For as far as things haven’t been decided yet, the final tournaments are finally wrapping up. The finals currently still being played are DotA2 with Alliance vs Cloud9, CS:GO with Na’Vi vs Ninjas in Pyjamas and LoL with Ninjas in Pyjamas. Grabbing everyone’s attention though are the two tournaments that just concluded.
Starcraft 2 featured a perfect tournament run. Liquid`TaeJa went 17-0, acing his teammate Liquid`HerO in the grand finals. Rarely have we seen such a display of dominance in an SC2 tournament while still applying a wide range of varying strategies. In the hands of TaeJa, everything seems to work. It certainly did this event.
As posted earlier, the best Dutchman this DreamHack was Sjaak, who lost to TaeJa in the round of 16. The best non-Korean in the tournament was Liquid`MaNa who lost to Jaedong in the round of 8, who was quickly avenged in the round after by his teammate TaeJa. TaeJa having won HomeStory Cup IX last weekend and now his fourth DreamHack title seems insatiable. There is no question who the player to beat is in Starcraft 2.
Hearthstone had a Team Liquid finalist as well, namely Liquid`Amaz, who with his Priest play in the semi-final was arguably the delight of the tournament. He was however bested in the finals by RDU, which is rapidly escalating into a very controversial story. Several times during the tournament players were messaged through Battle.net. Though we would like to stress that everyone should reserve judgement until there’s proof that the messages actually affected the games, what is clear is that this should never be allowed to happen in a competitive tournament. Stream footage clearly shows RDU received strange messages at different times throughout the tournament.
RDU is a respected member of the Hearthstone community. As such we should all hope that he was not involved in anything that compromises the integrity of the tournament. The need for functionality that blocks messages during tournaments has rarely been so shockingly apparent.
Regardless, controversy or no, people will be talking about this DreamHack event for a long time. It’s been my pleasure to keep you guys up to date on the eSports side of DreamHack and thank you for reading.
