An Open Letter to Mr. Gabe Newell, Valve, and IceFrog

This letter comes from Dota fans in China. Every single word was written with our deepest love for Dota 2 and our profound recognition of Valve’s diligence in creating e-sport classic brands.

As you probably heard already, the Dota 2 community in China has been thrown into a mess over the past few months. Wings Gaming, the champion of TI6, was disbanded due to the groundless and arbitrary law and rule enforcement by the Dota Association of China Esports (hereinafter referred to as "ACE"). Soon after, EHOME was also dismissed. We feel that this system of "hidden rules" and "soft violence" have damaged the professional environment of the Dota 2 scene in China and applied excessive duress on the professional players.

As an organization that is supposed to stabilize the Chinese scene, the ACE has done great damage to our region:

1. The legal rights and dignity of professional players have been overtly violated. It is inconceivable that professional players would suffer retaliation just because they sought legal relief in response to missed payments. Because ACE controls many third-party tournaments and training activities, players have no choice but to yield. This is harmful for the players' ability to train and will deter future talents from joining Dota.

2. ACE has a history of making decisions based on selfish business interests and with extreme contempt of Chinese laws. The victims were Wings Gaming and EHOME this time, but next time, it could be anyone. For Chinese investors, the unpredictable and malicious ruling of the ACE poses high risks and is a deterrent for further investments in the Chinese scene.

3. Although Dota 2 is not the most played esport game, our fans have proving themselves to be highly invested, both emotionally and financially. At the end of the day, what draws us to the game is the incredible dedication and performance of professional players. It pains us as fans to see our beloved players bullied and blackmailed.

4. Our players need a favorable environment for everyday practice and third-party tournaments to hone their minds. Even among the ACE clubs, various forms of bullying never stopped, such as jointly refusing to scrim with particular club(s). Although ACE only has authority over the Chinese region, their effects on our players will trigger upwards to international and Valve events.

We hope that this provides ample evidence that the existence of ACE has been largely detrimental to the development of Chinese Dota. We don't deny the positive impact they had during the early days of the scene, but recent events have shown a deformity of its internal power distribution and lack of balances and checks. It is frustrating to us that ACE continues to disguise itself as the spokesperson and the chief justice of Dota 2 in China.

The length of a professional Dota 2 career is rather short, and the golden age for professional players is exactly when normal teenagers go to high schools and colleges. Therefore, many Dota 2 players do not have chances to receive high-quality education and might not know how to use law to protect themselves. In labor disputes, given that the union system in Dota 2 industry is not well established, players tend to be very vulnerable when confronting industrial hegemony, which has further increased the cost of seeking legal remedy. We understand Valve’s prudence before taking any further steps, and it’s not Valve’s obligation to solve a problem purely generated from the legal loopholes in China. We would like to just propose some suggestions:

1. Support the victim players and clubs through public media, and condemn the unconscionable "judgment" and manipulation by ACE

2. Work along with Perfect World and sports functional departments under Chinese government agencies. Guide the rule-making to make sure the new industrial regulation is consistent to China’s legal system as well as Valve’s strategy for the global promotion of Dota 2;

3. Build better communication channels between Valve and professional players. Guide and educate the players on their gaming careers within the framework acknowledged by Valve (e.g. Valve could guide players to make sure the duration and time-spots of their labor contract are consistent to Valve’s transfer deadline for TI, to minimize the interference on TI by potential labor disputes);

4. Continuously optimize the game client, or design a worldwide unified integration system for third-party tournaments. If the third-party tournaments are uniformly managed with better transparency, we would be able to prevent the non-official games from being monopolized by organizations like ACE. We might even deter future hegemonic organizations from being formed.

Justice is never too late, but justice must be seen to be done. With Valve’s technical capability and strategic acumen, and the effort from visionary people from multiple sectors in China, we will ultimately find out an optimal solution to overcome the problems stated above. Concerning the quality of design, Dota 2 has always been the highest benchmark among all Action Real-time Strategy games. From the perspective of industrial normalization and professional environment, we believe Dota 2 will also become an example.

The beautiful Seattle summer is around the corner. We are eagerly awaiting a fantastic TI7 and we wish you a great success!

Look forward to your response.

All signed Dota 2 fans

To dear friends on reddit,

This is an open letter from Dota fans in China to Valve and IceFrog concerning the incident related to Wings Gaming and the subsequent events. We hope you could spare a few minutes to read through the details of events and our suggestions. China is an indispensable part of competitive dota, so although this is an issue unique to China, we believe that the health of the Chinese scene is important to the global environment. If you would like to support our propositions and want it to be heard by Valve and IceFrog, please sign this petition at https://www.wenjuan.com/s/AbeMNn/. Apart from this post, we are also having a parallel session at Sina Weibo.There has been some discussion about the issues between Wings Gaming and ACE on Reddit, but there has been quite a bit of misinformation, so here is a quick recap:The dissolution of Wings Gaming: This thread here gives a good overview of events leading up to and resulting from the players leaving Wings Gaming.

tl;dr: the players left Wings Gaming after the organization were late on salary payments for 2 months and ceased communication. In order to protect the organizations' interests, ACE enforced a ban on the players according to a "collateral contract" signed by the players, which is actually invalid according to Chinese labor laws. This is all the meanwhile issuing almost no punishments towards the Wings organization, ignoring parts of their own rules. Subsequently, Team Random was refused membership in ACE.The dismissal of EHOME. In a leaked QQ online meeting transcript, the heads of ACE claim "they are not banned, but we just don’t like them." According to common sense, if the players were not "banned" but rather "disliked", then EHOME's choice to "like" the players should not affect their position in the ACE. However, after EHOME's roster announcement, ACE issues a statement that "EHOME unlawfully contacted players who still have contracts with ACE teams" and EHOME is kicked from ACE. However, as mentioned previous, Team Random had already been refused membership in ACE. By doing so, ACE admits the existence of Team Random and the fact that the five players then plays for Team Random, a non-ACE team. On one hand, Team Random is told they are "not apart of the ACE," and on the other, EHOME is told "the players still have contracts with ACE teams." This leaves open the question: were they ACE players or non-ACE players? or Schrödinger's players? All the meanwhile, ACE releases misleading and untrue statements to appease Western fans.The elimination of EHOME.K from WCA. WCA had started before the dismissal of EHOME and EHOME.K had played matches as a part of the tournament. This tournament was organized by Yinchuan Municipal Government, but ACE has control over all Chinese team invitations. Following the dismissal of EHOME, their sister team EHOME.K was kicked out, solely because EHOME.K is a satellite club of EHOME. This is a very standard example of how ACE hijacks teams and players, and forces them to bend to their wills by ruining their chances to participate in third-party tournaments.

Appendix:

Here we want to provide the relevant legal rationale. This part will most likely not be interesting to most, but we will try to make it narrative, and torespond to potential questions.

1. About the back pay to Wings players. According Clause 32 of Chinese Labor Law and Clause 38 of Chinese Labor Contract Law, the players areentitled the right to "terminate the labor contract anytime" when a back pay occurs. What the players decide later and whether Wings pays the salariesoverdue later on are irrelevant, the legal basis for leaving the team was back pay. ACE stated that there was another collateral contract prohibitingplayers from doing so, which is invalid because contracts must not violate statutes. ACE thought it had done enough to stabilize the situation, but theplayers insisted on leaving Wings and established Team Random, so ACE found the players "guilty" based on the breach of that invalid collateralcontract. This is a warning to other players in the ACE teams: You kids have to knuckle under to my hegemony. Even if your employer could not payyour salary on time, you should not seek for legal remedy because we will relentlessly retaliate

2. About the discriminative policies against Wings players. Like everywhere in the world, employment discrimination remains a big problem. Someemployers prefer men over women, women who have kids over those who haven’t. Concerning ACE, they prefer players who unconditionally endureback pay over those who know how to use law. The tacit understanding that "none of us would accept their job applications" was devised because theACE members were afraid of other teams getting them, but that’s unfair to the players since they did nothing wrong legally. Employment discriminationis against the spirit of Chinese Employment Promotion Act, but unfortunately, its legislative technique was so vague that the act couldn’t be properlyexercised.

3. Q: Why don’t you seek Chinese government agencies or judicial branch for solution?

A: First, due to excessive duress, the players decided to compromise because they still wanted to participate in TI7 and there wasn’t much time left.On the one hand, we were glad to see that they settled the dispute with ACE. In other word, they had to surrender to ACE for their career, otherwisethey wouldn’t have a favorable environment to prepare for TI7. However, their compromise eliminated the basis for litigation. That’s why we gave upthe legal approach and asked for help from the public media side.

Second, we are filing a petition not only for the collapse of a hegemonic organization, but also a brighter future for Dota 2 in our region. Even if ACEcollapse, it’s quite likely that a new industry association will take place of ACE, and it’s not guaranteed to be better than ACE. Among all the entitiesthat might take part in the future ruling-making for Dota 2 industry in China, Valve is the only one that has pure interest for the prosperity of Dota 2.The government is not, it can only ensure that the new rules are not conflict to Chinese laws. That’s why we suggested Valve to "Guide the rule-making to make sure the new industrial regulation is consistent to Valve’s strategy for the global promotion of Dota 2". Admittedly, Valve has littlepower in China, but there is chance that Valve could push Perfect World to do something with the government agencies, since Perfect World is Valve’sofficial partner in China, and is obedient to Valve concerning all affairs about Dota 2.

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