushing others to be support role.
That’s pretty much what’s happening. Fear is going to play a support and Sumail will be 1/2 spot for now, maybe definitively 1 or 2 after a few tournaments. We’ll see how that works out.
1 RTZ
2 Sumail
3 Universe
4 Fear
5 PPD
Fairly sure this was confirmed by PPD or Charlie (team manager) but can’t look up source on my phone.
Sumail had consistently played the 2 position and most former carries play as 4 instead of 5 when supporting (including Aui).
It feels like bad move from eg focusing too much top position players. It’s like an all star team with no synergy. We will see after their first tournament.
Read ppd’s blog post. He said Aui didn’t mesh with the team at all, while RTZ and fear are total bros and him and ppd are friends as well. No one on the team liked Aui personally. Aui was also certainly the weakest link of EG during TI.
Sure he is the weakest link but that was the team combination that won TI regardless, if RTZ was the team, they might not have wont the TI.
As I said, We will see how it goes in the next tournament.
It’s the second time that RTZ has joined a team and forced their 1 position to move to 4. Kuroky went from 1 to 4 in Secret now Fear is doing the same.
They would be fully prepared for that though; RTZ is a former teammate so it’s not like he’s an unknown quantity. Maybe they’ll be more comfortable this way.
From what I understand anyway, I don’t think a kick was necessary unless they had problems. I’m pretty sure there were some issues within the team involving Aui to decide to kick him. Can range from stuff like not seeing eye-to-eye with the team/captain, drafting, etc. And Arteezy has said that he had issues with Secret. They’ll always make roster shuffles work regardless of positions so it’s not that surprising or out of the norm to have cores shift to supports.
Is a kick necessary after you win the biggest tournament in the world?
Well, there’s a case as to why it could be. That’s the case EG are making, anyway.
Just to throw this in there, PPD has recently released a statement on his twitter about it. To reply to your question however, I think yes it’s necessary in some cases. It’s almost definitely due to being a contender for the highest eSports prize pool, but again, small internal issues can always blow up to something big when you lose after winning so much. Sometimes change is necessary and I guess EG seem to think so, if it means they can be in a happy working environment for both them and Aui.
PPD said Singsing guessed it. He outlines why he kicked Aui here
http://peterpandam.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/post-ti5-blog.html?m=1
So this dude still got his prize money right?
IT sucks for AUI but they basically had a chance to pick up rtz and they felt fear was better than aui as a team member.
Old man Fear on support? What a waste.
They didn’t need to kick Aui. His techies won them the TI5 final because of the drafting advantage it gave them.
Edit: I read PPD’s statement – the dude makes alot of sense. Serves me right for forming an opinion before being fully informed.
I agree it makes a lot of sense but it didnt really answer why arteezy left eg in the first place and why it will be different and drama free this time around.