DotA Protea Gamers face uphill task

In light of being awarded their DotA Protea Colours, the African Continental Championships 2008 (AfriCon) taking place this weekend and having two Swedish teams here for a week (including SK Gaming), the DotA Protea National Team are feeling rather anxious. And who can blame them? After all, they’ve been studying and learning from SK Gaming for years and this is the first continental championships ever.

Ryan van den Bergh, DotA Protea team manager and national team selector, heralds SK Gaming as the best team in the world. When asked how the Protea team approaches a competition like this, he responded by stating that the team has done a lot of training.

“Strategising, using spreadsheets and listing all the heroes they [SK Gaming] use. Watching their replays is also important,” van den Bergh added.

Poor attendance at National Trials

The DotA national trials were held earlier this year over three legs with each leg running over five weeks, playing one game per week. The trials were operated based on the Swiss system.

“A lot of other organisations use a simple elimination system. All that does is kick out the weaker teams after a match or two. What does that do? The weaker teams become weaker whereas the stronger teams play more and become stronger. The Swiss system keeps the teams in for the whole duration.

"The first leg was the qualifiers. The second leg was the provincial championships. The third leg was national championships. If you win all your matches in the national championships, you get your national colours," van den Bergh says.

“After the three official legs we then selected a number of teams who did very well, and it’s all done by regulations, to participate in the national team trials. We hold it in the area in which the majority of the players reside. So we actually did invite more than two DotA teams. We invited a lot of DotA teams. They were the only two that showed up," he says.

“For the COD 4 nobody showed up. So therefore, based on our regulations, we have no Protea COD 4 team. When we have a competition in Cape Town, the teams say they’re all in Joburg. When we have a competition up here, they say they’re down there. It’s a pity, but regulations are regulations,” he adds.

Two teams compete for national colours

So in the end, the DotA national team trials saw Team Exploit take on Bravado. There was a bit of controversy when the finals started as one of the Team Exploit gamers, Wessel Lourens, had unofficially moved across to Bravado, but then had to return to Team Exploit.

“We allow transfers between legs or between LANs as long as it’s done on record. A lot of clans, as informal as they are, move guys on the fly. Now what happened with Wessel Lourens, he had switched informally outside our structure to Bravado, but according to our paperwork he was still with Team Exploit,” van den Bergh clarifies.

This made it difficult for Bravado as they had been working with Lourens for a while. The gamers admitted that it was quite a blow to see one of their players, whom they had been strategising and developing tactics with, return to the opposition.

Commenting on the timing of the national team trials, which were held one week before rAge, van den Bergh says the timing of the national team trials were decided at the beginning of the year.

He added that Mind Sports SA does not recognise rAge as an official national gaming event and therefore did not take its timing into consideration.

“It [having the events one week apart] wasn’t all bad because it showed us which gamers can handle the pressure. Next year, we will however be taking the timing of other gaming competitions into account,” he says.

Ryan van den Bergh and umpire David Vannucci oversaw the finals, tested the gamers, kept records of replays and screenshots, and were part of the final selection committee.

“Next year we’re have the online league again, which will be the official sports national league. We’ve shortened it to two legs, from a time point of view. Also, we’ve learned to avoid exam times, a lot of the gamers are very young. We’re having under 18’s join Africon. So next year we’ll have two legs and we’ll also be holding provincial LANs, hopefully in each of the provinces, but that’s up to the clubs to tender. Then we’ll have national championships. Then again we’ll have national team trials next year and go to AfriCon again next year,” van den Bergh says.