ppd says OG stopped scrims over Alliance cheating controversy

Alliance was cleared of any wrongdoing for its alleged cheating in the Dota Pro Circuit, but that doesn’t mean that things are just going back to normal.

Alliance coach Peter “ppd” Dager did a personal stream on Twitch recently and discussed the controversy surrounding his shot-calling for the team during games in DreamLeague Season 15. Though he wasn’t bombastic or confrontational in his answers, he did let slip that there is some bad blood in play as a result of the controversy.

“After this huge coaching debacle with all this [drama], OG canceled all their scrims against us. We had two sets of scrims where we were supposed to play against them...Here’s the thing, they’re not angels either. These guys were 20 to 30 minutes late for our last set and then the set before that they messed up time zones and were over an hour late,” ppd said.

From there, ppd discussed how he wound up on Alliance. He stated that Alliance captain Gustav "s4" Magnusson messaged him “out of the blue” and specifically discussed the rule change with him and suggested that ppd was actually brought in to help Alliance through in-game comms. Though ESL and DreamHack have since changed the rules to prevent this, ppd stated that he remains with the team and will continue on with them for the time being.

This likely means that ppd will be serving as the team’s coach through The International 10. Alliance recently secured first place in DreamLeague Season 15, which gives the team 800 Dota Pro Circuit points. That puts the squad in a very good position to qualify for The International 10, with anything better than a winless performance in the second Dota Pro Circuit major likely securing the team a spot in the event.

The controversy surrounding Alliance started on Reddit, but exploded after OG captain Johan “N0tail” Sundstein blasted the team on Twitter and got into a short argument with Alliance carry Nikolay "Nikobaby" Nikolov. Though N0tail backtracked on his criticism of Alliance publicly, things are clearly not yet resolved in private.

What is a scrim in Dota 2?

A scrim in Dota 2 is effectively a practice match involving one or more pro teams. They can serve as a warm-up for a competition or as a staging ground to trial new team members. Scrims are also a frequent source of controversy due to the long list of unwritten rules surrounding them and the refusal of scrims being one of the few ways that teams can police one another.

The most notable incident involving scrims came in 2014 when Newbee was labeled for “team racism” after it was accused of refusing to scrim with Team DK due to DK's organization’s signing of multiple Southeast Asian players.

In 2015, Cloud9’s Ravindu "Ritsu" Kodippili came under fire alongside a number of other notable North American players for sharing scrim data in order to undermine fledgling team Digital Chaos.