Tundra Esports collapses, Insania’s gold deflation, and doxxing allegations: Dota 2’s wild week

It has been an eventful week Dota 2 scene, and it’s a lot to digest. We’ve seen title contenders falter, the return of familiar faces, and other topics worth discussing.

From tournaments to Reddit threads, here are the events in Dota 2 this past week that I’m invested in.

Dota 2 esports can be a basket full of surprises, but this certainly wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card. Tundra Esports again Yandex groupthe very two teams that reached the Grand Final of ESL One Birmingham 2026 a few weeks ago, were sent packing from. PGL Wallachia Season 8 in last place after both tied 0-3 on the Swiss Stage.

Yes, both teams were forced to send out players who were going to play in the event, but each team was only supposed to send out one player. Widely regarded as the two best teams in the world, this sounds like a one in a million situation.

Tundra again missed their carry, Ivan “Pure” Moskalenkoand we have seen them make disastrous performances without their star player in the past. With how different Tundra looks without him, this really reinforces my opinion that Pure is currently the best player in the world.

On the other hand, I would say that the Yandex Team had a competent, import replacement Dmitry “DM” Dorokhin in the place of Evgeniy “Notice” Ignatenko. The last time they played with this roster, they managed to win PGL Wallachia Season 7.

These results are impressive across the board, but even more so for Yandex. This rings especially true given that the rumors appeared CyberMeta was already reporting that the team planned to remove Noted from DM permanently.

Either way, it’s almost refreshing to know we’re going to see a different tournament winner this year. It takes us back to 2025, when it felt like any team could take the title.

PGL Wallachia Season 8 also let us check out some familiar faces: Omar “w33” Aliwi. The two-time TI winner has been retired for some time, but is returning to the camera, this time in a different role. This Romanian area made its first talent in Wallachia, working as a desk analyst.

I believe w33 is a welcome addition to the talent pool. He has competed at the top of the scene for years, so he will bring a lot of insight and experience to the broadcast.

I’m not going to lie, it’s been repetitive seeing the same talent at every event, so his presence feels like a breath of fresh air. Hopefully, we’ll see him recommend the team to pick Tide and TA, because this pairing gives you everything, apparently.

It looks like w33 is following in the footsteps of other retired professionals Quinn “Quinn” Callahan again Aydin “Insania” Sarkohiswitch them to analyst roles after hanging up the mouse. However, the influx of former professionals turning analysts is putting the careers of non-professional analysts at risk.

I guess that’s the price to pay.

Talking about it InsanityTI winner had an interesting take on episode 28 of the All Chat podcast. Here, he mentioned the flaws in the economic system of the game and said that it points to a boring path.

The main points he made in his speech were:

To be honest, Insania cooks with this take. As a viewer, I will admit that it is incredibly boring, and sometimes scary, to watch heroes stockpile survival items like the Black King Bar, Aeon Disk, Pipe of Insight, and Crimson Guard. Sometimes, players can find giant Chronospheres or Black Holes, and nobody actually dies in the middle of time because of how powerful they are.

In some cases, heroes that historically didn’t have much damage in the late game can now buy items to solve that problem. Sand King used to be a low-damage starter, but now he can survive in the mid lane and late game because he can buy things like Aghanim’s Scepter, Daedalus, and Skull Basher to just dish out/buff out damage.

This also led to teams playing slower and choosing to farm the map. For example, if teams like Tundra Esports or Team Falcons are in the lead, they will just choke the map and keep farming until they have a lead of 30,000, because many things reduce the chances of losing the game.

When situations like this happen, we the fans are forced to watch 10 to 20 minutes of both teams playing before the real fight breaks out.

Additionally, I think this also reduces the skill factor of Dota 2. You can make up for your slow reaction times, weak armor, or missed power spike windows just by farming faster than the enemy team and patching your weaknesses with multiple items.

Quinn shared a very touching story on his live stream, claiming a former player Mason “Mason” Venne he was a toxic person who allegedly leaked his father’s information.

He said: “Back when I was a nobody, and he was a top-level champion, he was on a TeamSpeak channel I was on with some friends, and he was constantly harassing me in pub games and burning me, mostly, like crazy hard.

“He made a blog on NA Dota that leaked my father’s family’s private blog and kicked my family out. Mason is a bad, very bad person.”

Now, Quinn isn’t exactly a spotless source here, as he’s also known to be a problem in pub games. We have seen him play sad games and he uses dirty language to the players in his games many times. That said, allegations of doxxing are in a whole different conversation.

Quinn may not have the best reputation in the game, but other than that, she tends to come off as a good person in the community. Meanwhile, Mason is known for being dangerous in and out of the game, and has received 12 Twitch bans and multiple conduct bans on his Dota 2 accounts.

Overall, I think there’s a clear line between in-game toxicity and anything that involves personal information being shared outside of a game. This is the line where the two do not compare.

To end the report on a lighter note, we have a very unusual development for the North American qualifiers for the DreamLeague Season 29 million dollar tournament. Spoiler alert, this is not happening indeed help the argument that NA is now a one party state.

GamerLegion, a North American team that regularly qualifies for major Dota 2 tournaments, was looking to defend its spot at one more. They participated in the DreamLeague Season 29 qualifiers, where they were tasked with playing only one opponent.

In the four-team double-elimination bracket, half of the teams decided to skip all games and not play at all. This pretty much turned the game into a 1v1 matchup between GamerLegion and an unsponsored stack called Amaru Flame. GamerLegion finally hit the ground running, going 5-0 on all maps to qualify for the event.

The total match time for all qualifiers is less than 180 minutes, or three hours.

What’s worse is that only eight of the 20 players in those qualifiers were actually from North America. There were quite a few players from Europe and South America sneaking into the qualifiers, so it’s even harder to call it a “North American” qualifier.

Considering we haven’t seen a resurgence of North American talent or organizations looking to invest in the region, we may be in this situation for a long time. Gone are the days of Evil Geniuses and Shopify Rebellion, but at least it’s heartening to see GamerLegion stack up against the best teams in the world.