What will soon be one of the biggest tournaments in eSports history, The International 2015, will take place in the KeyArena, Seattle on August 3rd – 8th with a total prize pool of $14,000,000 and increasing. The first round of tickets was sold out after only 6 minutes of release, while many complain they couldn’t get tickets even before that.
The initial pool prize from valve was $1,600,000. However, players can support the tournament by purchasing a Compendium allowing them to unlock gimmicks and in-game vanity items. According to wiki.teamliquid.net 25% of the Compendium sales are collected into the pool prices while another 25% goes to the creator of the vanity item. Currently around $12,000,000 of the pool prize comes from compendium sales. The winning team of the tournament will receive almost half the pool prize. The other half is distributed among the other teams based on where they finished.
Ten of the most prestigious teams will be directly invited into Ti5 leaving 6 more spots up for grabs. They are obtained by winning the regional qualifiers; North America, Europe, China, SEA. The last 2 spots are for the regional qualifier’s runner ups that will go into the playoffs. After a round robin the bottom 6 teams the will be eliminated while another 2 will be eliminated from phase 3 brackets. The format for the main event in KeyArena will be the Double elimination of 8 teams.
What’s controversial is the new patch 6.84c applied 2 months ago will be the version used in the tournament. The patch introduces a few new items such as octarine core and lotus orb, hero aghanim upgrades, Vladimir’s offering affecting ranged heroes and many more small changes applied to both heroes and items. It is literally game-changing. This means that every team will go back to reevaluating nooks and crannies and possible strats. Finding out what works to professional teams is crucial as their salaries are based on their tournament earnings.
The item named ‘Octarine Core’ changed the Meta completely. Before 6.84c heroes like ‘sniper’ or ‘troll warlord’ were commonplace for a carry as they could sit back and constantly farm gold from creeps. 6.84 changes include the decreased amount of gold from creeps making the game more team fight orientated. This lead to a more aggressive play style for supports as well. A greedy support like ‘enigma’ farming the jungle being less efficient will be replaced by supports like ‘lina’, a hero who can be effective from level 1.
An aggressive game will make it increasingly difficult for farm orientated heroes like ‘sniper’ and ‘troll warlord’ who supposedly don’t have an early escape mechanism to run from ganks, making them a liability for the entire game. Instead they will be replaced by heroes like ‘gyrocopter’, ‘alchemist’ or ‘slark’ who can come online faster with their nukes and abilities. 6.84c has also been called the magic Meta because of the new ‘octarine core’. It gives 25% spell time reduction and also 25% spell lifesteal. This produces a massive change allowing spell based heroes to heal part of the damage they give off, letting them last longer in important team fights. In this new Meta heroes like ‘Leshrac’, ‘Zeus’, ‘Lina’ and ‘Undying’ have become core heroes rather than supports, something that has never been seen before in the history of Dota.
