Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes silly, sometimes serious column about Dota 2.

It is the most human thing in the world to want to be the coolest person in the room. Competition for status is written into our society and culture. It is why we valourise the assertion of individual will and downplay collective success. It's how teenagers figure out who they are. It's how democracy (sort of) functions, how movies get made, how lies pass into general acceptance. It's a process we can't shake, a process that generates politicians and celebrities and bullies and to the point some really, really shitty Dota players.

Dota 2 is about other people. Its strangest contradiction is that it demands a huge amount of collaboration and selflessness but that the loudest praise will always be reserved for individual people and individual plays. This contradiction is how the same crowd that went wild for fountain-hooking at last year's International can then decry the tournament's eventual champions as rats for making a series of solid if unflashy strategic decisions. We're trained to praise the exceptional over the capable, to chase exceptional victories instead of, you know, victories. This is one of those lazy default positions that demands real thought to conquer. It's essential to get over yourself in order to be any good at Dota, but doing so means shaking yourself out of the notion that a competitive game is there to give you what you want. It means losing the idea that you are the hero.

When a game becomes a sport, it sheds many of the ideas that come with being a commercial entertainment product. In sport, you don't assume that everybody who takes part has a right to win or even a right to have everything their way. These assumptions are common in gaming, however, legacies of the notion that the customer knows best; that the player is the person in charge. Yet in Dota, as in sport, there will always be people who try to buy in to the kind of legitimacy that only practice can really earn; who believe that they can warp sport into a game that they control. The guy who buys lots of Pudge cosmetics and locks him at the start of every game is the same guy who shows up to a tennis court with expensive gear and no idea what he's doing.

Pudge is the most popular hero in the game by an order of magnitude because he's Dendi's hero, even though Dendi rarely plays him competitively; because he represents the lone skillful player rather than the boring collective. Yet locking Pudge is also shorthand for a naive and solipsistic view of the game for exactly this reason it indicates that somebody is incapable of putting the game at hand ahead of the fantasies that they'd like to entertain about themselves.

This is where the nature of videogames and, in particular, Dota's origins as an RPG-RTS hybrid complicate things even further. I used to try to embody myself in every competitive game I played. I had a couple of boring and unoriginal ideas about who I wanted to be the assassin, the lone wolf, the rogue agent and I bullishly stuck to them regardless of my success level or the needs of the people around me. I slipped into scrubland, to borrow David Sirlin's use of the term. I wanted to win on my own terms, not somebody else's.

To an extent, this is reasonable. The promise of an RPG is experiencing adventure and triumph as an idealised version of yourself; the appeal of an RTS is in seeing your strategic mind actualised in the movement of pieces on a board or map. I can look at Dota 2's roster of heroes and see myself in some of them but not others. I might want to be Storm Spirit, and decide that Storm Spirit is who I'm going to play, but then I'm going to learn that I'm really Dark Seer. I'm really Phoenix. I'm really Centaur Warrunner. I'm really Mirana. I'm really whoever the hell my team needs me to be.

Playing as part of an organised team has taught me a lot over the last couple of weeks, but the biggest thing I've learned is that it's wins that matter, not people or plays. Dota 2 is a game about looking at five players and five heroes and figuring out how to arrange them so that the other guy's magical rock garden blows up. That's all there it is to it but resolving that formula requires selflessness and collaboration. It requires individuals to give up their individuality in service to a greater goal, and that is why it is such an uphill struggle when you're queuing for matches by yourself. Individualism is the norm; the dream that this time this time! I'm going to be the hero is the game's most crooked draw.

If you feel like you can only play a particular kind of Dota, force yourself into the unfamiliar. Play Single Draft, or Least Played, or something. If you only want to play a particular kind of Dota, then understand that you're waiving your right to complain when games don't go your way. Dota, like society or any other cooperative enterprise, does not function when individuals are only looking out for themselves. I appreciate that I am probably going to piss off a bunch of libertarians by framing the issue in that way, but I'm okay with that.

The really cool thing about videogames is that they can be used as a way of practicing shifts in behaviour or thinking that can be mirrored in other contexts. The game is victim to all sorts of social and cultural pressures that bring about undesirable traits in its players, but it also exists in dialogue with those pressures it is possible, by learning to put other people before yourself in a videogame, to get some sense of what that change might look like in the rest of your life.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

At the end of June some of the best Dota 2 teams in the world will meet in the 51,000-seat Commerzbank Arena to battle for a prize pool of nearly $200,000. It's sure to be a terrific event for anyone who loves Dota, or watching esports with huge crowds of fans, and we have five pairs of weekend passes to give away.

Teams include Fnatic, EG and International champs, Alliance and Na'Vi. They're playing for a prize pot enhanced by ESL's own version of the Dota 2 Compendium, with its own stretch goals.

The finals take place on Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 of June. The tickets we're giving away will grant access to both days of competition. Alongside the games there will be autograph sessions, sessions with some of the Dota 2 workshop's most talented artists, a cosplay competition and a secret shop full of Dota 2 goodies.

To win a pair of tickets, invent a Dota 2 hero and describe them in under 50 words. Give them a name, and an ability. Please email your answer to tom.senior@futurenet.com with the subject header "ESL One Frankfurt Answer". Winners will be announced next Monday. NB: travel to Frankfurt isn't included as part of the prize.

UPDATE: we've had so many entries, we're going push back the announcement of the winners to Wednesday June 4. You're free to send your answers up until June 4, so there's still time!

If you'd like to buy tickets, you'll find various options on the ESL One Frankfurt bookings page. You can find out more in the event FAQ and on the ESL One Frankfurt site.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes silly, sometimes serious column about Dota 2.

Somewhere, in the offices of a distant videogame publisher, a mid-level business guy is crying. He's crying because a couple of years ago he was all like "we should sell an internet magic computer book for our competitive online game" and his bosses were all like "lol no". He's crying because everyday he has to fill out reports with words like "outreach" and "conversion" on them. He's crying because the Dota community has, at the time of writing, spent $18,867,328 on internet magic computer books.

The Dota 2 community has purchased almost 1.9 million of these books in just shy of two weeks. Every day, 150,000 people equivalent to the entire population of the Dota subreddit think "yes, it's time for another magical computer book, thank you." I am not in a position to question the value of the Compendium. It's really well made! And I own two and a half of them.

But these are still the kind of numbers that make you think. It's hard to explain exactly why 2014's Compendium has been so much more popular than last year's. It's a better product, certainly. You get more items for buying it, the stretch goals have more of an immediate impact on the game itself, and leveling it up is compulsive and carries a tangible if ephemeral benefit. It could just be that a lot of people are willing to drop the price of an indie game on a battle booster and the promise of a special hat.

It could also be that the community really does want The International to be a big deal that all that investment really is targeted at inflating the prize pool to the point where this year's winners will become some of the richest people in e-sports. There's credibility in that. This is after all a game about ego, competition, and victory through sheer weight of numbers: it is not out of the question for the Dota community to sit back and decide to farm out their lategame advantage.

Then there's the outlying chance that we've all been hypnotised. That Valve's experimental psychoeconomics has exploded out across the internet in a great flash of purple light, wallets bursting in its wake.

I think there's probably a little bit of truth in all of these. They all contribute to the notion that The International is an event and that the Compendium, while not a ticket, is nonetheless a way of confirming your participation in that event. People want to belong, and they want to be seen to belong. Valve's genius is evident in the moments when other people get to see just how much everybody else has participated in the countdown at the start of a match where you find out how big everybody's magical internet book is. The community's genius, on the other hand, has been to collectively amplify the importance of the Compendium itself. I didn't even think before buying the Compendium. I just saw it and bought it, because I'm a part of this community and, well, that's what you do.

Without the community, for example, the Arcana item vote would be a transparent means of gathering marketing information a little like those internet quizzes that tie into your Facebook profile and ask you pointed questions about your spending patterns. The community makes this whole process less cynical, turns the vote into something fun where people can argue about whether or not Io should get a face painted on him. The Compendium becomes, thanks to the discussion it creates, part of the life and character of the game.

Then you extrapolate this process across the game's expanding audience, across the ambassadorial role of e-sports and the popularity driven by last year's International and, yeah many internet magic computer books get sold.

The funny thing about success like this is that it makes it very difficult to figure out what the future of the game is going to look like. At the moment, it feels like the good things about the Dota community expand fractally across the scene at every level from the jokes shared by friends who regularly play together to forum communities, reddit, and outwards. Accross nationalities and languages. I wonder about how long that will be the case whether or not we'll reach a point where Dota is so big that this sense of a singular collective effort expressed through the Compendium drive won't be quite so pronounced. That'd be a shame, I guess, but it'd also signify actual global saturation.

It'd be hard to be too angry about not being special any more when Dota games are being shown on television, or projected onto the moon, or something.

This year's International is going to be telling either way. Last year, Valve's Erik Johnson told me in an interview that they were probably going to stick with Benaroya Hall for 2014 that the focus would be expanding the spectator experience online, rather than allowing more people to attend in person. For whatever reason, that's not the decision that was made. This year's tournament is going to take place in a much bigger space, with much more people in the audience and a worse view, inevitably, for some. The money will mean more to the victors and falling short of that money, if Valve stick to the old distribution model, will have an even greater effect on the scene in the year that follows. It's easy to see that $18m investment as one part of a fractal expansion of competitive Dota at every level.

Is this the pattern for the future, I wonder? Endless growth without fractures forming, without oversaturation or compromise? I ask now, because that has never happened before.

If you'd like to read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Well, that was inevitable. Yesterday, the Dota 2 community completed their quest to give Valve all of the money. The prize pool for the upcoming International tournament stood at $6 million, meaning over $4.4 million had been raised from sales of the Compendium sticker-book and its corresponding point system. Now, Valve have unveiled more stretch goals, with potential rewards reaching to the 10 million mark.

Here's what the new stretch goals will unlock:


$6,800,000: Earn 25 compendium points every day by winning a game with the Hero we choose for you.
$7,200,000: Vote for the Hero you'd like to receive a new, alternate voice & dialogue pack.
$7,600,000: Select one of your Least Played heroes and we'll provide a GPM/XPM analysis tool during the game to help you compare your performances with previous games
$8,000,000: Vote for the Hero you'd like to receive a reworked model.
$8,400,000: You'll receive an item that customizes your Multi-Kill Banner.
$8,800,000: Live Broadcasting of the after party with special guest Darude.
$9,200,000: Unlocks new models for your creeps after you've killed the enemy barracks. (Available to all players, not just Compendium Owners)
$9,600,000: A new quest system will be added to track your progress, and earn you rewards as you win. (Available to all players)
$10,000,000: Unlocks the ability for you to perform a voice taunt with your Hero in the early stages of the game.


Will the community spring to an extra $4 million? Based on the trends of these graphs, it's certainly a possibility. But then, only 25% of each Compendium and point sale goes towards the prize pool total. If the $10 million marker is reached, it will mean that approximately $33.6 million will have been spent on International items.

Here's a quick maths question for you. If a copy of Dota 2's Compendium costs $10/ 6 (which it does), and $2.50 of that goes to the International 2014's prize pool (which it does), and that prize pool which launched at a base level of $1.6 million currently stands at over $6 million (which it does), then how much deeper is Gabe Newell's swimming pool tribute to Scrooge McDuck? The answer is lots.* Valve aren't the only winner of this equation, though. The participants of the Dota 2 tournament have a much bigger prize to compete for, and the Dota 2 community have now secured the entirety of the Compendium's stretch goals.

It's not just the amount that's impressive, but the speed at which it's been raised. If you take a look at CyborgMatt's Prize Pool Tracker, you can see the comparison to last year's fund-raiser. In 2013, the community raised $1,274,407 across the entirety of that Compendium's funding period. This year, they've made $4.4 million in just eleven days. If nothing else, it's a testament to how much the community has grown in the year since the game's official release.

The last few stretch goals guarantee Compendium owners new music, environmental effects and base customisation options. Additionally, a 1v1 mid-lane-only matchmaking option will be made available to all players.

As it stands assuming the prize pool's distribution remains the same as last year the winners of The International will make over $3 million. That's great news for whoever proves to be the top team, but, in his most recent Three Lane Highway, Chris argues that all this year's finalists should be getting a percentage of the pot.

*You can apply this same answer to almost any question regarding Valve and money, which should make your end of year exam quite a bit easier.

Every Friday the PC Gamer team turns around, bright eyes, and looks back at the best and the worst of the previous week

THE HIGHS

Wes Fenlon: Playing and reviewing The Walking Dead: Season 2 Episode 3 was the highlight of my week. The episode wasn't quite as strong as episode two, for me, which found a near-perfect balance between interesting conversations, character progression and hard choices. But I loved reviewing episode three because it left me with so much to think about. It really made me question player agency in story-driven games and the difficulty of balancing the player's influence with the character's own personality. I think Clementine is a little too reliable in episode three compared to the adults around her, but Telltale really nailed making every decision a labor of fear and uncertainty.

Phil Savage: Over the last few months, Gone Home's Steve Gaynor has been talking to a selection of game designers, and releasing their conversations as a podcast. It's called Tone Control, and it's now completed its first 'season' with Gaynor taking a break as he works on The Fullbright Company's next project. That makes it a great time to dip into the archive, which is well worth doing if you're the sort of person who likes to spend hours listening to hot, intimate games chat. Which I am.

Notable interviewees include Tim Schafer, Clint Hocking, Ken Levine, Craig Hubbard and more. Also, former PCG writer Tom Francis who isn't a long-standing industry veteran, but did once buy me a whiskey, and so deserves a mention. Whoever Gaynor's talking to, he uncovers some fascinating insights into game design and creation.



Tim Clark: The key art created to accompany the Far Cry 4 announcement is so I dunno, let s say startling that, like Phil, I wasn t even sure whether it was real or a particularly well-executed NeoGAF parody. Only a despotic junta leader of the most supreme self-confidence is able to rock that particular shade of purple.

What isn t in doubt is how glad I am to have a new Far Cry on the way. The heavily trailed Himalyan setting should provide plenty of opportunity to expand on the savage beauty vibe of the previous game, a shooter which has only grown in my admiration as more time has passed since I finished it. But here s the key question: will there be a yeti hidden away in those foothills? And what is the monetary value of a yetiskin wallet? Asking for a friend.

Ben Griffin: There are three things I love in this world. The first is Dark Souls. The second is my reflection. And third is FIFA. But for the purposes of this bit, let s just say third is The Sims (ordinarily it s fifth, behind Christmas and the smell of cut grass). I ve wasted my actual life playing the last three over the last 15 years, and yes before anyone points it out, I m bitterly aware of the irony.

The trailer shows off the revamped character creator which does away with clunky menus, a range of body shapes from slim and ripped to morbidly obese and depressed, and a feature that lets you finetune wrinkles. Unlike last time around, it s now possible to create someone without giving them a great honking moon face, and that s what I m most excited about. Now I can make my Sim as appealing as me. Also, it s not always online like SimCity was, so you might even get to play it at launch!



Tyler Wilde: I m really happy to see player communities band together to keep old multiplayer games going, as they have with the Battlefield series. I could wag my finger at EA for not fighting to keep its old games running post-GameSpy shutdown, but that s a dead end our effort is better spent praising the players who are knocking down barriers to keep playing the games they love.

Chris Thursten: Dota events always feel like Christmas, but The International is something else. Super Christmas? Let's go with 'Super Christmas'. The Compendium the in-game betting book that helps to crowdfund the tournament's prize pool is the best expression of what Valve are trying to do with the game. It's been great to watch the community take ownership of Dota as an e-sport, whether that's finding more inventive ways to present the qualifier games or inflating the prize pool north of $5 million. As much as I'd like to see that prize pool distributed more evenly, that's a small gripe with an otherwise-great system.

I've also enjoyed watching North American Rejects stampede through the American qualifiers. If you're one of the people on reddit who questioned my praise for the quality of play in that tournament this week, well, it was NAR I was referring to. The US has always struggled to pull together a team capable of living up to the hometown support they get at The International, and between EG and NAR this might just be the year where those chants of 'USA!' 'USA!' get heard outside of the lower bracket.

Read on for our lows of the week





THE LOWS

Tyler Wilde: I m disappointed by NPCs across all of gaming, something I ve been thinking about after reviewing Bound by Flame. I spend hours and hours with these characters talking to them, fighting alongside them and yet they re so often just encyclopedias of information about my current quest, or the same greeting over and over. Even the most complex of them usually stare blankly at me when I stop talking, or can t remember anything that wasn t baked into their database of dialogue. They have no brains.

I loved bonding with my crew in Mass Effect, and the way Telltale makes silence a choice. These are little steps, but NPCs still haven t changed all that much in the past 10 years. More than improvements in graphics, I hope for more experimentation with how we interact with AI characters, especially where it leans toward simulation. I m not ridiculously asking for true artificial intelligence, or guards who can beat the Turing test, just for characters who exhibit the illusion of intelligence well enough to surprise me now and then.

Tim Clark: The Division being delayed until 2015 is one of those things that, when it happens, seems so obvious that you have to take a mental inventory to check that it hasn t actually happened already, but you forgot in all the unexcitement. Which isn t to say I m not excited by the game. I am muchly. I just never for a moment thought anything that looked so ambitious could be turned around in time for a release date this year.

The same goes for The Witcher 3. As soon as you got a sense of that project s sprawling scope, you knew there were two hopes of it coming out on time. And the other was called Bob. There s probably a direct inverse relationship between the level of polish demonstrated by vertical slice demos of new games, and the likelihood of any of the other content existing at the time they re initially shown. Still, not that we should complain. Turns out there are quite a few other things to occupy ourselves with in the meantime



Phil Savage: Which version of Watch Dogs do you want. I've decided just now, at random that I'd like the basic game, the White Hat Pack, and the Conspiracy Mode Digital Trip DLC. Let me consult the big chart to see if... Well, shit.

Buying AAA games is becoming an increasingly bizarre experience. I get why pre-orders matter to publishers, and why that leads to a series of exclusive deals made to retailers, but none of it seems to benefit the consumer. That's because, in my experience, these exclusive digital bonuses remain at best pointless, and at worst detrimental to the experience. In Watch Dogs, each outfit pack confers a bonus and, while that doesn't sound like a big thing, it has the potential to undermine the balance of the game. To make it worse, Watch Dogs has asymmetrical multiplayer. It may mean that, if I'm invading another player, I'm directly at a disadvantage for not having bought my copy through Game, or Uplay, or while riding a horse backwards through Tesco. Whatever you have to do to get the extra vehicle hitpoints of the Club Justice Single-Player Pack .

Wes Fenlon: I'm torn on this one. Steam has added more games in the first half of 2014 than it did in the entirety of 2013. That's a ton of games, and I'm sure Early Access and Steam Greenlight are playing a big role there. Is it too many games? Not necessarily I want everyone to have an opportunity to get a game on Steam but it highlights how big an issue curation is going to become in the near future.

Valve is taking steps to make it easier to find games. Devs are able to put their games on sale whenever they want. User reviews now indicate that a game was reviewed in Early Access. But the Steam front page still mostly drives people to what's on sale and what's currently selling well. There are so many games, it's going to become increasingly hard for the average user to browse and discover something new. Games are going to get lost in the shuffle. More shovelware is going to slip through the cracks. Valve's going to have to do more curation to ensure Steam stays a useful storefront.



Ben Griffin: What is this I don t even probably best describes my reaction upon watching what little of Bombshell s overlong, meaningless trailer I could stomach. It s a game about a bomb defusal expert called Shelley Bombshell Harrison, so already the metaphors are a being complexly layered. Does she like bath bombs, too? How about photobombs? No? Just the explodey kind. Like Mass Effect s Jack wearing a version of Ripley s Power Loader as reimagined by Victoria s Secret, Shelley enjoys "kicking ass, motorcycles, and kicking ass on motorcycles." Kinda like how I enjoy playing games, sitting in my chair, and playing games while sitting in my chair.

If you re smelling Eau de Nukem, your nose isn t wrong. This was a 3D Realms joint (in collaboration with developers Interceptor Entertainment) called Duke Nukem: Mass Destruction until Gearbox acquired the Duke Nukem IP in 2010 and tried to sue the everloving stuffing from them. See how far into the trailer you can get, if you must. It s a rubbish, dated top-down shooter with a rubbish, dated protagonist. Awesome name though. Bombshell. Strong.

Chris Thursten: This is one of those things that gets you widely derided in certain parts of the internet, but it s been on my mind this week and it might form the basis of a future Three Lane Highway column. In short: Twitch chat is one of the worst things about e-sports, and the only thing about the hobby that I find actively embarassing. This has been particularly apparent in the Hub streams being run for the TI4 qualifiers, Big Brother-style 24-hour shows where Dota personalities live and watch the games together while surrounded by kittens. It s a cool idea, but it s brought out a really ugly side of the community. The comments that get directed at women in particular make me embarrassed to associate myself with the scene.

Someone s probably going to argue in the comments that this is just how things are on the internet, but I don t see that as an excuse. It s exclusionary, unprofessional, hurtful and lame and it s holding back the game that these people purport to love. This might be as effective as yelling at a cloud, but seriously, guys: grow the fuck up.

Now you can get in the mood for DIGITAL SPORTS! with the help of the smooth, comforting and somewhat sociopathic Narrator from The Stanley Parable. As teased all those months ago, his gently mocking wit is now available as a Dota 2 announcer pack. Sure, it's not hard to make fun of an incomprehensible game about internet wizards, but it takes skill to do it and still make the game's fans want to give you money.

The announcer pack was made by The Stanley Parable creator Davey Wreden and the Narrator's voice actor Kevan Brighting. According to Wreden albeit jokingly it aims to make Dota 2 "not only understandable but even downright accessible to the common layperson". Has it succeeded? If you'd rather not experience the pack in a live Dota environment, you can get a full preview at the Dota 2 wiki.

If you're so entrenched in Dota 2 that you don't know what The Stanley Parable is, you can find out via a 50% weekend sale. The Stanley Parable Announcer Pack is out now, and will be 10% off for 48 hours after release.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes silly, sometimes serious column about Dota 2.

Last year I arrived in Seattle a couple of days before The International began. Being ahead of schedule meant spending a few afternoons hovering around the hotel where the players were housed, watching the group stages and trying to grab interviews with whoever I could. Some of that material ended up in the feature that I subsequently wrote about the tournament, but a lot of it didn't.

Every player I spoke to was keen to point out that the prize money wasn't as important to them as being able to say that they were the best in the world at something. Despite that, many players felt dissatisfied with the way the prize pool itself was divided up.

Last year, sixteen teams took part in The International. First place took 50% of the prize pool, second place took 22%, and subsequent placements earned 10%, 7%, 4% and 1.5% until 8th place, after which point teams went home with nothing. Finishing 7th and 8th nonetheless earned Liquid and Fnatic $43,116 each, the kind of money that would make for a grand prize in any other tournament.

This year's Compendium has been incredibly successful. Less than a week after its launch, the crowdfunded prize pool is scraping the underside of $5 million. That's crazy. According to the numbers on Cyborgmatt's tracker, that means that the 7th and 8th place finishers at this years tournament could be making upwards of $75,000 - as long as Valve stick to the same distribution pattern as last year.

I'd like to argue that they shouldn't. Last year, several of the players I spoke to pointed out that the lack of a prize for 8th-16th place finishers was a missed opportunity. Maintaining a steady income is a huge challenge for pro gamers, and much of what Valve have done with Dota 2 has been done with the aim of solving that problem. Compendium cards, pro player cosmetic sets, pennants: Valve want to find a way to build a stable business environment for e-sports, without assuming central control over the scene as Blizzard did with StarCraft II.

Part of the answer, I think, is establishing prizes for every finisher at The International. Simply getting to the tournament is a huge achievement - the quality of play in the American qualifiers this week testifies to that - and rewarding that achievement with guaranteed cash doesn't seem like it would dilute the competition. Nobody is going to be happy with $10,000 when they could be winning a million-plus. And the money would give teams an incentive to stick together in the months that followed the International, avoiding the spate of dissolutions that struck teams like Dignitas and Mousesports after they bowed out of the tournament early.

Distributing 0.25%-0.5% of the prizepool to the bottom eight finishers wouldn't put a dent in the vast amount of money that the Compendium is capable of raising. We're talking about prizes vastly in excess of what is available to teams throughout the rest of the year. This is an opportunity to distribute that money more evenly across the scene as a whole, using the draw of The International to inject funds into teams that otherwise might not get another shot at a big title. The money isn't everything, at the end of the day, but it's a problem - a problem that Valve are in a position to solve.

If you enjoyed this article, you can find more of Chris' Dota columns by clicking here.

The Compendium is a magical tome filled with knowledge, riches, and small pictures of people who are absurdly good at Dota 2. No wonder then that the community has been snapping up copies in record numbers. The digital sticker-book-companion to The International 2014 has upped the tournament's prize pool to over $4 million a more than $1.24 million increase over the last International. Impressively, it's done all this in under 5 days.

As was the case last year, The International prize pool starts at a base level of $1.6 million. For every Compendium sold, $2.50 is added to that total. This year because Valve enjoy a smooth flow of money into their bank account a point system has also been introduced. For every 100 points a Compendium owner earns, they'll receive extra immortal treasure, custom in-game effects, bonus Loading Screens and an increased Battle Point Booster percentage. Points can be earned by watching matches, picking favourites and making tournament predictions within the Compendium, or by paying cash, with 25% of point sales boosting the prize pool.

In addition to providing more money for competition winners, raising the prize pool also unlocks stretch goals that give benefits to Compendium owners and the Dota 2 community at large. So far, the following bonuses have been unlocked:

$1,800,000: The International 2014 Battle Point Booster (Battle Point bonus increases as the compendium levels up)
$2,000,000: Portfolio of Heroes Triumphant (Bonus Loading Screens)
$2,200,000: Ability to vote on which hero should receive the next Arcana.
$2,400,000: A new Compendium-themed HUD.
$2,600,000: Ability to vote on the participants of an 8 player Solo Championship at The International.
$2,900,000: All Random Deathmatch game mode available to all players.
$3,200,000: A Treasure containing Valve created Immortal Items. Every 10 compendium levels grants an extra Treasure.
$3,500,000: Access to special emoticons that can be used in Dota 2 chat.
$4,000,000: A Mini Pudge courier. (Level 50 compendium owners have an alternate skin)

Future stretch goals include new music, a 1v1 mid-lane matchmaking mode, bonus environmental effects, and at $6 million the ability for Compendium owners to customise a building on their team's base. For more, head to Valve's Compendium micro-site.

The International's American qualifiers started yesterday, beginning a process that will determine the invitational tournament's final five teams. The International will begin July 8th.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes silly, sometimes earnest column about Dota 2. The following was originally posted on the Three Lane Highway Tumblr in September 2013 - we're republishing it today as Chris is currently on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic. Enjoy!

In 2005 the late David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech to graduates at Kenyon College, Ohio. I m going to quote a few paragraphs of it below, but before I do I want to lay out why it is relevant to you, a person who presumably came here to read about Dota.

The majority of the things you need to learn to be good at Dota are not things that will make you good at real life. You are probably never going to land a sick Sacred Arrow on a fleeing mugger. You won t place wards at strategic locations around your cubicle to let you know when you should be alt-tabbing away from Reddit. You re not going to invest an unexpected tax return - sensible as it might seem to do so - in a courier upgrade and the first parts of a Mekansm.

But game knowledge isn t the sum of what makes a person - or a team - successful. There s another skill ladder that every player needs to climb, and its rungs are the principles of empathy, leadership, and mood-management that are broadly ignored, from time to time, by everybody, and that if performed well indicate that you re making some progress as an actual human being in addition to improving your wizardsmanship.

Dealing with abuse from other players is something that newcomers need to deal with, but learning not to become an abuser is just as important. Dota is an emotive, social game, and anger and frustration and the urge to blame are inevitable by-products of playing it. Improving means learning to see anger and frustration for what they are - hindrances - and developing strategies for dealing with them. Indulging in rage because you feel bad is as detrimental to your team as not buying wards because you can t be bothered.

The reason that most players don t bother to filter their emotions is simple: it s hard, and it requires constant work. Everybody slips up, even people who spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. The funny thing about learning to see anger as a personal failure is it makes you more aware of just how many mistakes you really make. Your skill doesn t improve in a straight line: it s a sinusoidal wave, and when you learn to forgive yourself for the odd lapse of judgement you ll naturally become more able to extend this sympathy to others. It s a virtuous cycle, equivalent to the vicious cycle that makes players rage at their teammates, wreck morale, throw the match, rage at their team mates, and so on, and so on.

It helps to establish rules for yourself. Structured thinking allows you to readily find a response to a crisis when what you really want to do is yell at someone. What form those rules take is something that you ll have to figure out for yourself, based on the level you play at, the people you play with, and your own bad habits. For the sake of demonstration, however, here are mine.

Never begin a sentence with why , or frame criticism as a question.

Consider the absurdity of yelling why would you do that?! at somebody who just made a mistake. They don t have an answer. If they knew enough to avoid making a mistake, they wouldn t have made a mistake. It s far more likely that they misclicked, or weren t aware of something crucial - an imminent enemy TP, an ult on cooldown, a ganker suddenly going missing from another lane. In that moment you can either try to understand their mistake or you can interrogate them about it to make yourself feel better: I suggest the former. Why would you do that!? is rhetorical flatulence, and it s completely appropriate to roll your eyes at people who noisily indulge themselves in it.

Talk about what you need to do, not what you should have done.

Lectures aren t solutions. The time to explain ideal teamfight strategies or item builds is later, after the game, if you play regularly enough with your teammates to make that worthwhile. In-game, suggest simple, next-five-minute plans and do so calmly. Okay, guys, let s focus on getting BKBs up beats why the fuck don t you have a BKB? It s core before X, and Y, and Z every single time.

Offer as much praise as criticism.

Okay, it s going to shit. The match is running long and your team s early-and-mid-game advantage is starting to peter out. It s clear that Spectre doesn t know what they re doing - a Vanguard and a Crystalys at forty minutes, really? - and the enemy has just slapped a Roshan attempt out of your hands with a solid teamfight victory. It s time to find another plan, and that probably means asking people to correct their play. Tell Spectre to go and farm, if you need to, but mark that in your mind as a negative strike against team morale - and start looking for a positive to match it with.

Maybe you pick up a few free kills on an enemy support because of Jakiro s excellent aggressive warding. Say something! It might not turn the game around, but it makes a difference. It establishes that it is still possible to do good when most players will be reaching for the FF keys.

We think of Dota matches as being won on economic momentum - gold, kills, towers - but they re also won on psychological momentum. If you burn a load of goodwill by putting someone down, start figuring out how you re going to earn it back.

Be honest about your mistakes, learn from them, and move on.

This is the one I struggle with the most. Being forthright when you ve fucked up is great for a number of reasons. It establishes that you re actively thinking about your play, that you re willing to improve, and it defangs other peoples ability to pin the entire match on your failure. What comes next is continuing to play as if it didn t happen, making whatever adjustments you need to make and then choosing to think of the game ahead as winnable. I m sorry, guys, I m having the worst game ever is as much a self-serving indulgence as what the hell are you doing?! , really.

Figuring this stuff out is one of the coolest things about learning to play Dota. Not only is it transferable to everything else you ll do in life, but it hooks into philosophical principles that apply to the game s mechanics as well. The principles I ve listed above require engagement, awareness, and an active choice to play better. The social challenge of Dota requires a separate but parallel set of skills, another form of game-sense that allows you to take everything your brain can do with regards to perception and analysis and communication and apply it to more effectively wizarding the fuck out of five other people.

Next time you bash out FFS and ping a teammate s recent corpse fifteen times, consider that you re not only throwing the game but your potential enjoyment of the game. You are choosing the see the game only through the narrow lens of the part of yourself that is still two years old.

This lane goes both ways, of course. Being a good teammate will make you a more empathetic person, and learning to think more critically about your own responses to the world will make you a better teammate. So that s why you should go and read or listen to David Foster Wallace. There are lessons you can apply to your Dota performance that fall well outside the remit of any in-game guide.

Here are those paragraphs, by the way.



The point isn t that you should be chasing love and fellowship with everyone that matchmaking decides to party you with. It s that you have options. The urge to dispense blame indicates that you re resting in your lazy default position, blinkered by a totally natural but also totally surmountable habit of positioning yourself at the blameless centre of any given crisis. You have the power to not do that. You can place wards in the jungle of your own mind - and you should, because no-one else is going to do it for you.

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