ESEX Dota 2 Awards 2014

Winner: GoDz Enchantress Cosplay

The highlight of this transcendent performance is the healthy musculature daubed across the grub-like skin of Parker’s abdomen, a thin veneer of good health that serves only to highlight the depth of the neglectful rot that has taken hold. Stream viewers were exposed to the sight of Parker’s shoggoth-body, lounging on the couch and staring back at them, a corpulent Escher painting that serves to parody the Dota community at large.

Runner Up: Techies

People asked for techies for ages, and now that he’s here, enjoy your games extended for 40 annoying minutes, win or lose. “Boy I wish there was a hero that forced us to spend all our gold on detection even when he’s not around,” said no supports ever.

The “ArtStyle” Award for Best Player Departure

Winner: Mason “mason” Venne

Leaving Evil Geniuses scant weeks after joining the team for its run at The International 4, Venne managed to become the highest-earning player per time employed in the history of Dota 2 ESPORTS, earning over $100,000 per month as an official EG player.

The “June 2014” Award for Most Tournament Packed Month

Winner: June 2015

Last year, ESL mafioso forced their way into an already packed scheduling war for June turf, winning handily by dropping a football stadium on MLG’s heads. Just twelve months later, another heated battle appears to be brewing for the month of June, with DreamHack, ESL, and MLG (this time sans-scope) having back-to-back-to-back events again before TI5.

The “Bruno” Award for Best Outfit

Winner: Universe’s Jacket

Saahil “Universe” Arora’s rise to the highest tier of competitive Twitter usage was capped this year by his appearance in a jacket spattered with nebulae and constellations and he found success at tournaments whilst bedecked by the very spacetime from which his alias was drawn.

The “Marco” Award for Worst Management

Winner: Arrow Management

Arrow Gaming’s management has been accused this year of convincing his players to throw matches, cheating them out of earnings, refusing to feed the impoverished players in his team house, attempting to cover up involvement in match-fixing, threatening their own players (and players’ girlfriends), fabricating “official” Facebook pages for teams (including iG & Evil Geniuses), and forcing at least one player to prostitute himself to make rent. Insiders have indicated that one of the above allegations may be untrue.

The “DD” Award for Worst Team Logo

Winner: Team Tinker

Team Tinker’s logo features a dark purple beard set upon a the blindingly white bespectacled head of the Dota 2 hero Tinker. In case you were not sure what hero this team was named after, the head is framed by an obnoxiously large unnecessary yellow “TT” just in case you were not sure to which hero the head belonged or that the logo belonged to a team.

The “Ranked Matchmaking” Award for Fundamentally Changing Gameplay

Winner: Nemesis Assassin Event

Who would have guessed that five people who hate each other can band together and work toward the common goal of denying a winning team items? Never has a single cosmetic item in the history of Dota 2 resulted in the actual purchase of wards and couriers over the course of a competitive game. How could anyone predict that players could derive more happiness from opponents not receiving any items when winning? Is it possible that a team actually cheers its Phantom Assassin player acquires less than 1 CS per minute over a 90 minute game while perpetually hiding in the trees? This was the reality during the Paradox Nemesis Manifold Assassin Contract Foreseer Event.

The “Botched Initiation” Award for Poorly Executed Announcement (of an Announcement)

Winner: YouPorn Team

When everyone first heard about YouPorn’s planned foray into ESPORTS, we expected huge things. Dongers were raised and people looked forward to reading the first few sentences of their big announcement before skipping straight to the end to find out which team it was. After all, who couldn’t get aroused by the thought of YouPorn.bone7 or YouPorn.LongDD or YouPorn.mynuts, but alas they ended up sponsoring the Spanish organization Play2Win, a team which disappointingly contains zero sexual pun player names. Still, YouPorn did get some valuable publicity in the 18-25 male video game player demographic that surely did not already know about their services.

The “Rate Your Enjoyment” Award for Best Vote

Winner: Cloud9 Summit Redemption

Cloud9 won the Summit 2 redemption vote, allowing them to not only break their run of second place finishes but also attend the tournament, where they went on to lose to Vici Gaming in the finals. No Chinese team was able to crack the top four in the poll, showing that Chinese people in general a) aren’t used to voting for stuff and b) prefer to actually win tournaments like the Summit 2 and TI4 instead of popularity contests.

Runner up: Smash wins Summit 2 MVP

Peruvian Dota jesus earned more votes than all other MVP candidates combined.

The “Преступлéние и наказáние” Award for Best Real Life Ban

Winner: Reddit

Reddit’s administrators took this one home with their second ban of OnGamers following OG’s campaign of vote manipulation across many video game and ESPORTS subreddits. This ban narrowly edged out Starladder’s ban of Solo, Beyond the Summit’s ban of Arrow Gaming, and Reddit’s first ban of OnGamers several months earlier.