TI4 Qualifiers: Invite first, ask questions later; the troubles faced by hehe united, HGT and TongFu.

After the events that unfolded earlier this week with Revenge eSports wanting to change their roster, we decided to follow up on reports that other teams may have had roster changes already in place or in the works before they received their International invites, but were invited by Valve under their previous rosters and without consultation. These are their accounts as we found them.

Hyper Glory Team replace KaKa due to illness

The first team who came to light as potentially having a roster issues after their qualifier invites was Hyper Glory Team, who are considered one of the front runners for the Chinese qualifier. Due to sickness their mid player, Hu 'KaKa' Liangzhi HGT announced on their Weibo that he would temporarily go back home to recuperate, and that former ViCi Gaming mid player Tianyu 'Cty' Chen would be standing-in for them.

The severity of KaKa's illness may have however been understated, as we are told he will remain at home for a longer time than the initial announcement indicated in order to fully recover, which means that Cty may in fact be a full time replacement for both the International Qualifiers and potentially TI4 itself. From what we know, the team is working with Valve to prove that KaKa's illness is such that he can no longer be an active member of the team.

hehe united are invited with an old roster

The second team which is looking to be having some troubles is hehe united, a slight surprise pick for the European Qualifiers due to their somewhat unclear roster. According to the teams manager, Felix 'Ezalor' de Zwart, they were approached after the qualifier invites went out to submit their roster. They chose to submit the roster they've been scrimming with for the past two weeks or more, which is as follows:

Mathias 'H W A' Seefluth

Atte 'Nihis' Pataja

Sebastian 'Chipshajen' Widlund

Björn 'QuiX-' Granström

Ionut 'Ar1sE' Turtoi

However, they were in turn told by Valve that the time for roster changes was over, and that they would have to compete with another lineup, including two former players (Igor 'Kaibutso' Sokolov and Oscar 'Reelo' Ljungberg) who have according to the team never played for them at the same time, with the exception of an incorrect lineup stated for a joinDOTA League game which took place on the same day as the qualifier invites were announced. It should also be noted that due to the rules for the joinDOTA League stating that teams are not allowed to play with players from other teams hehe united had decided that Ar1sE and QuiX- would continue to play in the league with their respective previous teams. As this league represented a majority of hehe united's recent games, it could easily be seen to give a wrong impression of the teams roster compared to how they themselves saw things.

It should also be noted that we have been told that similarly to the details coming to light about the Revenge eSports case, Ar1sE previous team's manager was asked to confirm that he had left the team rather than the player himself. This practice isn't necessarily malicious and may even work out fine in most cases, but when in many cases no contracts are in place for lower tier teams (Ar1sE however is under contract with Team Cede Nullis) and player movements are often made against the wishes of the previous team, it seems questionable to allow personal conflicts or misunderstandings to potentially affect the proceedings of such a prestigious event. The players themselves should be the primary source of information as to their own intentions and wishes.

To be clear, although the team is widely known to have been going through roster changes recently, they were not contacted to provide a roster prior to receiving the invite yet were expected to compete with a roster which was not up to date and which they had never played with in that configuration. Due to the delays in communication between the team and Valve they only found out about their intended roster a few days ago, and have only after that been able to start practicing with this lineup for the qualifiers. The team does however accept that they have had an unstable roster and should have been more proactive in clarifying which players were on their roster in case they were invited to the qualifiers. They have decided to make the best of it, and will take part in the qualifiers with the roster demanded by Valve, which excludes QuiX- and Ar1sE.

TongFu.WanZhou have a late announcement of their roster change

Yesterday it was made public that TongFu offlaner Zhiwei 'Mtsty' Fan has decided to retire and support/jungler Gu 'XBG' Jun has left the team. Their replacements will be TongFu coach and offlaner Zhao 'Kabu' Kai who is coming back out of retirement as well as up and coming carry player Lv 'XiaoLv' Ming, formerly of Heart Get Together, as well as third as of yet unnamed player. At the same time as these moves we are also informed that Xing Gao 'Gx' Shun of the legendary 2010 LGD squad has been brought on as the teams new manager, after Tong 'CuZn' Xin left the team for NewBee.

This move was made internally almost two weeks ago according to our sources, prior to the International Qualifier invites were sent out, but as the team did not play an official game for 10 days, the roster had not been on display anywhere. The team was also not asked to confirm their roster prior to receiving the invite. We have been told that Valve has asked the team to participate in the qualifier with their previous roster, however we are also informed that this is impossible, as the two players who left the team have already moved on with their lives, one of them having taken up a full time job while the other was forced by his parents to return home in order to resume his studies. The case of TongFu remains unresolved to the best of our knowledge.

The problems involved with the qualifier invite process

For those who do not know, the process of inviting teams for the qualifiers is in principle the same as for the direct invites, with Valve solely being responsible for the process. Even though Valve each year reaches out to actors within the community to manage the qualifier tournaments for them these individuals still act only as agents of Valve's will and their part in this process is only to further the instructions they have been given by Valve.

It should also be noted that the world of minor teams in Dota 2 is still very volatile, especially when the qualifiers this year needed to fill no less than ten places for each region. A lot of the teams invited to the qualifiers are either not sponsored or have only nominal sponsorship and therefore struggle with roster stability, as playing Dota full time is a big investment for these players.

The problems that we are seeing here are a result of a policy of inviting teams first and asking questions later, even when the state of the team is not directly clear based on recent official games. We have confirmation from multiple sources that Valve has not communicated with teams to ensure that their understanding of the teams current rosters were correct prior to sending out the invites, and in some cases we've been told that there was in fact no communication at all prior to the invites being suddenly made public.

The demand for roster stability for it's own sake has become a contentious point of the International invite and qualifier process, especially as teams seemingly are allowed to change their rosters until the very eve of receiving their invites, but are punished harshly if they make changes after this cutoff point. But that's not the real problem here, at least not according to the teams we've talked about. The problem here is that these teams made changes internally or prepared to make changes before the cutoff point, but these changes are not being taken into consideration as they were not public or Valve was not aware of them.

There's also a question of clarity in terms of the rules. We have a conception that we know exactly what the rules are, but what we know has all been said second hand, parroted and interpreted, twisted and distorted. As has been shown over the past few days and in this article, even teams and players weren't entirely clear on what the rules were. When talking to Revenge eSports captain, Ricardo 'Mstco' Román, he told us that the team didn't think a roster change for a qualifier team would be a problem, and that had they been asked for a roster before receiving the invite they would have submitted one with Iwo 'Iwo' Bejar Kalinowski as part of the team. According to our information this would have been acceptable, because it would have taken place before the official invites were published.

Should hehe united, TongFu.WanZhou or Hyper Glory Team have received their invites anyway had they explained their upcoming roster changes before the cutoff point? Does it change the fact that much of the results that their invites are based on are with a different set of players? Does it matter that Revenge actually had more results with Iwo? Or that LGD.cn had far more history with Xie 'DD' Bin last year? This is not a simple question with a straight forward answer. But if these teams had been asked to present rosters prior to the qualifier invites being released they could have stated their cases and argued for their rosters on their own merits, rather than being bound to rosters which may or may not have been correct to begin with.

The qualifiers are supposed to be for teams to prove that they have what it takes in the face of doubts placed upon them due to issues such as roster instabilities. If these same doubts will be held against them, all we achieve is that teams can not attend to internal issues for fear of complete exclusion from the International process.