Peter “ppd” Dager made a post earlier today about the problems with the invite system of qualifiers in Dota 2.
He lays out the issues of the problems with the qualifiers and time constraints. When looking at it as a whole, there are two problems. The first is the pure time constraint. I don’t think this is possible to fix at all given the number of tournaments happening in the Dota 2 circuit in the coming months.
The second is about rating teams that deserve an auto-qualified spot in the closed qualifier, or a direct invite. As for the latter, I don’t think there can be a completely fair system for that as there are too many mitigating factors.
But let me assume for a moment that there aren’t. I imagine sometimes this happens and a TO can field an invite that isn’t affected by things like: schedule, popularity, home country team, etc.
In that case, I’d make this first rule. No team that has had two roster shuffles can be auto-invited. I chose two as I feel that is enough of a change in a roster to be considered a completely different team. At the same time this creates some advantage for teams that stick together longer (which is, as far as I know, what TOs want anyway).
Second, I’d say create either an arbitrary mark of time or an arbitrary amount of qualifiers to rank teams. Obviously this depends on timing, but these qualifiers come in waves. So after the first wave, you look at the NA region and see that The Dire literally stomped everyone into the ground. I’d move them into an invite level team. At the same time I’d make an arbitrary mark of time/amount of LANs for a team to have their invite privileges removed. For instance, if EG bombed out of LAN three times, I’d force them to play online qualifiers if they wanted to get back in.
There are obviously a lot of problems with this just from a pure logistical standpoint in terms of scheduling/planning, so I’d understand if they don’t do this.
In which case, why not do the most basic thing that everyone can do, get a panel of Dota 2 experts and then have them give you power ranks of teams in each region and then seed accordingly. I feel this is the very least a TO can do.