Vitaly Save- Melnik, the captain of Virtus.pro’s Dota 2 roster, believes that it is too early to place the Russian team on a par with tier-1 teams. Melnik noted that the roster participants lack the experience of playing at LAN tournaments. In addition, each of them still has room to develop in terms of individual skill. Save- spoke about this in an interview for the command channel.
Save:
“We are all moving towards the same goal – to become a tier-1 team. It seems that we are going well so far, but we still have a lot of work to do, both individually and as a team. We are not yet up to tier-1. To become a tier-1 player you need a lot of experience in LAN tournaments, experience in various game situations. Overall, I think we still need to upgrade as players. There is still a small step that we need to climb, each personally, as a player, in order to become tier-1. “
Melnik also talked about the system of monetary penalties that Virtus.pro players invented themselves.
Vitaly Save-Melnik:
“We have different types of fines. There is a penalty for not playing at least one public match before a scrim or before the official match. This is necessary for the player to be warmed up, to be able to think normally. Otherwise, why play this scrim if people are simply not ready to play it, if the body has not yet risen.Initially, at our bootcamp, it was a rule to play at least eight public games a day. But then, two weeks later, the whole team decided to reduce this number to six games. We also had fines for people yelling or talking loudly after four in the morning. But this mainly concerned me and Yegor, because everyone else goes to bed early.
We decided that this money [for fines] should not go to us. It seems that we came to the conclusion that we wanted to send them to some shelter, to charity. “
The last tournament for Virtus.pro in 2020 was OGA Dota PIT Season 4. There Melnik’s team took 5-6th place and earned 7.5 thousand. Before that Virtus.pro became the champion of EPIC League Season 2, where it received $ 200 thousand for the first place.
