As Valve’s flagship Dota 2 tournament fast approaches, Chinese organisation EHOME has revealed StarLucK as a new major sponsor.
The post on Facebook reveals that StarLucK will be joining EHOME’s exciting new Dota 2 roster on its “journey back to the top”. StarLucK is described in the post as an upcoming multimedia esports platform in China, which was founded by an “agglomeration of esports veterans and international talents”. The company’s aim is to “build a leading multimedia esports platform that focuses on fair competition and the needs of the players”. The platform offers services for Dota 2, League of Legends, Overwatch, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and runs on software developed by the company.
EHOME, as an organisation, houses rosters in Dota 2, CS:GO, Overwatch and perhaps slightly oddly – Freestyle Basketball. The organisation’ main hope will be to qualify and perform well at The International 7 and with their roster, it’s impossible to count them out. With the acquisition of The International 6 champions, Wings Gaming’s Zhang “Faith_bian” Ruida and Zhang “y'” Yiping they have two TI winners on their books. 28 year old Liu “Garder” Xinzhou finished second at The International 5 with CDEC Gaming. The roster is rounded off by Wang “old chicken” Zhiyong and Chen “Tianyu” Cty – both also immensely talented players.
Faith_bian, on his day, is considered one of – if not the best – offlaner in the world and although the five players that took home over $9,000,000 between them failed to make an impact after the huge tournament last August, the ability is undoubtedly there. There has been recent controversy in the Chinese Dota 2 scene with “governing body” ACE seemingly banning the Wings players from playing in any Chinese competition other than Valve events. The reason provided by ACE (in the simplest way possible) is that Wings players left their organisation high and dry and thus the remaining organisations want a degree of protection.
Esports Insider says: From an English side, it’s hard to even find StarLucK or what it does but EHOME is a very well respected team in the Chinese scene and thus the partnership is likely to be fairly big. Congratulations to both parties involved.