When a member of North American CS:GO team Cloud9 unapologetically admitted that he and his teammates used adderall during a tournament in March, esports league ESL reacted swiftly, announcing that it would enforce randomized drug testing at its next event before it pursues a larger policy in partnership with two organizations dedicated to anti-doping practices.

An incident with performance-enhancing drugs was inevitable for esports, which are growing more than ever alongside the popularity of competitive games and livestreaming. ESL s stopgap measure of implementing random tests for ESL Cologne in August is welcome, but how will drug testing be handled going forward? How will a league like ESL react during a tournament weekend when one of its players tests positive for a banned substance?

To get further clarity on the ESL s perspective on this issue I spoke with Michal Blicharz, Managing Director Pro Gaming at ESL.

PCG: Why is the implementation of player drug testing necessary to the ESL?

Michal Blicharz: We are a company with the word sports in the name. The integrity of our competitions is paramount to what we do. We have already invested enormous amounts of resources to combat online cheating with our ESL Wire Anti Cheat software and the time has come for us to do something about performance enhancing drugs. In the past 18 months the salaries of the best esports players have risen about ten fold and the prize money aggregates per game have gone into high millions. The temptation is there for players more so than ever and it s on us to educate gamers, preserve the integrity of our competitions and, if necessary, punish those who break the rules.

"The reaction from the video games and esports industry has been overwhelmingly positive."

Do you believe that other leagues will follow your example?

Blicharz: What other leagues do is really up to them. We are of course willing to share our experiences and best practices if they reach out for help.

Is there currently, or are you planning, any retroactive investigation into teams' activities?

Blicharz: We have considered it, but we do not think that it is realistic for us to gather enough conclusive proof retrospectively. We are currently focusing our efforts on establishing good procedures for future events.

Has the ESL spoken directly with Cloud9 about the admission that its players used adderall during ESL Katowice?

Blicharz: When we first heard about this issue, we focused our energy on what we can do moving forward. This is not to say that we are indifferent to what may or may not have happened in that specific case, but it was clear that a more urgent need was to find real ways to prevent those situations from happening in the future.

As for the player himself, or his team, we are unable to retrospectively test the team for PEDs, therefore any investigation would likely prove to be inconclusive.

How has the new policy been received by teams?

Blicharz: The reaction from the video games and esports industry has been overwhelmingly positive. At the core of it, teams are interested in being provided a fair playing field.

It's also on the teams to make sure gaming is clean and I hope they will actively play their role as well.

If a player is prescribed adderall, or another drug, by a doctor, would they be permitted to use it during an ESL competition?

Blicharz: We are currently consulting with NADA on how to handle it and to learn what the best practices are that we can apply to what we do. We certainly do not want to disqualify players who have legitimate medical conditions.

Section 2.13.3 of the current ESL rulebook reads, "If a participant gets disqualified from the ESL One during an ongoing stage, all it's members get banned until the end of main event." If a player tests positive for a banned substance at an ESL event, what will happen?

Blicharz: Our league operations and legal teams are working on updating the rules, and the exact terms of all sanctions are yet to be determined. We want to treat doping like any other form of cheating. This is something our Director of League Operations should speak to, but we will very likely punish illegal doping the same way we would punish cheating in a match. In essence, those things are not different from each other as far as the integrity of the competition is concerned.

Along with incidents like the betting scandal in Counter-Strike earlier this year, do you believe there's a need for the CS scene, or esports in general, to become more mature?

Blicharz: Of course esports has to mature. It's not even 20 years old! At the same time, in many ways it's outgrown some sports that have been around almost a century. It takes time but we will get there.

Thanks for speaking with us, Michal.

Aside from last week's journey into low prio, my recent experience of Dota has been divided between two extremes. I've been playing solo ranked every day, eking out MMR points in a land where actual cooperation is a precious commodity, warred over by very angry young men who will scream, betray and trample one another if it means not being the last person to call somebody else a dickhead. It's solo Dota. You know what you're getting into.

Over the last two weekends I've also being playing in The Rektreational 2. It's a games industry Dota tournament run by a bunch of guys on the west coast of the USA. My team, Uptown Dunk, comprises people from various UK games media outlets. Others represent specific developers, websites, and so on. It's friendly and a lot of fun, like a golf invitational. It's an excuse to talk about Dota with colleagues. If you'd like to watch the main bracket this weekend, the first game is at midnight PDT Friday/8am GMT Saturday.

The Rektreational is also, for the people who organise it, a huge amount of work. Making a tournament happen means weaving together Google docs, email threads, Challonge brackets, and so on. It means finding times when seventy-plus people can play. The first Rektreational ended in February after almost six months of working around this stuff. The second has been run over two weeks—with a much more unforgiving bracket—in order to simply remain practical.

This needn't be the case. As good as the external tools for arranging tournaments are, making them work together is a job that requires a lot of commitment from a team of human administrators. This is true of any tournament in almost any game, amateur or otherwise. Yet much of this effort goes into solving problems that computers are, by their nature, very good at handling. Much of the effort required to run an amateur bracket could be negated—or at the very least, simplified—if the functionality for running brackets was incorporated into the game itself. Hell, Dota even has a 'manage tournaments' button on the community page—greyed out, for the majority of players, since time immemorial.

Structured team play is a really rewarding way to experience Dota, and it's unfortunately downplayed by a game itself. Team matchmaking has been a mess for a while, buggy and detached—fine if all you want is a five-stack to practise against, but that's about it. It doesn't give you access to any of the really rewarding stuff.

Namely: getting to know a manageably small circle of opponents. Getting to prepare. Getting to tailor specific strategies, rather than the catch-all generalism that traditional matchmaking encourages. Getting to experience winning when it matters, even if it only matters to the sixteen teams in contention. All of this stuff scales with skill level: you don't need to be a pro to get something out of taking Dota a little more seriously than you otherwise might. There is such a thing as 3K MMR tournament meta—you just don't see it because very few people can be bothered to go through the hassle of organising something at that level.

Valve haven't expressed much interest in running Dota 'seasons' at an amateur level—they leave that to the community, to groups like JoinDota—but they have expressed an interest in providing the community with tools. There's even precedent for players organising their own structured competition with their friends within the game—it just takes the form of a fantasy leagues, rather than actual Dota.

Imagine this, then: a toolset whereby players could configure ladders, brackets, and so on, and invite premade teams to participate. The game client would handle results, progression, and so on. You could even open tournaments up to the public and apply entry criteria—a nationality, an MMR range, and so on. Add some kind of system for voting on match times and handling forfeits and you've got a framework for amateur tournaments that would make running them vastly more appealing to admins, and therefore more widespread, and therefore more accessible.

Streaming or spectating games makes things more complicated, and that's something to enter into at the organiser's discretion. As is prizes, sponsorship and so on—but they're not the point. The point is giving more of Dota 2's playerbase access to one of the most satisfying ways to play, and providing alternate progression paths that sit comfortably alongside the MMR system.

As Dota grows, being able to compete like this gets harder—and, arguably, more necessary. Amateur tournaments make the game feel smaller, and, in turn, more meaningful. Tournaments for the top 1% are, by their nature, exclusive. I want the tools to run brackets for the rest of us: trench thunderdomes that encourage lasting rivalries and, dare I suggest, a sense of community.

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