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The International 2016s qualifiers are over. The 18 teams who will travel to Seattle are set. At this time of the year, the building anticipation has the power to stall all other discussions in the Dota 2 world. Unfortunately, that includes the discussion of how we got here: How Valve determined who was invited to its tournament and who would have to compete in qualifiers.All this has happened before and all this will happen again. Every time Valve announces invites to one of its majors, complaints arise about how its team determined who to invite. And, every time, the dust settles after a few weeks and we move on to other topics. Until the next major. Its time for a proper investigation into Valves operating procedures with respect to its Dota 2 events to determine whether there is room for improvement.Scrutinizing Valves process immediately presents itself as tricky because the process is opaque to us. How do we judge if Valve is making the best decisions possible if we dont have access to its decision-making process? It seems that Valve feels it is unnecessary for other stakeholders to be able to inspect its processes, provided it offers satisfactory outcomes. As a private company, this sort of thinking is not unusual. But as a regulatory body dictating the workings of a competitive industry, questions need to be asked and answered.The role of direct invitesThe place to start would be to ask what exactly direct invites are. Does Valve hand out direct invites to particular teams because of some measure of objective merit, or is the decision completely at Valves discretion? The latter option allows for arbitrary judgement, which is obviously unwanted in a competitive field. Thankfully, all evidence suggests that the truth is the former, that Valve does have reasons for who it invites to its events.Indeed, in the past year, some patterns in Valves invites have even become so consistent that weve come to treat them as norms, despite never being confirmed by the company itself. For example, the top four teams of the previous major have always been invited to the next one. Furthermore, there has always been at least one team invited primarily due to its achievements in non-Valve events.So, it is clear that Valve does have an internal qualification process for direct invites. If you are directly invited to a major, it isnt like getting a lucky invite to a cool party. Its recognition that youve done something that qualified you to be at the event. What have you done? We dont know. But Valve does. The question then becomes why the developer feels uncomfortable sharing its reasoning with us.This question was actually answered within the Manila Major invites announcement from Valve:Deciding on how to handle the direct invites to our four tournaments is a difficult process, and we dont take a specific formulaic approach to which teams are invited or how many we invite.In other words, even though the process of deciding who to invite is a thoroughly reasoned one, the reasoning used from event to event might actually change. This is because the problem being solved is a complex one and, thus, might requires a fresh and dynamic approach to solving it each time.A players perspective from LodaThis really gets to the bottom of the discussion at hand. Valve could create a set of criteria known to the public for how to qualify for its events. But then itd have to stick to them. And right now the Dota 2 team appears to be concerned that the esports scene presents too many exceptional considerations to justify risking a commitment to one way of doing things.While this is a clever strategy for sustaining decision-making power, thus potentially improving individual decisions, there are questions about how this affects the overall ecosystem. Jonathan Loda Berg, captain of Alliance, shared his thoughts on the matter.I kind of understand why they have a hidden system, but at this point I feel its a bit flawed. The majors were, and are, a great thing for Dota, but at the moment we dont even know in what way they matter until the next round of invites are sent out. I think it has to be more open for sure.I think it adds an immense kind of pressure on players and teams to not know. You can win a tournament right before a major and still not actually know if you will get invited or not. I believe LAN wins should matter a lot, but Im obviously biased. Perhaps placing top-four continuously is more impressive than actually getting first once. I think like I said before that something has to change. I can feel a different kind of stress from teams and players nowadays, and I believe its because they do not even know what they are aiming for. To be tier-one, -two? To win a major or actually practice to play a qualifier? I mean in some cases its better to take one month off to practice for an important qualifier such as the majors rather than partake in other tournaments, just due to the value of reaching majors and placing top 8 there. The teams and the fans need to know what we are playing for to give it any worth.Lodas comments make two very important points. First, Valves lack of transparency puts enormous strain on players. This strain seems comparable to a person constantly having to worry if theyll get the job or get the promotion. The traditional sporting world lacks examples of this. You know well in advance how you might qualify for the World Cup or the Champions League. Even if esports are different from traditional sports, other competitive games also only utilize transparent qualification processes. Magic: The Gathering, a competitive game, which functions much like an esport but also predates the field, follows the same route as sports: premier events offer various routes for qualification but all are known openly and in advance. Indeed, even Counter-Strike, an esport also administered by Valve, uses an entirely transparent qualification process.That other competitions do things that way perhaps suggests that Dota 2 could too, but it is not an argument for why it should. Lodas second key point, however, does present such an argument. Knowledge of qualification criteria can play a role in the decisions teams make during the year, so Valves choice to protect its own authority actually deprives teams of the ability to make informed decisions.Transparency is necessary for a legitimate competitive environmentTeams should be able to navigate the major system by making decisions about how to prioritize their time, which events to go to, and which is the best route to try to qualify. With an unknown rule set, this isnt possible; the only winning strategy is attend everything, win everything. But this is not a reasonable principle. There are real trade-offs, in terms of time and other resources, when it comes to deciding when and how to train and which events to attend during the year.Valve has done a reasonably good job producing desirable outcomes with its invites. But the process also matters, and not just as a means to an end. In order to be a fair and competitive system, those participating in it need to know how it works.Imagine if a patch were launched without any patch notes. Imagine if a tournament were hosted without any information about its format. Both examples are clearly not conducive to a fair and competitive environment. Thankfully, these things dont happen. Valve supplies full information to teams about how its game works, how their tournaments work, and updates when changes are made. Yet somehow the process that underpins the esports ecosystem -- tournament qualification for Valve events -- has thus far escaped the same standard. This is the case despite the fact that Dota 2 is still a game, and the rules for games need to be clear if participants are expected to reasonably compete in it.It might be that the competitive scene in Dota 2 is sufficiently complex such that it is not comparable to other games and sports that use transparent qualification systems. However, Valves comments imply a false dichotomy. It is not the case that the system needs to be either entirely formulaic or entirely hidden. It is possible to provide some key information about the process through guidelines that express roughly which achievements are relevant, leaving room for Valves discretion.Air Max From China . -- Ohio States Urban Meyer has never had any issue acclimating to the biggest stages in college football. Wholesale Air Max . Louis Cardinals. Victorino is batting sixth and playing right field after missing two games because of back tightness. https://www.airmaxchina.us/ . Malkin got tangled up with Detroits Luke Glendening early in the third period and his left skate took the brunt of collision with the boards behind Pittsburghs net. Cheap Air Max For Sale . Nine days before the opening ceremony, organizing committee chief Dmitry Chernyshenko said Wednesday that Sochi is "fully ready" and will deliver safe, friendly and well-run games that defy the grim reports that have overshadowed preparations. Cheap Air Max . Halladay signed a one-day contract with the Toronto Blue Jays on Monday that allowed the veteran right-hander to retire as a member of team with which he broke into the majors and spent the bulk of his distinguished 16-year career.CHICAGO -- What happens when a lovable loser winds up a winner?If the Chicago Cubs win the World Series for the first time since 1908, what happens to fans who have waited for next year their entire lives, the ones sporting T-shirts that read, Just win before I die? What happens when someday arrives?It will be better than the tradition of losing thats been passed down, said Jim Beaupre, a 66-year-old retired teacher who grew up near Wrigley Field, his eyes welling with tears as he showed the venerable ballpark to his 4-year-old grand-nephew. It will be the curse is broken, the bad old days are gone.Others say victory will be a reward for sticking with a team that was so bad for so long.Theres a sense that we paid our dues, weve watched utterly meaningless games in the dead of August ... we tilted our hats in the right way, worn our lucky shirts, stared at the TV at just the right angle, sat in our lucky chair and done all of that for decades and its finally paying off, said Steve Rhodes, whose Chicago-oriented website, the Beachwood Reporter , once posted a song, Dont Start Believin, to remind fans about the danger of hope.At the same time, there is at least a little worry that winning a World Series means losing something developed for more than a century, bolstered by heartbreak, failure and, yes, resilience.We could totally change our identity in the next week or so, said Kiljoong Kim, 45, of Chicago. We all really want it, but there is no doubt that we are all going to miss what we used to be.Dr. Stephen Schueller, a clinical psychologist at Northwestern University who specializes in happiness and well-being, agrees.I do think there is some concern (that) if they win it, it is going to break this story we tell ourselves as Cubs fans, he said.What that will look like is anyones guess, though it could turn Cubs fans -- the cuddly puppies of fandom -- into something else.Fans could become unbearable, Rhodes lamented.Al Yellon said one need only look eastward to see what could become of Cubs fans, how the friendly confines could become a decidedly different park.I look at the Red Sox fans, and when they suddenly won (in 2004 after 86 years), from the ouutside it looked like they became kind of insufferable, said Yellon, whose Cubs fan site is called bleedcubbieblue.ddddddddddddcom .Rhodes and Yellon may be onto something. Scientifically speaking, there may be something different about the brain of a fan who has been subjected to repeated doses of optimism every spring training and the despair of the regular season and the certainty that next year will be THE year, according to one expert who has written extensively about brains in general and the brains of Cubs fans in particular.Such fans turn out to be better decision-makers and deal better with divergent thought, as opposed to unreflective fans of winning teams, wrote Dr. Jordan Grafman, a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern and a lifelong Cubs fan.Grafman said Cubs fans shouldnt worry about losing those skills just yet, even if they outlast the Indians in a World Series that Cleveland led 2-1 heading into Saturday nights Game 4.One exposure (to winning) is not going to do the trick, he told The Associated Press.On a recent bike ride over to Wrigley with his 2-year-old son, Matt Monsueto, 39, said he is happy at the prospect of his boy not having to endure the annual heartbreak that has for so long been part of the lives of Cubs fans.And yet he wonders if success might change things for future generations of Cubs fans, make them less patient and more demanding.My two daughters are Blackhawks fans, Monsueto said of the hockey team that went nearly a half century without winning the Stanley Cup before winning three over the past seven years. They expect parades.If the brain of the Cubs is in no danger of changing anytime soon, much of what made the Cubs fandom so lovable to the rest of the country already has. The guys who dragged lawn chairs to the rooftops to watch the games have been replaced by corporate gatherings. The bleacher seats that were a few bucks are now far, far more.All that magical stuff is gone, Rhodes said. Theres a new generation of fans who have invaded my piece of heaven. ' ' '