This Dota 2 player activity video shows why the SEA servers are stressed

Earlier today, Reddit user What-A-Baller posted a video showing Dota 2 player activity around the world. It’s a compilation of Valve’s official map showing the worldwide distribution of Dota 2 players online in a single day. Check out the video here:

In case you can’t view the embedded video, you can also find it here.

Based on the gif, we can see that the life of a Dota 2 SEA server isn’t easy. At some point, it seemed to me that the SEA countries weren’t on the map, until I realized I was looking at the peak time for player activity in the region. SEA’s Dota 2 activity is so heavy, the visual representation makes the islands and archipelagos disappear!

With that many players and such heavy activity, you might think that SEA would be dominating the competitive scene. Unfortunately, the Dota 2 scene is currently owned by Chinese and European teams. If you look at the map, those regions are also high in player activity.

What I find strange, though, is why Southeast Asia has such difficulty producing high-tier teams, since the region has this many players. SEA Dota 2 is presently only dominated by Team Titan—a team often dubbed as the strongest SEA team today.

Although several other SEA teams such as Scythe, Arrow, Mineski, and Execration are strong in their own right, the only team who seems capable of taking on foreign teams outside of the region is Titan. This means the problem isn’t really with the number of players in the region, but with the quality and skill of teams being formed.

What’s it like playing on the SEA servers?