One of the most prominent players in the North American region has revealed the state of the Dota 2 scene in NA, claiming that the region’s pubs and ranked matches are deteriorating.
Tal “Fly” Aizik is a known and big figure in the North American Dota 2 scene, and in a recent post-match interview, he claimed that the quality of players in the region’s pub games has declined. In the post-match interview at the elite league,
It may be easy to qualify Fly’s claims as an individual view, but it has gone beyond that as several high immortal-ranked players have also lamented the North American servers as a “graveyard”.
He also stated that it has become a trend for NA players to migrate out of the region to Western European servers over their North American counterparts.
Fly attributed this new phenomenon to the superior match quality in Europe, leaving the region’s server filled with only South American players whom he said stay on the NA server due to high ping, which can go as high as 200ms when connecting to European servers. This will in the long run water down the competitive makeup of the region.
However, beyond the server preference issues which are affecting the North American Dota 2 space, there’s also the case of behavioral and relationship issues with rampant griefing, toxicity, and a general decline in good behavior affecting NA Dota 2.
According to high immortal-rank players, there are frequent experiences of deliberate in-game sabotage, such as feeding down mid-lane and destroying items, trash-talking, and griefing behavior.
These affect players’ experience and competitive play overall. Meanwhile, some of the other Dota 2 players who moved out of NA are Gaimin Gladiators’ Quinn “Quinn” Callahan and Fly’s former teammate at Evil Geniuses and Shopify Rebellion Andreas “cr1t-” Nielsen.
