The South East Asian qualifiers for the PGL Open: Bucharest Dota 2 competition have caught attention recently, as a timerating rule meant Fnatic failed to qualify despite tying with two other teams in the round robin stage with 2-1 records, as reported by Join Dota.
The reason Fnatic was eliminated was because the tournament was using a time rating system to break ties in the round robin phase of qualifying. What this effectively means is that Fnatic were the last team to have a chance of equally the 2-1 record already established by both Happy Feet and Mineski, but the teams with the shorter matches were the ones to go through, Fnatic's being the longest, hence they were eliminated.
"In full transparency, PGL did tell us about the timerating beforehand. Doesn't change the fact that it is a bad way to settle a tie," Fnatic manager Eric 'ReiNNNN' Khor said of the situation on Twitter.
"We used that rule in order to reduce the chance of tiebreakers because the schedule is impossible, too many qualifiers taking place in the same time," a representative of PGL told Join Dota. "All teams knew about the rules before the qualifiers and they agreed to them."
PGL also said that teams themselves had asked for qualifiers to be shorter, so each could participate in as many as they could at once. "When we scheduled the whole thing and set the rules, there were multiple other qualifiers from other upcoming events and we had to make a decision to make sure our qualifiers will end in time."
However, PGL now say they'll remove the rule for the remaining qualifiers to avoid a situation like Fnatic's, although they still said tournament organisers may need to use time ratings in the future to keep times down.
Do you like timerating rules?