Dota 2 international 2023: Release date, venue, teams and

The Dota 2 Internationals 2023 is here, and the hype train is at its peak, so we thought, why not jump on this bandwagon and pick you guys as well? This year’s international is going to be a lot different than the previous ones, as we all know that Valve is not afraid of trying something new with Dota 2. This year, they are changing the format a little bit more, which I will cover later on in this blog. For general knowledge, As you guys would know, the internationals are the biggest tournaments in e-sports (prize pool-wise). And for Valve, it’s like their firstborn child, so they pay a lot of attention to it. I‘ll try to uncover all of the things about the 12th Internationals, whether it’s the starting date or its crowd-funded prize pool; whether it’s the tournament’s brackets or qualifiers, this will be the only blog that you’ll need to get your information about the tournament. But before all of that little history about Dota 2’s infamous internationals.

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So just like Valve-sponsored counter-strike majors, Dota 2 also has an official annual tournament called Internationals,” and the unique thing about this tournament is that the prize pool is crowdfunded. And the way the crowdfunding works is very simple. The TI’s battle pass percentages contribute to the prize pool. I’ll talk more about this later on in this blog. And I remind you that the 2021 internationals had a 40 million dollar prize pool that is almost equivalent to the 2022 FIFA World Cup. This makes the internationals the biggest e-sports tournament (prize-money-wise) on the planet. Now let’s talk about the venues, the schedules, the format, the qualifiers, the TI’s battle pass, and a lot more other things.

The venue:  

The venue for the ti 12 is going to be the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, Washington. The arena in itself has a history; it was first opened 61 years ago, in 1962, and as its name clearly indicates, the Climate Pledge Arena serves as a long-lasting and regular reminder of the urgent need for climate action. The Climate Pledge Arena is also home to the Seattle Kraken of the NHL. The arena has a seating capacity of around 18,000 people. But this arena is just for the playoffs, not for the group stage, and obviously not for the qualifiers.

 

Qualifiers: 

Most of you don’t care much about the qualifiers, but a little knowledge about the underdogs of the tournament may be beneficial for you. So the qualifiers are of course regional-based, and Valve confirms SA; WEU gets an extra slot for TI12 regional qualifiers; no Last Chance Qualifier this time around. Now, there is no given explanation why these regions got an extra slot, but who cares? More teams mean more bone-to-bone and sheer blood fights. This time, two regional qualifiers will take place at the same time. The dates for qualifiers are:

NA and China, August 17–21 ( 1 slot for each region)

SA and Eastern Europe August 22 to 26 (2 slots for SA and 1 slot for EE)

Southeast Asia and West Europe August 27 to 31 (2 slots for East Asia and 1 slot for West Europe)

 Now this new slot will be a regular part of The Internationals? We don’t know yet, but let’s see how this unfolds. And if you want to watch the qualifiers, then head over to the PGL’s official Twitch channel; the qualifiers will stream there.

Date, Schedule, and Format:

 The tournament starts in October. The group stage will kick off on October 12–15, the playoffs will start on October 20, and we will get our finalists on October 22. And the finals will be held from October 27 to 29. Here you might see a pattern, and if you didn’t, then I’ll tell you that every stage of the competition is varying from Friday to Sunday, and it’s really a piece of good news. On one side, you’ll get a whole month of competitive Dota 2, and on the other side, if you want to experience the atmosphere of the arena, it is conveniently on weekends, so you can enjoy the ambiance and experience the highest level of competitive Dota with your naked eye. The tournament was first announced to start on October 14, but clearly, there was a margin of mismanagement by Valve, and now everything is working as a clock.

The date and schedule are out of the way; now let’s talk about the format and the big changes that Valve made to this international. The first thing that they interchanged is the name of the stages; now they are calling the group stage and playoffs “the road to internationals,” and the finals are getting called “the internationals.” Now, seemingly, that’s really not a big difference, so let’s bounce.

So traditionally, group stages had ten teams playing for four days to find out which team was going to be placed at which spot in the playoffs, but now they have swapped it to four groups of five playing for two days. This system rattles down the matches that individual teams had to play before the playoffs. Valve is hoping that this will make the matches more fun because, before this, some matches were not that interesting because they didn’t directly affect the standings of teams. This change would make the games more impactful, thus entertaining and thrilling to watch, as we all know, and just like counter-strike majors, the group stages will be held behind closed doors, meaning that there will be no crowd for the group stage.

The playoffs will see 16 teams whittled down to just eight as they battle it out in brutal best-of-three elimination matches. So far, this sounds really fun and entertaining to watch, which left me wondering why they didn’t do this before, but hey! They came sooner rather than later.

And For the final bracket, This has the biggest change: while the previous TI’s traditionally had around 16 teams, this time the number is shredded down to 8. The format is the same as Best of Threes. And if you caught it, they did chop the bracket down to half, from 16 to 8. Now we have to wait and watch how it all unfolds. I personally think that this is going to make TI’s a little more intense and every game a deathbed fight, or it can permanently damage the aesthetics of the international and wouldn’t give the underdog teams their fair shot at the title.

Battle pass:

Over the previous years, the international prize pool was crowdfunded, as I stated earlier in the blog, and it was kind of a tradition that was ongoing for several years. The battle passes that players purchased had a percentage of their price directly going into the prize pool, and hence the internationals had a different touch in the hearts of the players, and this very thing made the 2021 internationals the biggest e-sports tournament ever on the planet (prize pool wise), having a 40 million dollar prize pool, but keep remembering the past would not do good for anyone. “When wounds are healed by love, the scars are beautiful. The quote is directly reflecting the current situation of the internationals. In a blog post, Valve talks about how they are simply canceling the Battle Pass this year. 

The reasoning they are giving is that the battle pass content drop makes the game one-dimensional content-wise, and after the International, the updates took months to arrive, leaving the players high and dry for new content. Now, by eliminating the battle pass, the devs will take the time and make the updates more frequent and inclusive to everyone. Just like everything, this decision also had its bad side, so by canceling the international’s battle pass, the crowd-funded prize pool will take an enormous hit, but Valve knew that most of the Dota 2 player base does not buy the battle pass, and hence they don’t enjoy the cosmetics that come with it. 

While crowdfunding made the Internationals as big as they are right now, it also made the other tournament circuits pretty unexciting. We might see the historically lowest prize pool this time around; the prize has not been confirmed by Valve, but it’s rumored that it’ll be around 3 million dollars. While there are outcomes that can come negative from eliminating the battle pass, or rather just canceling it for this year, there is also a brighter, or rather positive, side to this. Now that the battle is out of the way, the developers will have the resources to put towards the core game updates, which will polish the game; furthermore, the recent 7.33 update can be seen as a new step in the right direction.

The Invited Teams:

A total of 12 teams are getting direct invitations to internationals. As I mentioned above, this time some regions get an extra slot, so this time eight teams will join the group stage by qualifying through the regional qualifiers. Now for which teams got the invitation, I have made a chart for it:

Teams	DPC Points	Team members
BetBoom Team	760	Nightfall, gpk, Pure, Save, TORONTO KYO
TSM	900	Timado, Bryle, Kasane, Ari, and Whitemo
Team Spirit	1020	Parker, DarkMago, Sacred, Scofield, and Stinger
beast coast	1040	Yatoro, Larl, Collapse, Mira, and Miposhka
Talon Esports	1120	23savage, Mikoto, Jabz, Q, and Oli
Shopify Rebellion	1170	Arteezy, Abed, SabeRLight-, Cr1t-, Fly
PSG.LGD	1284	Shiro, NothingToSay, Niu, planet, y`
Evil Geniuses	1470	Pakazs, Chris Luck, Wisper, Matthew, and Panda
9Pandas	1496	RAMZES666, Kiyotaka, MieRo`, Antares, Solo
Tundra Esports	1660	skiter, Nine, 33, Saksa, Sneyking
Gaimin Gladiators	2140	Dyrachyo, Quinn, Ace, tOfu, and Seleri
Team Liquid	2150	miCKe, Nisha, zai, Boxi, Insania

All of the data is taken from Liquipedia. I don’t think I have to simplify or explain the chart, so let’s move on.

Tickets, Where to Watch:

The tickets are not for sale yet. Valve announced that the sale of tickets for the playoffs and finals will go live at the end of August. Last year’s international, which was held in Singapore, was sold out on a single wave. Last year’s playoff ticket price for the playoffs was 68 dollars, and for the finals, the ticket price was around 361 dollars. Now, I don’t know what the price of the tickets will be yet, but we have to wait for the valve’s announcement.

If you are a cozy one and don’t want to spend money and don’t want to leave your house, you can stream the games by going on the PGL’s official Twitch channel, or you can simply watch the matches on your game client.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT INTERNATIONAL 2023