Yes, this is another Dota 2 post.

Dota 2 belongs to Valve and whatnot. The International I’d like to think belongs to us all.

I give my yearly impressions of the premier competitive event for a video game. Before, it probably seemed like a quaint little commentary on a budding hobby. But, really, I’m not certain we can truly consider this a small time thing anymore. For one, the prize pool for this International was over 18 million dollars. Eighteen million. That’s a lot of hats.

For pointless rivalry, that’s 16 million more than Riot Game’s League of Legends. But don’t worry, they’re future proofing their competitive league. Certainly, this furore for Dota 2 will abate. I mean, it’s not like we didn’t almost double from last year’s 10 and a bit. Which, to be fair, was insanity considering TI3 only had 2.8 million for it’s prize pool. Could this be a flash in the pan? I suppose. But two years in a row is a little surprising and, more than that, Valve is a very savvy developer and it’s hard to argue when the fan base is more than willing to throw money at this competition.

And why shouldn’t we be?

In case you aren’t aware how the International prize pool works, Valve sets the base prize every year at 1.6 million dollars. From there, everything else is contributed by fans through purchases of merchandise related to the event. Primary amongst these is the Compendium: a digital program with information about the event, teams and location. As this is a digital book–and part of a digital game–the compendium offers a number of interactive elements. You can vote for your favourite team and player, create your own all-star team and submit your most wanted for the goofy match which shares its namesake, make predictions of heroes picked and banned throughout the event along with other statistics and much more. The program is priced at ten dollars. Which, if you’re playing Dota 2, doesn’t seem that grave an investment given that the game is free. This is the first year I bought one, the prior two I was graciously gifted them, but even if I had bought all three that would mean I’ve spent a grand total of $30 on this game over three years. Considering that games, on average, launch for $60-70 in Canada, I have a few more to support before I even reach a point of overspending on this game.

From these compendium sales, 25% of the proceeds go towards the prize pool. Even more devious, Valve has released several chests filled with special, limited time hats for the event. Purchasing the chests also adds 25% of their cost to the prize pool. If any other company had been behind this scheme, it would be exploitative but since these hats really do nothing other than provide a vanity item to the game and their quality is rather top notch, it’s hard to fault this method. It’s so simple yet effective that, once again, I’m shocked no other developer has followed suit. Even more, these chests are rather reasonably priced (I suppose) at $2.50 a box. Granted, there’s a gambling element that I’m sure people will be quick to criticize as every chest that’s opened has a chance to hold an additional rarer item but it’s so minor that to complain about it feels more petty than anything else.

And even with all that, it comes packed full of goodies that it’s hard to argue with the value of the compendium itself. If you choose not to spend a single extra dollar outside of that original ten, then you get three immortal items, announcer pack, emoticons, wallpapers, taunts, in-game effects, new map type and courier. Granted, most of this stuff wasn’t assured as they were stretch goals achieved as total compendium sales reached specific milestones. Both years Valve has placed the stretch goals, however, they’ve been reached both times so it’s a moot point right now.

Anyway, all this just means that we have a big prize pool. What I really want to discuss is the competition itself.

Last year’s Internationals was good but there were some elements that detracted from the overall experience. I’m glad that Valve addressed those format issues this time around. This year, every team participated in the main event (instead of half of them being eliminated during the group stages a week before the main event. However, the group stages wasn’t just for setting up seeding in the main event. I liked how they made all the games important for the players. First amongst it was that the top four teams of the two divisions began in the upper bracket. This is a big deal since the first games in the lower bracket were a best of one.

That is a big deal.

Most tournament matches for Dota 2, especially if you’re in the later stages of a tournament, are a best of three. Resting your tournament hopes on a single match is incredibly dicey. Especially since the outcome of a game can be heavily reliant in the first ten minutes of the draft. A surprise hero pick can really turn a game and even a few mistakes can spiral into a crushing defeat. In this way, even the strongest teams can drop matches to much weaker or inconsistent teams. It’s a real dice roll and everyone’s going to be fighting to be out of that position.

It also makes those single matches very intense. And, once again, it’s great to see all sixteen finalist teams at the main event even if it’s just for a single match. The only complaint I have for this setup was that we had the lower bracket games after the upper bracket games. This meant, especially with the delays, some of these high stakes matches occurred well into two to three o’clock in the morning. Unfortunately, it was simply not feasible to catch all these matches.

The rest of the tournament, outside of the finals which was a best of five, were best of three sets. Teams in the upper bracket would drop to the lower with loses but if they won their first match in the upper bracket, then they were assured a top six final position. With this year’s division of the total prize pool, Valve went with a more distributed model. Last year saw the lion’s share of the tournament go to the winners with only the top eight teams really earning any significant portion of the money. This year, every team that got to the International got a piece of the pie and I preferred that. And that covetous top six spot meant that your team would get an excess of 1 million dollars.

I have no problem with every team getting paid for this tournament especially since almost half of them had a gruelling gauntlet to get to the tournament in the first place. Only ten of the teams got a direct invite. Four had to qualify from intense regional tournaments and two had to have a wild card tournament to get into the event. Even more than that, the regional tournaments were open to everyone in the world so there was competition from everywhere. Granted, while every Joe could sign up, the teams that got into the actual regional competition weren’t any real surprises and consisted of familiar professional players that weren’t on an invited team.

I’m really curious to hear more of the Major League that Valve is brewing for next year as well. I get the feeling that they prefer not having the International be an invite only competition though how they’ll make the qualifying process more transparent will be interesting to see. Opening up the competition beyond the twelve or so same faces, however, is really good and this tournament showed why.

Part of the compendium fun is trying to predict who would take the title and who would follow them closely behind. I can safely say that no one has correctly predicted the top six teams for the International 2015. That’s because two of the top six teams came in through the qualifiers. One of those teams came in through the wild card slot.

I would be surprised if anyone, in their wildest dreams, would have imagined CDEC getting into the grand finals. It’s unprecedented. The International has had the wild card before but they were usually eliminated rather quickly in the tournament. This year, however, this team of relatively unknown players simply crushed the competition. They came out of nowhere. And that isn’t an exaggeration. I believe four of them had never participated in a tournament before. The one that had did not win. It was a dream story and so unexpected that Valve didn’t even have any introductory video for them like they did all the other teams–and how could they?

But it wasn’t just CDEC that came out of nowhere. Ehome–while not a new face to the International–was resurrected and got a respectable 5-6th position. Complexity was mostly full of new players coming from Heroes of Newerth and they posted a 9-12th spot. MVP Phoenix snagged a 7-8th spot and won many hearts through March’s roars.

Even better, the grand winners were none other than Evil Geniuses themselves. Not only is this their first International victory but they’re also the first North American team to take the aegis as well. They even managed to maintain the surprisingly accurate tradition of having the tournament pass hands back and forth between eastern and western hands. I’m really happy that there hasn’t been a single team to win the tournament more than once. We haven’t even had a single player win multiple Internationals and no one region dominates the scene. I feel it’s really healthy for the scene to have such a diverse and competitive field. For the fans, you can’t know who is going to take the crown and if you’re a fan of western or eastern style Dota, then you’re going to be happy to see either thrive. Maybe even next year we’ll get a few more regions qualifying. I know South America has been on the cusp of making it and with MVP’s respectable placing maybe we’ll see more from the Koreans.

And with all this, I still haven’t even touched on how much better the actual production of the tournament was. We got more Kaci and her interviews. We had better insights into the players and their situations. The arena looked spectacular and that stage with its special effects were incredible. Deadmaus was kind of… odd as a closing celebration but at that point, most of us were simply ready for bed so whatever.

It’s great that Valve is still learning and improving with the tournament and it just keeps getting better and better. It’s hard not to keep interest when everything that was good is even greater than before. We’ll be entering into the post-TI slump were pretty much the entire scene takes a much needed break but hopefully we’ll hear what this new Majors system is going to be soon since it’s going to start shortly. And that’ll give teams very little time to do their team shuffle (which I hope leads to more stability which is still the one element sorely lacking).

It’s never been better to be into Dota.