It is a tragedy for both pros and fans alike earlier this week when the Dota 2 servers crashed during a live tournament match. The crash occurred during an 80-minute game between Team OG and Falcons at BLAST Slam 1.
Moment of server crash during OG vs Falcons Game 3 (Image credit: BLAST Slam 1)
What happened at BLAST Slam 1?
It was around midnight in Copenhagen, Denmark and Team OG and Falcons were playing the final game of their nail-biting best-of-three Playoffs series. Eighty minutes into the game, with everyone tired and out of sorts, the Dota 2 server crashed.
This caused heroes to not move and eventually, the players were removed from the lobby game. The admins from BLAST Slam 1 attempted to recover the game but to no avail. After almost an hour of waiting, the game was remade.
The Best Dota 2 Match of 2024?
Game 3 was such a roller-coaster of a game even without the server crash. Although OG was the underdog going into this match-up against Falcons, they managed to leverage a surprising draft to catch Falcons off-guard.
In the 80-minute game, multiple Divine Rapiers were at stake, even despite Ammar “ATF” Al-Assaf’s Magnus executing multiple-hero Skewers into fountain. Most importantly, was that OG clearly could have won.
What happened to game 3 between OG and Falcons?
With the game crashed and unrecoverable, the admins could only remake the game 3 with similar drafts. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t the same advantage OG initially had anymore as Team Falcons adjusted their pace against OG by farming more with their Alchemist and Magnus picks. They took the new game into late game, which was the correct counter against OG’s now-known draft.
This should be a call-to-action for Valve to consider implementing the replay takeover system, similar to the Source 1 version of Dota 2. The system was intended for players to replay the instance of an old match, to see what if they took a different move. However, this could be useful for unfortunate situations like this, where the game was unrecoverable. And of course, fans are also calling for Valve to not ship updates/patches in the midst of a live tournament, which they seem to do more frequently in recent years.
In hindsight, it was very unfair to OG, which clearly did all they could to pull off a potential upset on a back-to-back champion. Their debut as a new roster for the 2025 season was off to a rough start, but they still tried their best to beat all odds. Hence, it’s sad to see that OG was robbed of their one glory and underdog story at BLAST Slam 1 because of technical issues from the Dota 2 server crash.
However, it wasn’t too long before Falcons found themselves eliminated as well, potentially showing that in the grand scheme of things, this wasn’t a major issue at all.