After an amazing and historic TI5 (including one of the hottest plays I’ve ever seen) it’s all change for some of Dota 2’s biggest western teams. Cloud9, Team Secret and Evil Geniuses have all made significant roster changes in the past couple of days. This is especially surprising for EG, who won the tournament, bagging themselves a cool six million dollars and change, making them the defacto best team in the world.
Their change comes with the dropping of their support player Kurtis “Aui_2000” Ling and hiring of Artour “Arteezy” Babaev, a new hard carry for position 1. Previously Arteezy played with Team Secret, the favourites to win TI5 who were unceremoniously beaten by a series of supposedly weaker Chinese teams. Arteezy made some quite frank comments on his stream last night as to why Secret didn’t work out, which are archived by Reddit as the stream itself has been muted. Aui_2000 wasn’t best pleased about the whole situation, as you can imagine. EG team manager Charlie Yang confirmed the changes.
Meanwhile, with Arteezy leaving Secret, they’ve announced some further changes of their own. Along with an official statement from Arteezy – in which he manages not to insult anyone – Ludwig “zai” Wåhlberg is announced to be “taking a step back” to focus on his school career. With two of their key members gone, Team Secret say they will announce further information later in the month. This will come down to them either finding two new world-class players (Aui?) or disbanding as a team to find new teams for themselves.
Meanwhile Cloud9, who were also expected to do rather well at TI but lost in the second round of the main event, have completely disbanded. The news was first revealed via a livestream from one of the players, posted on Reddit, and later confirmed on twitter by C9 founder Jack Etienne. That’s five more very good players looking for new homes who could merge/mingle with the above changes for exciting new combos.
There’s a full breakdown of every big change on Reddit, along with further links to additional sources and information from players.
That it takes a thread like that to know what’s happening to these million dollar talents is ludicrous, gathering disparate links from a collection of social media sites via various individuals rather than official channels. We’re talking about a legit ten-figure industry here and players are mouthing off at team mates, revealing future plans of huge teams on personal streams and managers are making official statements via TwitLonger? Some viewers love the drama of it but for me it shows just how young e-sports still is.