The Open and Closed Qualifiers for the 2023 Dota Pro Circuit are over, and multiple regions are wrapped up with upsets. While Old G failed to go through, the North American region witnessed Arkosh Gaming falling apart in an unexpected manner.
Despite forming a promising lineup, Arkosh even struggled to make it through the Open Qualifiers. After a series of disrespectful moments from Kim “Febby” Yong-min, other team members, Max “qojqva” Bröcker, Steve “Xcalibur” Ye, Jaron “monkeys-forever” Clinton, and Zakari “Zfreek” Freedman, gradually lost their will to play together.
The internal issues within the team started to appear in the public light when Febby decided to take a cannabis edible after an $80 donation while Arkosh were still actively playing in the qualifiers.
While Febby was under the influence in a decent portion of the matches, he also proceeded in the games without giving a second thought to his teammates’ ideas regarding the draft. Febby’s questionable leadership was also accompanied by a series of suspicious plays that only added more salt to the wound.
Given how annoyed Qojqva and the rest of the team were regarding the drafts, they performed noticeably poorly as there wasn’t a clear strategy to execute.
Arkosh continued to win and made it into the closed qualifiers even with the drama, but their problems only got bigger as they got closer to the end. With players continuing to play in an environment that they apparently disliked from the first day, Qojqva and xcalibur started to act up, while Monkeys-forever laughed noticeably less than usual during matches, indicating that there was a stressful environment within the team.
Zfreek, the last reasonable and rational member of the team, tried until the very end, but he also gave up during their last match versus the AlienManaBanana stack, as he realized he could never get his ideas across to Febby.
As their final match in the qualifiers came to an end, Febby asked Arkosh members never to see each other again, and all went their separate ways. Now that the Arkosh’s latest lineup is no more, players are already back to the public ranked matches of their home regions with Qojqva once again considering adding xcalibur to his avoid list.
This final comment by Qojqva increases the number of players he didn’t want to play with from the start to two as he also had asked SirActionSlacks to replace Febby before the stack even got together. The core player proposed inviting Grubby, the Warcraft legend who fell in love with Dota 2 and recently hit Legend rank.
Arkosh hoped for raw talent to overcome any chemistry issues that could arise, but it looks like they happened to mix fire with gasoline.
