On behalf of the DotaGAF Community, let me welcome you to the Dota 2 International 2015 thread, our annual celebration of Valve's multi-million dollar hat festival!
HYPETRAINJ GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!1!!!
I've done this OT for the last 3 years because I love Dota and these threads are always fun.
I'd like to start this year's OT with an interview I did with the writer of the first
International thread - EviLore
Q: In my experience Dota is an extremely polarizing topic on GAF; people either hate it or love it. I was wondering how do you describe Dota to other people?
EviLore: I don't even try to describe it to laypeople. At its simplest conceptually, though, it's a competitive team-based multiplayer game. To an otherwise uninitiated gamer, it's a genre unto itself. Nothing quite prepares you for the onslaught of subtle technical mechanics and the sheer size of the knowledge base you'll be tapping into as you try not to suck. It's a game wherein, with an open mind, you'll still be learning things on a daily basis after 1000 hours of playtime, and that's not even taking into account the way each patch rewrites the status quo.
Q: For the upcoming TI5 are you cheering for or watching any particular players or teams?
EL: I don't have any team loyalty this year, especially with all the roster changes coming out of TI4. Mostly I'd like to see an exciting contest for the final day (with daring feats like Dendi's Roshan attempt with TA against Alliance) and not something one-sided and clinical. But I think we'd all like that.
Q: You wrote the OT for TI1 and the prize pool was a crazy-at-the-time $1.6M and now we are heading past $16M for TI5 - an over tenfold increase. What are your thoughts on Valve’s crowdfunding techniques?
EL: They know what they're doing. Valve is gathering new data and evolving ways to extract money from the community each year, sure, but we should always remember that at its core Dota 2 is a free game with the most consumer friendly, competitive scene friendly F2P implementation of any high profile game. So they can set their sentient financial analyst AI to figure out the best ways to sell hats and treasure chests and I'm all for it. It is so consumer friendly, in fact, that it feels good to buy into some of the cosmetics just to support the game when I see those logged hours pile up, and in the case of The International, to support the players.
Q: Have you been privileged enough to meet or chat with the mysterious individual known as IceFrog?
EL: Only he would be able to answer that question.
Q: Any shoutouts or final words you would like to give?
EL: GLHF
***This thread tends to be a reaction thread to live events that happen in-game and moves extremely quickly but feel free to ask questions about schedules, teams, hats, or anything.
Someone will be glad to help you or you can
PM me
Key Resources:
Valve's TI5 site
Liquipedia's TI5 site
Reddit (/r/dota2)
Gamepedia's Dota 2 wiki
Reddit TI5 Survival Guide
***If you are new to Dota 2:
- Welcome! Please feel free to ask anything big or small here
- Use the newcomer-friendly audio streams. The casters will try to explain the game specifically for new players
- Reddit (/r/dota2) currently has up their weekly
Stupid Questions thread where you can ask
anything anonymously and get an answer
-
League of Legends focused Guide to Dota 2
***If you want to spam reaction gifs and twitch emoticons GAFer Saprol has designed a excellent extension for your convenience:
Step 1
Firefox users - Install
Greasemonkey
Any other browser - Install
Tampermonkey
Step 2
Install
this extension
Step 3
You should have this selection that appears when you Preview Post, click on an image to add that image script to then end of your post
***TI5 is largely crowdfunded.
If you are interested in funding the tournament Valve sells a digital book called the TI5 Compendium, which costs $10 in Steam funds.
The Compendium gives you access to several in-game rewards listed
here.
If not, that is ok too because everything about watching TI5 is free!
Day 3
LB2 VP vs BO3 (loser eliminated)
LB2 iG vs BO3 (loser eliminated)
Winner Bracket2 BO3 (loser goes to Lower Bracket)
LGD vs CDEC
http://i.imgur.com/UIjDi0o.png
http://i.imgur.com/iYLyWvB.png
Winner Bracket2 BO3 (loser goes to Lower Bracket)
EG vs Secret
http://i.imgur.com/gJMoKT6.png
http://i.imgur.com/0f5fulA.png
Day 4
LB3 (loser eliminated)
LB3 (loser eliminated)
LB4 (loser eliminated)
All-Star
Day 5
LB4 (loser eliminated)
UB5 (loser goes to LB)
LB5 (loser eliminated)
Day 6
Semifinal
Grand Final
