It’s a glorious day for Southeast Asia and The Philippines; TNC Predator won the Dota 2 tournament in WESG 2018-2019.

The Filipino team had to fight White Off, veterans Virtus.Pro, and China’s Keen Gaming to win the top spot and that US$500,000 prize money. TNC Predator’s aggressive strategy and combos like their Chen-Venomancer offlane dominance was more than enough to make their opponents feel outdrafted and demoralized.

This marks TNC Predator’s second WESG trophy in a row. Congratulations to the Philippines’ top tier team.

The Philippines is your #WESG2018 Dota 2 World Champions!

It is known that our group had encountered challenges outside the game way back last year, and we are thankful for those who stuck with us through thick and thin. pic.twitter.com/gLkYofATEJ

— TNC Predator ?? (@TNCPredator) March 10, 2019

Not All Sunshine Down In China

The tournament wasn’t without its fair share of hiccups.

Firstly, one of TNC Predator’s players, Kuku, was banned by Chongqing ministries from attending the finals due to him using racist comments like “Ching Chong” when playing in public server games. The player had his share of controversies in the past; he was banned by Valve from attending the Dota 2 Chongqing Major for racist comments.

Plus, Dota 2’s Chinese distributor Perfect World has explicitly stated that racist comments during their hosted events or anything leading up to that will net players and even teams a ban.

Secondly, The Dota 2 division of WESG is branded as a “mad scientist” tournament according to veteran Dota 2 analyst and shoutcaster Redeye. He said on the Luckbox Podcast that the tournament’s rules of having 5 players from the same nationality to form a team is a strict requirement.

An excerpt from the podcast, if you will:

“OK, you want to be different, I get it right. So do your nations thing. No what you’ve done instead is you’ve gone for some sort of mad-scientist hybrid version, which is you can play as a team but only if you’ve got five players from the same nation.

So basically screw you to every team in Dota outside of China, because they don’t play with five nationalities from one country.”

He also went on about the teams who can form a full team and consist of 5 national players. Of which there are few:

“Very few. The Final Tribal are in here with five Swedes. OK, great, well done.

“EHOME… well Chinese team. Aster… Chinese team. Keen Gaming… Chinese team. Team Team… Okay well sort of but they haven’t because they’re five US players now so they’ve got none of the Canadians and that’s OK, fine.

“And then outside of that you’ve then got all the teams that’ve got to hybrid themselves into a brand new team which means you’ve then got to have players that you don’t want to have playing with other players forming teams.

“No, no, no, no, no. You don’t want to be forming other teams – the teams that own their contracts hate that sh**.”

That might be all well and good for Chinese Dota 2 teams, but for other teams like Virtus.Pro who have players from different countries, this means they have to reshuffle the roster to fit the criteria. In other words, the Virtus.Pro playing in WESG is not the same team that dominated last year’s Dota 2 tournaments.

“If it’s a national team, OK, no problem. But these aren’t these are having to literally form hybrid teams. Virtus.pro can’t play as Virtus.pro. Why? Because they’ve got one Ukrainian so you don’t get Virtus.pro the brand, which you want at the event.”

The worst part is that this may encourage players to leave teams they’ve loved dearly are are forced out to fit this minor flaw in the system.

“They’ve had to split and go off and make new teams. That’s insane. You’re encouraging players to leave their teams.

Why? And why aren’t you tapping into the fact that you could have had Na’Vi there, you could have had Virtus.pro there, you could have had a Team Secret there, you could have had Team Liquid there.”

WESG 2018/2019 was held in Chongqing, China.