Competitive Dota 2 is starting to have a problem with player burnout. It’s something that’s likely been building for years, with the various tournament and league formats that have been put in place.
But now, with two high-profile talents taking breaks in the past few weeks, with reasons that directly point to tournament burnout, and potentially more on the horizon, it feels more pressing than ever that Dota 2 do something about its insane tournament schedule.
Seleri’s departure from Gaimin Gladiators was directly attributed the intense tournament schedule. Image Credit: ESL
Competitive Dota 2 Is On The Edge Burnout Crisis, and It’s TO’s Fault
In late February, Gamin Gladiators Melchior “Seleri” Hillenkamp announced he’d be taking a month-long break from competitive play “to let him take an extended break from Dota 2 due to the intense scheduling of events.” A month later, this temporary hiatus extended to a full break, and departure from Gaimin.
Then in March, Seleri’s former teammate and Tundra carry player Anton “dyrachyo” Shkredov announced he’d be taking a similar break . Dyrachyo, a player on a team that had been winning, and winning consistently, was moved to inactive.
Why this is just two examples, it’s part of a larger trend. Late last year, Illya “Raddan” Mulyarchuk (Yatoro) and Miroslav “Mira” Kolpakov took a break from Team Spirit for around a month , and in November, Oliver “Skiter” Lepko of Team Falcons implied in an interview that several team members may take breaks during the 2025 season.
But who could blame any Dota 2 player for wanting a break? There’s been a huge in-game event, followed by a massive transformation of the game with the Wandering Waves update. And that was just the in-game action.
In the past three months, there have been five major tournaments that could be classified as Tier 1, as well as almost non-stop qualifiers. On any given day, since January, you could reliably turn on Twitch and watch competitive Dota 2. Ideal for the fan, put perhaps not ideal for the players.
Image Credit: Valve
The Old DPC and the Death March to TI
While it’s never productive to say ‘I told you so,’ the topic of burnout in Dota 2 due to the ridiculous schedule they currently have is something I’ve attempted to highlight for years, even back in the DPC days.
During that ‘era’ of Dota, I found myself, just a professional watcher of Dota, wondering how the hell anyone was supposed to follow this many events, tournaments, leagues, etc. In the time of the DPC Leagues as well, when I was a beat writer having to cover multiple regions with weeks upon weeks of matches, it felt non-stop. I put this to almost every pro player I interviewed during that time – isn’t the schedule too much? Don’t you need some time off?
For many the answer at that time was no. In March last year for Ari, formerly of OG , now of NAVI, the answer was no:
“I don’t get tired, I love playing, I love competing, I just want to do it all the time. So it’s like the dream to just play a tournament, three days rest, back to business. This is the dream for me, so I like it.”
The “I don’t care, I just love playing” mentality was something a lot players had. There’s a sense in Dota 2, and perhaps all of esports, that it’s okay to push yourself because this doesn’t last forever. There’s maybe only a few years where you can compete at the top level, earn a lot of money, and why let a daunting schedule ruin things.
But occasionally you’d find hints that everything wasn’t all good. Here’s Quinn Callahagn from the Berlin Major in 2023 :
“I think this is a bit cramped. If there was slightly bigger break times between majors and DPC, especially between majors and DPC [that would be better]. That’s the biggest one. Tournaments like this is the part where you’d want the break the most and not having anything more than a week is like, I don’t know, it’s not really enough, you know?”
“I have my family in the States where I can’t go back and see them because I’m flying there one day and I’m there, what, one day? And I fly back and need to like practice right before DPC. And so you’re sort of prescribed to not really take a break especially if you live internationally. I think it’s a bit suboptimal. If things were spaced out a little more I think it’d be beneficial for the scene and players. That’d help.”
And this was when there was objectively less Dota 2 being played than now. When the DPC shuttered, I expected fewer tournaments and instead we have far more. Too much, as it turns out. And now players are taking breaks and skipping tournaments, rightfully so.
What’s perhaps worse is the fact that the penultimate form of the DPC and the current event schedule is deliberately designed to prevent players from taking breaks. In the earlier days of the DPC, there was a lot of criticism surrounding teams that would skip Majors or take breaks. In 2018, Team Liquid, after a disappointing end to TI8, skipped the first Major three months later, played with a depleted roster for the second, and only really “started trying,” as some alleged, in time for TI19.
OG, the TI champs of 2018 and 2019, skipped the first three events of the 2019-2020 season in what would turn out to be a Covid-disrupted season. Team Nigma, the former Team Liquid, also skipped the first Major, as did powerhouse Team Secret.
Valve, clearly not happy that teams could simply opt out of the events, effectively made participation mandatory for the whole year for 2021. Three (planend) seasons of two divisions, with relegation, promotion, and perhaps most importantly, games all season. With just a narrow window of a month in between each season it meant Dota would be happening constantly – and to take any break was to miss out on the Majors and TI, the only really worthwhile prize pools.
Dyrachyo became the second major player to take an extended break this month. Image Credit: Valve
New Tournament Grind, Same Problems
After three years of this, enough was enough, and the DPC and its death march to TI was finally scrapped – only to be replaced by something far worse. In 2024 there were 13 Tier 1 tournaments (more by some measures), the most since 2017. The difference between these was that in 2017 it was rare for a team to attend every single one of the Tier 1 events. In 2024, it was essentially mandated.
Beyond this, DPC-like leagues and rankings have slipped into everything else. ESL operates its own DPC-lite with the EPT point system and DreamLeague/ESL One/Riyadh Masters cycle. PGL operates three tournaments a year, and BLAST operates four. Fissure and BetBoom effectively have their own two-tier event schedule. While nothing for these latter tournaments is officially run as a league, there’s almost an unwritten rule (or perhaps behind doors contract) that to attend one, you need to attend all of them.
At the end of last year I made a prediction that teams would start making decisions about tournament attendance not based on prize pool, but on convenience. On which tournaments were comfortable, paid the quickest, put up players in the nicest hotels. When every prize pool is $1 million, then no one cares about the money – it’s the time you’re investing, whether you can play the qualifiers for one tournament in the practice rooms of another, etc.
It’s telling that at the time of writing, we don’t know the attending players for many of ESL One Raleigh’s invited teams .
And related to that, there’s also a third, potentially unspoken reason – players really want to get out of ESL One Raleigh. Sorry Americans, but it really sucks to travel to the US. It has for years. your TSA and immigration is one of the most laborious and miserable of anywhere in the world, and I say this as someone who has spent three hours in lines at a Chinese airport. And for players not from Western Europe or the US, visas are a nightmare.
Then in the last few weeks the situation has gotten a lot worse. A Canadian woman was detained by ICE after a traffic stop. A British tourist was detained at the border between the US and Canada. People from across the world are getting locked up for having legitimate reasons for traveling to the US on valid visas.
For esports, which has often straddled the nebulous line about which visa to travel under (esports players often travel under tourist or business visas, or have visa free status in the countries they play in – but arguably should be categorised under athlete visas, something that is harder to obtain because of a lack of esports governing bodies), the risk of having a bad conversation with an immigration agent and being detained – no matter how small the risk – is not worth the trouble.
Now while the temptation for players would be to come out and simply say that they don’t want to attend the ESL tournament in the USA, there’s the unspoken rule that you *have* to participate in each tournament for a given TO, or risk not getting invited to another. So instead, players may conveniently take a break until after Raleigh and arrive back in time for the much more enticing PGL Wallachia Season 4. Or even take longer off. After all, the real events like Riyadh Masters and TI are really only a few months away!
Image Credit: Valve
How to Fix the Dota 2 Burnout Problem
Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of great solutions that are going to happen in the short term – and maybe they shouldn’t. We’re right now in an era of Dota 2 where it’s a battle for survival and control for tournament owners. There’s a finite amount of time in a year, and a finite amount of viewers you can attract. If you’re one of the pro players who can grind it out, dodge burnout, cash out during a time where every month a TO wants to a portion of a million portion portion portion dollars at you, then you’re golden.
But what we’re going to see in the medium term is a decline in tournaments who can’t attract players and teams to them. While at the moment ESL and Esports World Cup are on top, the minute the luxury treatment and prize pools start to decline, I can’t imagine all the teams sticking around. And by some observers’ measure, there’s maybe only two or three years of gas left in those tanks.
I’ve previously predicted that it’s going to be the more accommodating tournament organizers that weather this storm. The ones that pay quickly, put the players up in hotels for a week after the event so they can play qualifiers for another tournament, set them up in nicer hotels, with more unique experiences, that are going to win this. And we can add to that the TOs who don’t mind players and teams skipping tournaments.
Dota 2 has been a player-driven esports – the most player-driven esports – for many years. If the players say it’s too much, burnout is real, then the Dota 2 tournament organizers, for all their million dollar events and week long productions, will have to relent.
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