Someone Translate this Please, about perfect world, Valve should be alerted
There are two portions to this - One talks about PW’s organisational background, and one talks about the Shanghai Major itself. Please skip to Part 2 if you intend to read on the Shanghai Major itself as Part 1 is full of political jargon where the tl;dr is that Anderson is not so competent.
Title: On Perfect World (PW) and the Shanghai Major?
As someone who’s an insider among the Dota 2 fans, I’ve decided to write this piece after long consideration. I’m not sure if PW would censor this later on, but it’s a huge weight off my chest nonetheless.
The performance of Chinese teams in the Winter Major was very poor, and team composition is naturally the topic in everyone’s conversation. However, from my perspective, the competition’s unusual “architecture” and PW’s ineptitude is probably the deeper reason for this. Yes I’m referring to China’s Dota 2 Operators, PW.
Part 1
Credit to /u/Idealemailer and /u/mista20 for explanations:
PerfectWorld achieved substantial benefits by riding the wave of popularity of the internet. After listing Class A shares on the NASDAQ exchange, it had achieved its core purpose [other similar companies include Sheng Da] and internal management started to consider how to achieve greater profit, with substantial infighting.
Everyone was trying to get their cut of the benefits (everyone was trying to figure out how to get their cup of meat stew [what a wonderful expression]). Their focus shifted from understanding the customer’s needs so as to improve the customer experience, to grabbing a share of the profits. The in-fighting at this company reached the point where it has become heart-breaking, and I’m going to explain it all in exhaustive detail.
The Dota 2 venture was launched against popular opinion by 萧泓 (Svief), now PW’s CEO. Svief was responsible for HR and he was elected as CEO off his experience in Wall Street and his involvement in the listing, much to the dissatisfaction of PW’s seniors, one of them being the CPO at the time, 竺琦 (let’s call him ZHQ because he doesn’t have an online name). Obviously, ZHQ wasn’t happy with Syief’s appointment as someone who’s been in PW for quite a while.
Now, ZHQ and Syief weren’t exactly on the best of terms; PW attempted to appease ZHQ by appointing him as Chief Production Officer (首席发行官, thank you /u/tracyiwen). ZHQ tried to set himself up as the decision maker in the Dota 2 project, but Syief elected 蔡玮 (CW) as the Project Team Leader.
- So far: Syief /CW on Radiant, ZHQ on Dire.
CW successfully avoided being in the political storm by not being involved in the Project’s operations at all for a year, leaving 李亚娜 (Li Yana) completely in charge, albeit for an extremely short period of time. CW basically didn’t receive any outspoken objection from ZHQ until Perfect World stopped giving out Dota 2 Beta Keys.
- So far: Syief/LiYana on Radiant with CW as Standin, ZHQ on Dire
LiYana’s resignation happened as Perfect World announced the cease of Beta Keys without discussion with Valve. The client and servers weren’t ready - The D2 client experienced a 24-hour downtime halting promotions as lots of enthusiasts raised demands for the now limited Beta Keys, and the rate of attrition (thanks again /u/tracyiwen) was said to be 90%.ZHQ appointed his trusted "fire-fighter, 邓佩 (Teresa Deng), as she’s managed the 诛仙 MMORPG project before.
- So far: Syief/CW (Liyana DC’ed) on Radiant, ZHQ/Teresa on Dire.
Teresa brought her own team to handle things, replacing one of the previous correspondents to Valve, 精灵 (Anderson). Anderson himself was in the team because there was no one better at the time; besides the fact that he spoke some English, he certainly wasn’t up to the task. Nonetheless, as CW’s confidant, this alarmed CW and with the help of Syief (and some legal mess regarding ZHQ’s property), Teresa was relieved of the Project Team, the Dota 2 team pulled roots and moved from Beijing to Shanghai, far away from ZHQ.
- So far: Syief/CW/Anderson (Liyana DC’ed) on Radiant, ZHQ/Teresa on Dire.
The Dota 2 Project Team flourished in this period, but yet another crisis emerged - 池宇峰 decided to Privatise perfect World, causing CW to announce his resignation (set for May) and Syief turning into the facade of new COO 张云帆 (YunFan). Everything was delegated to Anderson now, and this coincided with DAC…
- So far: YunFan/Anderson on Radiant, (Syief/CW/LiYana DC’ed), ZHQ/Teresa on Dire. Radiant Victory.
The DAC under the leadership of Anderson was full of problems as a result of not being up to the task combined with a lack of support from CW. Despite both leaders bring a no-show, DAC was interesting enough as an event, and Valve was happy with the execution of DAC despite the niggling problems.
Post DAC, Anderson decided to pursue activities that made money, completely ignoring Dota 2 merchandising while delegating correspondence with Valve to his underlings, all this happening as they approached the Shanghai Major and the Dota 2 Campus Tournament…
Part 2
- tl;dr from part 1: YunFan as the COO is a noob (literally), and lots of stuff hinges on the performance of 2k MMR organiser Anderson.
Back to the translation:
- In the preparation stages leading up to the Major, Valve explained that they want to be as minimally involved as possible, and PW only has to report on their progress. YunFan was already overloaded with work and he was still unfamiliar with proceedings in the Dota 2 project, so the key decision maker was Anderson.
On the subject of looking for suppliers:
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Anderson chose to tender the broadcasting job; MarsTV and imbaTV had plenty of experience, but Anderson also added a third supplier - KeyTV. During the evaluation stage, after taking out labor costs, PW estimated the broadcasting job to cost about 2.8 million yuan; MarsTV quoted a figure of around 4million, imbaTV quoted 6million (inexplicably dropped to 5million later) and KeyTV matched the cost of PW’s Costing down to the cent. Hell, even the font used in the Excel proposal sheet was exactly the same.
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Furthermore, before the announcement of the Shanghai Major trophy shape, the powerpoint presentation from KeyTV had a section on the trophy exactly the same as the one Valve distributed to PW… The author still has the quotation figures and the KeyTV slideshow with him.
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The renovation & service job was awarded (at about 7 million yuan) to the same company that did DAC’s logistics, who didn’t even have proper renovation qualification.
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The arrangements for hotel costs was even more baffling. Anderson made it clear to the hotel that he did not want a bulk discount and wanted to be charged the original, full price. He obtained a Platinum hotel card (essentially VIP card I think) for the collective accommodation costs of the entire event; supposedly he later gave the Platinum card to YunFan. (thank you /u/czhihong)
The author now proceeds to talk about Anderson’s behaviour during the Group Stages:
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Anderson doesn’t help with the coordination at the Major, and all problems were basically diverted to the Valve employee who was only on scene to supervise. The focus was on impressing the boss when he arrived during the Main Event.
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The incompetence of the construction team (无能的搭建方) led to stage arrangements still incomplete up to a day before the Major started. The translators and broadcast team also didn’t have time for rehearsals, causing them to solve problems on the fly, as seen with the production problems during the Group Stage.
Now, onto the Main Stage:
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The problems everyone DIDN’T SEE apparently were worse than the ones people saw on the day. We got news during the 2 day break that an event at the Mercedes-Benz arena was cancelled, giving us 24 extra hours to work on renovations. The result - everything only came together on the midnight eve of the Mainstage! Wiring and commission took 10 hours while 5 hours were left for dress rehearsals, but the stage crew’s incompetence once again led to more downtime debugging problems during the Main Event.
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The air quality in the booth was also another severe problem. The gaming booths on the Stage were made of wood, put together by screws and large amounts of glue - and what did the construction team do? They put 4 air-conditioners BELOW the stage, pushing air beneath the stage back into the gaming booths, calling it “air recycling”. RIP EE.‘s eyes. The heat from underneath the Stage basically caused the glue to give off a chemical smell, and this very air caused even OG to bring a mask into the gaming booth. Valve’s employee had to open up the stage himself, pull out the air-conditioner, seal the air vent going into the gaming booth and reposition the air conditioners themselves to solve the problems, but by then all the Chinese teams were eliminated already! I don’t want to put the Chinese teams’ failures down to external factors, but the Chinese players themselves entered the gaming booths that day without any protection against this, and this largely has to be shouldered by Anderson. I’d really like to know how you really spent the 7 million yuan on construction.
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Also, the Secret Shop was cut by Anderson because it cost too much and he didn’t see the Secret shop generating any profit.
The final two paragraphs in the article touch on how Anderson is greedy etc. combined with the fact that the people Anderson hired are equally incompetent. PW basically made too many silly decisions, and the author (who isn’t very good in English) wishes to reach out to Valve once again, hopefully letting Valve & IceFrog know about the rottenness of PW with the help of everyone else who’s concerned.
I’ll appreciate any helpful edits with anything I’ve missed crucially, he does spend quite a bit of text slandering Anderson here, which is needless IMO for the sake of translation. I did this in one take so I’m willing to edit/correct where necessary. Thank you!
TLDR:
JingLing (JL/Elf) is the person in charge of the Dota 2 program in PW. He was recently promoted to this position since his direct boss who used to run Dota program left the company. Keep in mind JL is only 20 something years old, and just like most twenty year olds, is not in the best financial shape. So imagine the Shanghai major with a price pool of 3 million USD fell unto his lap, he was determined to get as much as he could out of the event.
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KeyTV. KeyTV is owned by JL’s wife, Ruru (who just had a flame war with Sylar, she tried to fuck Sylar on his contract terms and push him to CDEC instead of staying on LGD, she owns both teams). There were 3 bids for the english broadcasting segment of the Major. MarsTV, ImbaTV, and KeyTV. KeyTV’s bid matched exactly down to the decimal points of PW’s internal estimation, thats why they got the job.
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JL hired a stage crew that didn’t have the proper license, the same crew that was in charge of back stage operations during DAC last year. keep in mind the budget for stage building is around 7 million yuan (1M USD). Because this crew were so bad at setting up the stage and stadium, they ran out of time and the production had to skip audio and video wire testing, which led to the broadcasting problems.
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This same stage building crew installed ventilation wrong in the players booth, that’s why EE had problems with his eyes, Valve had to step in to fix the issue.
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The merchandise shops didn’t happen because JL thought he won’t make any money from it, or enough money to bother.
Can confirm things mentioned about group stage and main event are true ;( why can’t we have nice things
RURU, the CEO of LDG, CDEC. One of owners of EHOME and KeyTV. One of directors of VPGAME.com where people can gambling the dota game. And she is the wife of the Perfect World Dota2 manager.
TLDR: PW had a lot of internal problems between their CEO and upper managements. Due to these conflicts, the person in charge of D2 in PW changed from some decent dude to the one running the Winter Major → 精灵,or Elf. Since Elf got hold of the project, he started using it to his own advantage and tried to get as much money out of it as possible. The most notable things are hiring KeyTV instead of MarsTV and imbaTV who had much better resumes on hosting international tournaments, and hiring a construction company when they don’t even have the correct licence. This would explain most of the fucked up things about Winter Major (stream problem, sound booth problem) and the poster is hoping that this information gets passed on to Valve and OSfrog so they can stop working with PW again.
The poster also stated that the main reason for the low player base in China was due to PW being greedy and decided to go from closed beta into open beta without the server infrastructure to support it. The result was that the server went down for 24 hours due to all the new players, which made PW lose about 90% of the possible player base.
I’m Singaporean Chinese, so I’m gonna give it a go, but I won’t know a lot of the terminologies, especially the economics stuff, so bear with me…
As a Dota 2 fan with a bit of inside information, I have decided to write this article after long consideration. I am not sure if this will get deleted by PW, but writing this down makes me feel a lot better either way.
In this competition, the Chinese team did very poorly, and while the main discussion addresses a part of the reason, in my opinion, it is the poor structure of the competition(?) and the operations(?) that are the deeper reasons for this failure. Yes, I am referring to Dota 2’s Chinese operator, Perfect World.
As a company that benefited early from the online gaming fad, completing its IPO on the Nasdaq and privatizing, returning to A shares(???), they have fulfilled their primary interests.(??). A similar company is Shanda Interactive. A defining feature of companies like these is that once they attained their interests they cease to strive for improvement while the people on the inside scramble to maximize their benefits, and instead of trying to address customer needs and improving user experience they turn to sucking off higher management. PW’s internal strife has peaked, as I will explain in detail below.
It is said that Dota2 was pushed for by PW CEO Xiao Hong against many dissidents, and the result is that Dota 2 was held under great scrutiny by the company. Xiao Hong was oringally in-charge of HR, but because of his education in America and background in Wall Street he was promoted to CEO, and he successfully put the company on the stock market. This tasking of his, however, caused significant unhappiness within PW’s older management. Previous CPO Zhu Qi was one of them. As a long term member of PW he greatly desired the position of CEO, and Xiao Hong’s appointment naturally caused him great dissatisfaction. The two of them spent a year refusing to greet one another at work. To make Zhu Qi feel better, PW made him Chief Publishing Officer, a role that was arguably invented just to satisfy Zhu Qi. Do a quick search of this appointment on Baidu and you will see that most of the news are related to Zhu Qi. Zhu Qi managed to attain the rights to call the shots for Dota 2. However at the same time, the Dota 2 in-charge hired by PW, Cai Wei, is handpicked by Xiao Hong. This resulted in an awkward relationship in which Cai Wei could not participate substantially for over a year because he did not want to involve himself in any internal strife within the company, allowing a Lianna to hold the reins.
After the removal of activation keys (??), an unknown leader within PW made a press conference to announce this decision, without having communicated with Valve or having prepared the product. Gamers who have awaited a long time swarmed the service, eager to try out the game, causing the service to completely die within 24 hours. This caused a 90% loss in the player-base. Dota 2 has yet to fully recover from this mistake, and Lianna has since stepped down from her role because of this.
During this leaderless time, Dota 2 had greatest freedom and efficiency, improving significantly on the service, organising activities, increasing the player-base. This was the only time the Dota 2 team managed to achieve anything at all.
DAC’s organisation was filled with obstacles, and these problems have all come from Cai Wei’s non-involvement and Jing Ling(?)'s unclear roles. Thankfully DAC was sufficiently exciting, and despite numerous issues the competition was a success, and Valve was kinda satisfied, and Valve started the Majors system as a result of this.
At the moment, the new COO is not familiar with PW’s operations, and Dota 2’s team was leaderless. I now bring the star of this article, JingLing, into the spotlight. After ensuring that JingLing has outsourced Dota operations of the near future to other companies(?), Cai Wei finally left the company in May.
JingLing immediately started to strive for his own comfortable life. Unashamedly greedy, he only participates in events involving money. He even refused to communicate with Valve, leaving communications to be handled by his underlings.
Apologies for writing so much before going into the issue at hand. I wanted to summarise the entire operations of the company and how they managed to reach this stage.
For the major, Valve said they will not significantly involve themselves as long as PW updates them. COO Zhang Yunfan was too busy and too unfamiliar, and thus JingLing was tasked to call the shots.
JingLing chose to let producers bid for the rights in a way that let him collect some extra money on the side. MarsTV did DAC and Frankfurt and MDL, imbaTV did TI and the i-League. Neither will create any trouble, but JingLing chose KeyTV instead. PW’s own budget was 2.8M, MarsTV asked for 4M, and imbaTV asked for 6M. KeyTV’s budget report was exactly identical to PW’s, down to the font sizes.
Stage construction and services caused more, about 7M. Who did PW pick? A company with no credentials. You guys can guess why on your own.
I was stunned at how the hotel was booked. JingLing informed them that he did not require negotiation, asking the hotel to bill them their usual prices. All the players and crews’ stay duration were to be counted as one so he could get a platinum card (some membership I guess?), which he then gave to COO Zhang.
In summary, JingLing was greedy and rotten to the core.
During the group stage, JingLing will only reach the area in the late afternoon. He made no attempt to coordinate with the planning. The Dota 2 team had no choice but to go to the Valve co-ordinator for any issues they face. All he cared was how to look good when his boss was around.
Furthermore, due to their contracting of an incompetent company, stage construction was yet to finish even one day before the group stage started. The broadcasters explained that they could not test and rehearse, resulting in severe problems when the competition started.
Jingling in conclusion was a useless manager.
During the main event, everyone sees one side of the problem, but not the bigger one behind. On our rest days we were told that another event was cancelled, so we had 24 hours extra for the stage construction. We all assumed it was good news, but in the end the stage was completed in the midnight before the competiton started. You have to know the production needed 10 hours to set up and another 5 to rehearse. Without this time, the result was internet problems and delays from mid-game, during which settings were adjusted.
Another big problem was the air quality in the game rooms. The stage was mostly made with wood, nails, and a lot of glue. And what was the extent to which the construction firm was dumb? They put 4 airconditioning units below the stage, drawing the air from underneath the stage into the game rooms, claiming to help with air-circulation. But what kind of air was being circulated? Remember EE needing to pause for eyedrops? That’s because as the day went on, heated glue released a strong chemical smell into the players’ rooms. I would not stay in the room for more than a minute as the stinging smell made me nauseous and dizzy. The players had to bear with that for hours. OG chose to simply wear masks into the rooms. Our Chinese team players had no way to circumvent this issue. A Valve guy personally hoisted the airconditioning units out of the stage, and sealed the game rooms properly and added air-conditioning into the rooms themselves, and finally solved this problem. But by then, the Chinese teams were already out of the competition. I don’t want to blame our players’ defeat entirely on external issues - they had many problems of their own. But letting players endure such a poor condition for hours is inexcusable and had the potential to cause great harm to their health and well-being. JingLing, only you could pull that off. I wonder how you spent that 7 million.
The problems with this major can all be collapsed under two big problems: PW should have spent real money to organise and promote this Dota 2 instead of trying to simply maximise profits; on the individual level, JingLing this man is so greedy he is completely diseased, and his cowardice and incompetence meant that he could not do his job decently whilst at the same time making sure he profited from it.
PW has done too many dumb things in the operation of Dota 2, causing such a high-quality game to not receive the corresponding popularity it deserved. My English is poor, and I am unable to directly mail this to Valve or IceFrog. But I love this game, and I write this article to beseech everyone - let our voices be heard by Valve, and we will no longer allow this company, which is rotten to the core, to do further damage to the game we all love.
Here is Ruru’s reply on zhihu:
我是ruru，不想匿名。
想说的是：
很好，现在知乎发帖都可以当内斗工具了。
如果你们想被当成内斗工具，就一个劲转发闹吧。不就是到了项目组人员架构调整的时候吗？
用脑想：
完美这么大的集团，4000万的赛事决策会交给精灵？
又有人在说KeyTV.
整个dota2项目组应该都知道，整个赛事转播100%（包含英文流）是给了MarsTV。这些东西就别捏造了。和KeyTV毛的关系啊？
KeyTV当时是年后被喊过去义务转包英文流。（转切MarsTV做的主流）因为设备系统和设备原因导致英文流当时出了问题。
决赛英文转播V社换了另外一个英文团队。然而问题还是同样的没解决？英文流不还是一样的卡顿声音有问题？
每天一大群人说我什么内幕交易的我也受够了。我天性要强，万事不想求人，凡事不低头，长这么大就没找过比我强的男朋友好吗？
就这么说吧，就这天下所有的女的被包养光了，我都不会被包养。
不就是不小心卷入了某些人利益漩涡嘛。叼叼叼。
Tl;dr: she’s saying JingLing isn’t in charge of the event, since “such a huge event won’t be given to him, considering the size of PW.”.
She’s also saying that KeyTV has nothing to do with the English stream issues, putting the blame on the equipments, that the english stream still had issues after they swapped in a different team, thus proving it isn’t KeyTV’s fault.
I think most of us can agree on the stream quality improving after KeyTV got fired, them being incapable of handling the event is definitely part of the problem.
It includes some inside information in PW about the fiasco of Shanghai major. As a Chinese and a CN fan, I feel that valve should know about this situation. And I really want to place the blame on a few ppls instead of the entire organization, so it can be easily addressed and we can have a flawless Shanghai major, if given another chance, next year. I am inherently biased, take my word with a grain of salt.
I will provide a brief translation in the following comments. Recommendations and corrections are more than welcome.
Shit is getting real as fuck
Quote the original author of this article " I still have KeyTV’s bidding price and PW’s internal quote estimation saved on my desktop. They agree with each other to the first decimal place :)" AKA I will make an offer that you cannot refuse 
Jesus, do these people not know how to think for the long term? Sure you make a quick buck now, but you’ve lost any chance of being given another event. Why kill the golden goose?
Post-major drama delivers again
As a dota 2 fan with some insider knowledge, after long contemplation, i decided to write this essay[article]. I don’t know if, after I publish this, it will get deleted in toto, but writing it out makes me feel better. During this winter major, the poor performance of the Chinese teams is definitely one aspect of my dissatisfaction, but from my point of view, the major/deepest problems were the competition structure, and the weaknesses in the venue. That’s right; what I want to talk about is PerfectWorld, the Dota 2 subcontractor for China.
作为一名知道点内幕的dota2粉丝，在思考了许久以后我决定写这篇文，不知道发出来会不会被完美的公关删掉，但是写出来总会好受许多。
本次冬季赛中国的队伍表现很差，大家在谈论的节奏自然是部分原因，然而从我的角度上来看，赛事架构的畸形，市场运营的不力才是更为深层的原因。是的，我想说的就是Dota 2中国运营商完美世界。
I tried to make a translation as close to the original as possible.
Part one:
As a Dota2 fan with some insider knowledge, I’ve thought long and hard before writing this post. Maybe Perfect World’s PR team will have this deleted, but I have to get this off my chest.
Chinese teams performed badly at this winter major, and while the tempo that everyone is talking about is part of the reason, from my perspective, the deformed structure of tournaments and incompetent market operation are the more underlying causes. Yes, what I want to talk about is China’s Dota2 operator, Perfect World.
As a company that profited from capitalizing on the early wave of internet gaming, Perfect World had realized its core interests after completing a NASDAQ listing and the subsequent privatization and relisting on the A shares market. Like similar companies such as Shengda, a major characteristic of this type of company is that once it has earned its profits, it is no longer concerned with development, and its internal staff begins to form teams and carve out spheres, thinking about how to get their share of the interests at hand. Their approach to work changes from listening to user needs and improving user experience, to flattering their superiors and dividing vested interests. The infighting in this company has reached a state of insanity. I’ll explain.
It is said that the Dota2 project was forced through by Perfect World CEO Xiao Hong against vocal opposition. This project thus became the subject of great attention within Perfect World. Xiao was originally the HR executive of Perfect World. He was appointed CEO because he had studied in the U.S. for years, had a Wall Street background, and completed the NASDAQ listing. This appointment was met with displeasure from many senior executives of Perfect World, among which was former CPO Zhu Qi. Zhu was a long time staff at Perfect World with quite a successful history, and he wanted the CEO position badly. Xiao’s appointment naturally infuriated Zhu, and the two did not acknowledge each other for a year. To appease Zhu, Perfect World made him CPO, a title created just to satisfy Zhu’s demand for a position. If you baidu (i.e. google) “CPO”, all you can find is news related to Zhu Qi.
After becoming CPO, Zhu managed to find a way (some say it is to appease Zhu and maintain a balance of power with Xiao) to obtain the decision-making authority of Dota2. At the same time, the Dota2 project manager hired by Perfect World, Cai Wei, was a “parachute appointment” hired by Xiao Hong. This awkward relationship between superior and subordinate meant that Cai virtually did not participate in any meaningful activities in the Dota2 project group for over a year. The real leader was Li Ya’na, who has since left Perfect World. She had been with Perfect World for some time and could be considered one of the company’s own. Wanting to stay out of the infighting among the executives, Cai chose to seclude himself, letting Li handle all the planning. Zhu did not show much opposition to this either. This state of affairs continued until Dota2 cancelled access codes.
Some idiot executive at Perfect World though it would be a great idea to cancel access codes to promote the game, when they had not communicated with Valve, the product was not ready, and the servers were not prepared. Perfect World called a press conference and announced that access codes were cancelled. Players who had waited forever flocked to the game; they couldn’t wait to experience a product that was in fact unfinished (this was one of the reasons why Dota2 required access codes). The huge traffic caused the servers to crash for 24 hours. This complete failure of a promotion was the most catastrophic event in Dota2 history, with some saying that they lost over 90% of its player base. Dota2 has yet to recover from this stupid move, and Li also left her position as a result.
After Li left, Zhu quickly moved to appoint Deng Pei, who had helped rescue the company’s Jade Dynasty project. Up to this point, Cai Wei remained unconcerned with affairs, until Deng brought over her own team and started trying to take over the project. This is where the main antagonist of this story, “Elf”, comes in. Elf was one of the staff she was trying to replace. Because Elf’s English was decent, he was the liaison between Perfect World and Valve, although he was, of course, not capable of this job, otherwise the Dota2 product would have been much better. He was given the position only because Perfect World was unable to find a better candidate. However, Deng’s move to replace Elf disturbed Cai because Elf was a close aide to Cai. Once Elf was replaced, Cai would completely lose grip on the project. Cai went to Xiao Hong for help. Very coincidentally, Zhu Qi came under investigation for an old case and had his hands full defending himself, and so after some maneuvering, Deng was transferred from the group, while at the same time, the Dota2 project group moved from Beijing to Shanghai, completely removed from Zhu Qi, and entered into a phase of autonomy.
The autonomy period could be considered as the most liberal and efficient period of the Dota2 project team. The product received a lot of improvements, with localized activities such as New Bloom being developed, and a gradual rise in player numbers. This is probably the only time when the project team actually worked on the game.
But as previously mentioned, the corporate culture of Perfect World had long been one of satisfying the whims of its bosses. During this period, the entire Perfect World Group began a privatization process. Chi Yufeng released the buyback announcement, preparing for delisting from NASDAQ. This means that Xiao Hong was no longer of much use to Perfect World. So on the last day of 2014, all Perfect World staff received an internal email, saying that COO Zhang Yunfan would take over all gaming operations, and all projects will report to him. Xiao became a total figurehead. Before this email was sent out, Cai Wei had caught wind of the move. For self-preservation, he once again stepped back and handed all project operations to Elf, while preparing to resign and start his own business. This period was when the hot-blooded youth in Perfect World was preparing for DAC.
Hosting DAC proved to be full of difficulties, and the root of these problems is precisely the (non)work of Cai and the lack of clarity on Elf’s responsibilities. Both men chose to disappear or shirk responsibility at critical moments of the tournament. Fortunately, the DAC matches were exciting enough, and so the tournament was successful despite a constant stream of small problems. Valve was also rather pleased with DAC, and so the Major structure was introduced.
At this point, the new COO of Perfect World was still unfamiliar with operations, and the Dota2 project team had no leader. This paves the entrance for our antagonist, Elf. Having ensured that Elf would pass the Dota2 operations to his new company in a few months, Cai Wei finally left Perfect World in May, and the project team officially entered the Elf period.
In his new appointment, Elf busied himself planning for a life of prosperity. His face of greed was open for all to see. Any project with money involved would receive his full attention, while anything without the involvement of money, such as the product itself, was ignored. Communication with Valve was thrown to several of his staff, while he himself began a series of so-called collaborations, and so there was the Dota2 college tournaments, as well as the recently finished Shanghai Major.
If is this is true, it’s disgusting and should be a chargeable offense. Valve needs to be a lot more involved if they want to avoid letting problems like these escape their knowledge.
Everyone needs to keep in mind that Valve won’t address this publicly. They already took control during the event and mentioned the failures in their blog post. We know that Valve staff read Reddit, and with this thread gaining visibility there’s no way it gets overlooked. But don’t expect a public statement of any sort addressing it. They’ll take note and exclude the people involved from all future events. I think we all know it’s likely they’ll hold another event in China at some point, but when it happens there’s no way Valve hands over complete control. They might even hold just the next one outside of China (South Korea or Tokyo perhaps?) just to make a point. But I think that’s all the schadenfreude we’ll get out of it.
TL;DR: Dude buys 60Hz monitors instead of the 144Hz monitors and kept the rest of the money.
Can someone give a clear and cut TLDR? God that holy wall of text.
For those who wonder, the so called 精灵 in the original article, is a dota / dota 2 caster from China in the early days of dota. He has his Youku channel on dota 2 but stop uploading since Feb 2015. He was invited to cast in the first International in 2011 but was called Prince (Wang Yu Min).
Edit: He is husband of Ruru, the one mentioned in the Sylar’s post.
Edit 2: He was alleged Selling Dota 2 Activation Code in 2012 when dota 2 was still in beta.