DOTA 2 Podcast: The International 3
Intro: Welcome to The Secret Shop, which for now is a one-off podcast Kyle and I are doing to wrap up The International 3, give our impressions and hopefully give our fellow StarCraft fans a window in DOTA2 eSports.
The Facts
According to BBC News:
"The Seattle Times reports that about 1,700 spectators attended, while an online video stream attracted as many as 600,000 simultaneous views at one point.”
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The Games
The standard mode for competitive play, in Captain's Mode the two team captains go through phases of banning heroes from the pool and picking heroes for their team. After all 10 heroes are selected, the players select which player they will be playing as from the five their captain has selected. The captain has 40 seconds to make their picks and 30 seconds to select a ban when it is their turn, or else they will dip into their team's allotted 110 second bonus time. If the bonus time runs out before a pick, a random hero will be selected. If it runs out before a ban, no hero will be banned.
Questions about professional play vs. online pugs:
Why so much roshan?
What is the advantage of jungling?
Game 1 :
Navi looking very confident in the booth. Alliance is stoney faced.
A “rush” from Navi, Alliance owns.
Game 2:
Navi Smash
Game 3:
Some new picks. Miranda, Razor, Ogre
Alchemist picks again.
Bear and bloodlust strat.
Na’vi just too powerful.
Game 4:
Night Stalker.
Seems to be working for them.
Alliance take it.
Game 5:
Epic game.
Rosh pit madness with a puck steal.
Everyone just sitting on huge banks and the importance of buy backs.
Sneak attacks, multi-lanes and a tp cancel win alliance the game.
There was no triple TP (Town Portal) Cancel =(
Via Reddit user DinoMC:
“It sure looked like it live, but actually only Enigma got his tp cancelled during the big push mid.
TA never had a scroll to begin with, and Alchemist could TP just after the coil but decided to chase Puck instead.
32:35 ingame time if you wanna check (Edit: 42:22 replay time)
The double cancel later on was amazing though.”
On the subject of things that are totally awesome and actually did happen, Dendi’s TP was canceled at 0.0 during the final game.
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The Rumors
Some rough math by the DOTA2 Reddit populous estimates over 1 million concurrent viewers.
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TI3 Fallout
Erik Johnson from VALVE gave IGN a TI3 rundown
IGN: Do you find that most of the feedback comes from the fans as players of the game, or as watchers of the game, or…
Erik: Our fans are, especially as a crowd, pretty well informed about everything – literally everything – we do with Dota 2. They give us feedback on the reporters that we hire for this event, on how we manage lines for entrance into the event, you know, what merchandise they want, how they want it edited together from the production truck, and not like, drive-by comments, they’re pretty well-informed thoughts on what they want the production of this event to look like, and that’s how we want it – it’s their event.
And it’s interesting to us, because, you know, people don’t watch the Superbowl and talk about those things. So we don’t really know what that means, but it’s definitely meaningful.
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In Relation To Starcraft
What The International 3 did right
r/StarCraft - Lessons from Dota 2 and The International
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Kyle’s Questions
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