What’s up with Lima Major production?

Valve should have learned the lesson by now. When a huge esports event is organized by a company with relatively little experience in putting together epic tournaments, critical details are neglected and those details end up ruining the spectacle, at least for the viewers.

The Lima Major takes place in South America (Peru), and was supposed to be a celebration of the enormous growth that the region has experienced since its early days in Dota 2.

Organizations like beastcoast are some of the strongest in the world, and the overall competitive level of South American players is so good that Evil Geniuses decided to abandon North America to play in this region. So Valve probably thought: hey, why don’t we give these people a DPC Major?

Good idea, poor implementation

Valve’s idea wasn’t necessarily bad, although for many, Western Europe would have been a much better place to hold the first Dota Pro Circuit Major of the year. The only problem is that ESL and PGL probably weren’t interested in organizing the tournament so far away from their bases.

This meant that other organizers had to be found. Epulze and 4D Esports got picked. This wasn’t their first esports event, but it was definitely their biggest. Both companies started to organize important Dota 2 tournaments relatively recently.

Prior to the Lima Major, they both organized Tour 1 of DPC 2023 in Southeast Asia and South America respectively. But those were online events of relatively low complexity. A Major is a completely different beast and everyone who was aware of the situation feared for the worst.

Now, as we approach the end of the tournament, we know for a fact that 4D Esports and Epulze messed up badly in just about everything related to production. Unending crashes caused the audience to complain from day one.

Other esports tournaments experienced technical problems too, but they were generally resolved by the end of day one. In this particular case, the issues continued throughout the entire tournament! Something like this hasn’t happened in a long time.

Perhaps it was a thing in the early days of esports, but nowadays it’s absolutely shameful to see failures of this magnitude. Dota 2 was already in a bad place even without such problems. The player base plummeted over the past three months and the prize pools of Dota 2 tournaments have been really poor for the past two years.

With just three Majors per season, having a complete failure like this is unacceptable.

Header: 4D Esports, Epulze