EG forfeits out of The Premiere League, FIRE to replace


According to comments from Jacob “Maelk” Toft-Anderson, Evil Geniuses have forfeited their remaining matches in Dota Commentaries' Premiere League. Following their game versus Mineski in the competition, in which the team used three ringers, the team looks to be dropping out of the $10,000 league completely. No official word has come from Team Evil Geniuses, however Maelk had this to say on the Dota 2 subreddit shortly after the match:

Yes, we finally decided to pull out of the league.

We had several discussions with the management of the league last week regarding the fnatic-match and they initially wanted us to pull out of the Infused Cup due to it taking place that same day. We refused and told them if we couldn't move the fnatic-match or play both the tournament and the fnatic-match, we would pull out of TPL.

We rushed our first games of the Infused Cup to try to make room in the schedule to play the fnatic-match but ultimately had to forfeit the second game of the series. This is when we decided to pull out of the tournament.

Maelk continues, citing latency difficulties which cemented the team's decision:

"To further help our decision, TPL has a vast amount of matches against Asian teams, and we have come to the conclusion that we as a team would rather play Asian teams on LAN where both teams can play to the best of their abilities and not be affected by delay and spiking. TPL then decided to replace Nirvana.cn, an opponent EG had already played, with aL and issuing all the Nirvana.cn matches to be played again. Which is obviously only fair to aL, but considering we're already against playing under these problematic hosting-issues, it wasn't really helping TPL's case.



There has been a lot of decisions surrounding TPL that we as a team can't agree with and prior to the league even starting we had our reservations towards joining due to the management behind it.



I can only apologize for wanting to play to begin with thus taking up a slot, but we took a chance with the league which turned out to be a bad move.


-Jacob “Maelk” Toft-Anderson

These accusations against The Premiere League come shortly after a series of tweets earlier this week from joinDOTA's head shoutcaster Tobi Wan. joinDOTA has apparently experienced their own issues with The Premiere League organizers trying to schedule non-conflicting match times:

The team's record was 2 - 4 overall in the league before this decision, and were set to face Mineski.PColor this week, followed by aL, Dignitas, MYM, Na'Vi and WE over the following month. Team Expirience still leads the league with their 5-2 record, with Team DD (Former SK) closely behind them.

This incident also comes as one of a long string of tournament issues that the Evil Geniuses roster have had, including the boycotting of SMM last year, and being disqualified in the Dota2Replays Brawl for conduct issues two weekends ago. These repeating occurrences have many doubting the professionalism of the team, and asking if the organization should be stepping in to prevent damage to their reputation.

UPDATE: The Premiere League have responded to EG's forfeiture and Maelk's statements through their Facebook page, and finished with this decision:

The Premier League wants to establish itself as a serious and a professional league. Our aim is to promote and develop, through the game of Dota 2, the Electronic Sport in general. We know that we are not as professional as we would like to be for now. However, we are trying our best to improve. We did put a lot of efforts and spent a lot of time in order to make this league alive and bring forth a $10,000 prize.



We all agree on the fact that EG is made of stars and talented players. But is that enough? We think that they clearly lack manners and professionalism. Everyone can make a mistake, but when this becomes a habbit, it simply cannot be tolerated.



These kind of manners don't fit well with us and such an attitude is negative for the growth of professional Dota. All of this considered, we decided to kick EG from the Premier League.



We published a public vote about the EG case. To the question whether to kick EG from the league, 77% of you answered affirmatively, while 23% expressed support for EG to stay.



… The Premier League decided to replace EG by the team 'Fire' from the United States of America. Respect, motivation and professionalism are the three words associated to this team. Moreover, they recently showed great performance in recent tournaments with a stunning 19-1 win rate.



EG matches agaisnt xP, Mineski, DD and Fnatic will be replayed by Fire after the Week 6.

This additional replacement comes just days after the disbandment of Nirvana.cn and additional of aL by popular vote to the League. Fire came second in the vote to replace Nv.cn, so they will now take EG's spot. Coverage of the $10,000 league continues on the DotaCommentaries site here.

Source: RedditThe Premiere League


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Posted Feb. 5 16:04
Written by William Burden
Updated 14 weeks 4 days ago

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United States of America
Jan. 4, 2012 - Feb. 29, 2012