Opinion: DreamLeague Needs to Hold LANs Again

DreamLeague Season 24 was an absolute blast that saw Falcons end up back on top. The vibes were immaculate, the Pogchamp Pandas were playing some of the best improvised music I’ve ever heard, and everyone just seemed to be having a really good time.

One problem, though: the teams themselves weren’t there. Actually, they haven’t been there for nearly five years now, because the last time DreamLeague was held in a LAN setting, COVID-19 had only begun to become a virus of global concern.

This was all the way back in Season 13, and to put things in perspective, here’s a list of fun facts to give you an idea of just how long ago that was:

• Lasse “MATUMBAMAN” Urpalainen, Song “Sccc” Chun, and Nikolay “Nikobaby” Nikolov were still active players.
• Evil Geniuses still had a Dota 2 roster (the Azel “Abed” Yusop version).
• Chaos Esports Club still existed.
• Team Nigma (before they changed their name to Nigma Galaxy) was still competitively relevant
• Two-time International champion Neta “33” Shapira had yet to win his first TI title, and was playing for Alliance instead of Tundra Esports or Team Liquid.
• The Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) was still around.

Since then, DreamLeague has moved to an online format, which aside from the obvious latency issues this presents teams that aren’t based close to the Western Europe server, means that you don’t get the elevated atmosphere that a full scale LAN event does.

Pandemic Problems

Of course, I understand why it had to happen at the time. COVID-19 went on to ravage the world for much longer than anyone anticipated, shutting down international travel, forcing indoor events to be postponed or outright cancelled, and generally causing many things we as a species have come to take for granted to collapse overnight. Esports as a whole continued to operate at a somewhat reduced capacity, though remained largely unaffected as hosting tournaments online became more commonplace.

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Dota 2 was no exception to this. DreamLeague transitioned into the online-only era after Season 13, though at a much smaller scale after Valve announced that third-party tournament organizers would no longer host their own events for the DPC.

Instead, the DPC Regional Leagues were implemented, and DreamLeague began hosting the Western European league with a greatly reduced prize pool.

It wasn’t until April 2023 when they had the opportunity to bring the main DreamLeague branding back along with the pot of $1 million with Season 19. The global crisis had yet to officially end at that point, but things were starting to look up for the world at the time. The World Health Organization would then declare the end of the pandemic on May 5th.

LAN Still MIA?

DreamLeague took the opportunity to keep at it post-COVID, holding Season 20 as scheduled in June 2023. Curiously though, the tournament would also be held online, as it has been for the past six iterations now. This is certainly a far cry from what the event used to be, even though the production values have only gone up since DreamLeague’s LAN days.

It’s a real shame too, because the more light-hearted and laid back style of DreamLeague itself is something that fans and talent alike appreciate, at least relative to more “rigid” or “sanitized” tournaments. Having the teams there on location would only serve to make things better, especially after the disappearance of the beloved, house party-like Dota Summit series of events by Beyond the Summit.

Personally, I see no real reason why DreamLeague can’t go back to LANs now. There are few, if any, restrictions on international travel anymore, and I see this as a huge missed opportunity. It’s not like they’re strapped for cash to produce an offline event, either, considering that ESL is now under the ownership of Savvy Games Group, which itself is owned by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund.

Surely all that Esports World Cup money can be funnelled back into the “lower tier” ESL competitions, if only to have the teams be there at DreamLeague and not just at ESL One events. DreamLeague would live up to its name even more than it already does if that becomes a reality.