The Riyadh Masters 2024 tournament is off to a rough start this morning, with the games facing a couple of hours of delays. It was announced on the official Twitch stream that there were problems securing appropriate servers that will maintain the competitive integrity of the tournament.
For a tournament with such huge expectations and so much money behind it, this isn’t a great look.
Dota 2 delays at Esports World Cup
The stream has currently been live for 2 hours but we’ve yet to see any Dota. Despite the best efforts of the hosts Jorien “Sheever” van der Heijden, Mira “Ephey” Riad and Maurice “KheZu” Gutmann to maintain the content with game analysis, they have had to cut to a break. Now that a solution has been found, the games should be underway soon and everything should be able to get back on track.
Dota is no stranger to tech problems. Just recently, Aurora were forced to forfeit to BetBoom team during a DreamLeague elimination game.
Riyadh Masters 2024 Format
The Riyadh Masters is a 3-week long affair with an pretty convoluted structure. The teams that already had to fight their way through regional qualifiers find themselves locked into another play-in stage where they’ll need to fight again before ever coming face to face with the 8 invited teams. It’s a tough gig, especially since those that placed highest in the Riyadh Masters power rankings will arrive fresh faced to the group stage starting on July 7th.
Credit: Esports World Cup
However, with 20 teams taking part and $5 million at stake, it makes sense to include an extra step in the tournament. This is the only tournament to ever rival The International both in terms of scale and the infamous TI prize pool, which is expected to remain comparatively low this year. Dota has the biggest prize pool at the Esports World Cup by a significant margin, highlighting just how important a part of the event it is.
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