Making progress
The South American Dota 2 scene has progressed a lot since regional qualifier tickets are handed out to the division to attend official Valve tournaments, However, they still need to grow a lot.
Sadly, although Valve tried to improve the SA region, its roster stability is still something that needs improving. Match-fixing, cheating attempts and all the dark sides of professional environment still prevail much. In a recent event, Chaos Esports Club decided to get out of the SA scene.
The sad truth
Despite no given announcement from the team about the reason behind their decision, many players from SA confirm that those who come from other countries were not warmly welcomed in SA. In fact, while many foreign players are likely to think that high-tier players from North America and Europe being enthusiastic about going to SA and attending competitions there would improve SA scene, the SA players have an opposite point of view.
Insider's words
Infamous Gaming's captain, Mariano “Papita” Caneda, is now facing the same problem as Chaos did several weeks ago. Four players from Europe play together on the team led by him. Being one of the most victorious Dota 2 team in SA, Infamous's roster had only played in SA until this year. In 2017, in the shuffle after TI7, Papita became a member of the team, and from that point, he's always willing to do anything to make his team succeed. He accepted to swap role, he did his best to play as a midlaner while leading the team just to maintain their full SA roster, and he even wanted to persuade an NA icon to help improve the team but seems like none of his attempts succeeded. At the moment, Infamous has, alongside Papita who comes from Argentina, one Slovakian, one German and two Danish players.
Their newest member was Dominik “Black^” Reitmeier. The team officially made that decision after finishing at top three together with Black^ at the WSOE #6: Serenity’s Destiny tournament in Vegas. How was it possible for Infamous to get to the point that there is only one SA player in their roster? Here is the explanation from Papita.
“These are the difficulties that I and other SA players and teams encounter.” – Mariano “Papita” Caneda
Laziness and emotional instability
Without mentioning some specific names, Papita argues that players from SA don't want to follow a training habit and seem not to realize that practicing daily is required if one wants to keep up with the fast-paced developing meta on the competitive scene. On the emotional aspects, he thinks that “a bad day, a defeat or a situation that might occur in one’s personal life” can easily make the players stop trying, or convince them that there is no hope for their team. That leads to the option of quitting for most players. “They play without any objective,” he also says.
Match-fixing
Needless to say, this old problem still seems to be the worst thing to happen in SA scene. Although many players have been prohibited from playing at Valve's competitions, there are possibly a large number of players who are willing to make money from match-fixing, says Papita.
Language barrier
“Many have been offered to join teams from other countries, but they haven’t been able to accept these offers because they don’t speak English.”
In addition, according to Papita, players from SA seems to be pleased just by being given a chance to attend a Major or a Minor and finishing with the last position at these competitions.
Disregarding teams that have non-SA players
"There are teams from South America who do not want to play with us, to scrim/ practice with us because they do not like our players,” says Papita. Worse than that, the teams that agree to have some practice games with Infamous are likely to share the strategies and the picks deployed by Infamous with other teams afterward.
Lastly, Papita reveals that Infamous will attend a boot camp in one week in Europe prior to Epicenter to spend some time practicing with European teams.
Infamous earned their slot at the latest Major, EPICENTER 2019 and qualified to perform in Moscow, Russia for an attempt to make a historical run that has the possibility to give them a slot at The International 2019 via Dota Pro Circuit system. EPICENTER will commence on June 22-30 featuring 16 teams battling for a piece of the $1,000,000 prize pool and 15,000 DPC points.