Paul 'ReDeYe' Chaloner has been involved in e-sports for fifteen years as a shoutcaster, host, and presenter. He's seen every part of the business, from amateur bedroom casting to addressing thousands of people on stage. Next week, he'll be hosting his first Dota 2 tournament ESL One Frankfurt. Earlier in the week I spoke to Paul about his expectations for the tournament, how he goes about preparing for an event this big, and how the business of presenting e-sports has changed over the years.

In the run up to presenting something like ESL One, what do you do?

As a host, as I am at ESL One, it starts weeks before, sometimes months before. ESL One for me started back in March. The reason is because I've never done Dota 2 before. It starts with playing the game, understanding the mechanics, the heroes. Generally getting a good feel for the game. I guess I've probably put in about eighty hours of gameplay since March, which is enough to give me a reasonable base of understanding. Alongside that is drenching myself in the community. Understanding the funny stuff, understanding the memes that they use.

Every community is very different. Starcraft is quite intellectual, while the Dota community is much more fun. You really need to be in tune with that. With Dota, it's really important to me that I'm connected to the crowd and the people back at home and I understand what they want from the show. I've found that to be part of a winning formula for hosting well at shows. ESL One's no different.

What stories are you looking forward to see play out at ESL One, given that this is the last big tournament before TI4?

Well we've got all three previous International winners and that's a storyline in its own right. iG are looking pretty strong right now but Na'Vi and Alliance they're the big names but they've not been playing much and when they have been playing they've not been playing that well. For me it's intruiging whether the five that have not got an International title to their name, can they step up a few weeks before TI4 and give these guys something to think about? What does that do to them, going into TI? If Alliance win this at a canter, what signal does that send to everyone else? If they don't win it, and they crash out in the quarters, what signal does that send to them about how much harder they're going to have to work?

If Dendi reaches the semi-final this a smaller, personal story he'll become the highest-earning player in the world. He's currently third, but he's only a few thousand short. He'll become the most successful e-sports player of all time, two weeks before TI4 which will then change all that. It's ironic, really.

Providing that he gets to second place in the International again, he'll probably be fine.

He might well be the first guy to go over a million, as well. We look for stories like that we've got a ton of them, but those are the key ones for me. The big ones.

E-sports presenting requires increasingly more professionalism and craft, but people still come into it through the hobby from their bedrooms. Do you think that will change?

I think so. If you look at the early days of football on TV and radio, they struggled they'd often grab someone who had a good voice or who just loved the game. Murray Walker for instance started in motorbike racing and went to Brands Hatch every weekend to do some commentary from the track. I see some parallels in e-sports. In the last 10-12 years we've got some people who have come from where I was, bedroom shoutcasting, but now we've also got Twitch which more like bedroom TV. That helps them an awful lot, but the entry level is still very low. Not every tournament has the means to pay people and because of that you end up with a potentially lower level of professionalism.

A lot of the guys that come in now get thrown in at the deep end. I was very lucky I had a few years of doing bedroom shoutcasting and a few years of doing video to, er, not many people. These guys get thrown in on a giant tournament and it's their first time and they go out to 150,000 people and mistakes are very big in that environment. I think it's nice that the entry level is low but it does mean that we're still growing.

If you look at sports on TV right now there are a lot more presenters that have come from professional TV backgrounds. We're on that road, and I suppose my fear as an e-sports person is that we either step up or make way for the pros. We either need to help everyone get up to a good level or eventually when events have enough money they're just going to replace us with professional talent. I don't mind that so much you get the professionalism but I'd much rather have the people that are passionate about their game.

What's your feeling about the vast amount of money in Dota 2 this year? What are the ramifications not just for Dota, but for e-sports in general?

I think we have to wait another year before we figure out what it does to the landscape, but overall its a good thing. It's a sea change in how tournaments can fund themselves, because the majority of the money has come from us. It'd be interesting to see how that falls.

If somebody is trying to break into casting doing the squirrel-league stuff is there anything that people regularly get wrong that they could fix to move up a bracket?

This will sound really harsh, but the biggest problem is that most people see the low entry level and think "yeah, I could do that". In their head, it's like singing in the shower. I like singing in the shower and in my head I sound quite good but if I was to sing publicly people would be crying and asking me to leave the area. Shoutcasting is like that. In your head, you think "I would have said this, or what was this guy talking about, he's talking rubbish." After a while you feel compelled to try it you're probably quite good at it!

The problem is that 90% of the people who go onto Twitch or start up an audio channel have the passion they absolutely have the passion and love their game, but don't have the voice or personality to be able to project properly and entertain someone. What they do is maybe too in-depth.

As a play-by-play commentator, your number one job is to grab someone by the balls, hurl them in and make them love what they're watching. That would be my number one thing. Sometimes, people unfortunately aren't born with the right voice or the right personality to be able to do that. They're very good at knowledge, they're very passionate, but they're unable to project that via a microphone. It's the harshest feedback I can give someone, but I'm always very blunt and honest with people.

I think you can work on other aspects you can be phenomenally good at nine or ten of the other skills that you need that may make up for it, but it's very rare.



E-sports' growth is extraordinary but is that the pattern for the future? Is there a ceiling for how big it can get?

I can talk about what I've seen over the last couple of years. It's always been rises and falls. We went through the years of CPL in the early 2000s and they looked like noone could touch them. Then it fell apart, they lost a lot of contracts, their money didn't come in and they didn't pay people. Suddenly ESWC and WCG are the big things, and then they change their models and go more mobile and they fall off in e-sports terms. Then CGS comes along with $50m and it's all on live TV all over the world Eurosport and Sky Sports and we think okay, maybe we've arrived.

Then that falls apart and we're picking up the pieces again. For me it's always been peaks and troughs until the last three years. 2012, 2013 and 2014 have been always upward in almost every area. But specifically, more than anything else, the biggest change for me over the last fifteen years is the advent of Twitch. If we hadn't got Twitch when we did I'm absolutely certain that we would not be where we are today with the size and scope of e-sports.

To answer your question, it can get bigger but I'm not sure that it can sustain quite the sharp rise that it's had in the last eighteen months. But we're getting the kind of viewership that NHL would be proud of in North America. We're way exceeding things like BMX biking at its peak. That's kind of how I look at e-sports as we've got bigger how do we compare to other niche sports?

It also comes back to what we've been talking about for the last couple of years, which is the change in how we consume media. Most people watching Twitch don't even own a television, and if they do they link it up to the internet and watch Twitch on it. We just don't watch TV in the traditional way any more.

We always talk about the future of e-sports as a transition into other form of media "maybe we'll see this on the TV some day!" Do we still want that?

No! CGS was that moment, it was 2007, we were doing live shows from the Playboy mansion. SXSW. We we're on Eurosport, ESPN, Sky Sports. "Hurrah, we've arrived!" But actually, we missed the point. We didn't need mainstream. The mainstream is now coming to us they're looking at what Twitch is doing, what ESL have done. They're studying us, now. They're starting to understand that we're the forerunners. Gamers were the first ones to pick up social media. The first ones to do livestreaming. The first ones to do shoutcasting. The first ones to do internet radio. We're always the first to adopt new technology and do well with it. I guess we're starting to see our reward, now.

In that case, do we need to stop seeing television success as more 'legitimate' than online success?

In my mind, seeing e-sports clips on Sky Sports is still amazing. It would definitely add legitimacy to what we're doing. Do we need it to succeed, though? No. We don't. Five or six years ago we did, and that's what's changed.

Do you have any thoughts on why MOBAs particularly have picked up this head of steam? Pun not intended.

I think it's a coincidence that it's MOBAs in particular that have risen to the top. It's more the model that they're using the free to play model. They were the first games to use it. There wasn't a FPS until Team Fortress 2, which wasn't a massive e-sports game in the first place. CS:GO will hopefully go free to play I wonder how big that could get if it did. I wonder if we'd be seeing multi-million dollar prize pools for that game and I think we would. We've not had a free to play RTS game either, really.

But team games in particular have always gripped e-sports fans more. The success of Counter-Strike is proof of that. There's room for one-on-one games too, not just in RTS but in FPS. We've been waiting a long time for that Quake Live tried but it didn't really work. Epic have just announced that they're going to bring Unreal Tournament back and that's going to be free-to-play. I'm interested to see what they'll do over the next twelve months.

But it's still the payment model more than the game that leads to this kind of success, which doesn't take away from the fact that MOBAs are terrifically fun to play!

Thanks for your time.

ESL One Frankfurt will run from Saturday the 28th of June to Sunday the 29th at the Commerzbank Arena. If you'd like to attend in person, tickets are available online.

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

Yesterday I discovered a phrase that I like. I was reading this article about faster-than-light travel in the Washington Post, an article that includes probably the most exciting picture of a spaceship on the internet at the moment. The article links back to a previous interview between io9 and leading NASA engineer Harold White in which he describes the search for his "Chicago Pile moment".

"Chicago Pile moment" is his own coinage, and refers to the development of the first nuclear reactor in Chicago in 1942. It generated very little power, looked like a stack of bricks, and took up most of a large room but it was proof that nuclear power was a possibility in practical terms. After the Chicago Pile, building a viable reactor was a matter of improving on proven principles. It's the difference between trying to tame the yeti in your garden and trying to prove that the yeti exists at all.

That's a terrible analogy, which is why I'm glad that I can say "Chicago Pile moment" instead. I like the phrase so much that I'm now going to hang a column about internet wizards off it, because, you know, this is the point that I'm at in my life.

I lost a game of Dota 2 last night. This happens quite a lot. Just over fifty percent of the time, if I'm honest. Last night's loss was special, though exciting. If it's possible for a loss to be energising, that's what this was.

The match was between the team I'm in, Hot Dukes who I've written about before, briefly and Dwayne The John Rockson, one of the best teams in the UK circuit. It was our first game in anything resembling a proper competition. The match was a stomp; the XP and gold graphs both look like a ski slope in our opponent's favour. I'd entered us into the ESL Dota 2 Challenge to get a sense of where we fit in the food chain, and we discovered that we were minnows at the bottom of a small pond. But that wasn't what I was afraid of.

My biggest fear was that we'd lose in a way that disproved the possibility of future success. That we'd be beaten by strategies and methodologies that we had no hope of replicating ourselves, that we'd be up against people playing a different game than we were. That our hours of practice would be shown to be totally without purpose. That's how it went the first time I entered a tournament: not just outclassed but discredited, the road ahead veering up sharply and becoming a wall. The team I entered with didn't last long after that because we couldn't wrap our heads around just how bad we were; the number of things we didn't know exceeded the bounds of computable mathematics.

After last night's match my new team watched the replay, howling with embarrassment at some of our incredible blunders. Here are some hot tips that I can share with you as a newly-minted competitive gamer: don't teleport two people onto a besieged tier one tower for no particular reason. Don't wander into the side shop assuming that it'll be fine. Don't put an Ion Shell on the creep that the enemy tower is about to target. Don't dive two towers against a team that knows what a teleport scroll is. If you have to ask whether Chronosphere is off cooldown, it's probably too late. And so on.

We're going to have to try hard to make good on all of this new information. We're going to have to be tryhards, and I'm keenly aware of how much all of this forming a team, giving the team a name that we like, thinking about the team, practicing as a team, having hopes and dreams at all is likely to attract that word. I'm not totally convinced that I care.

Competitive Dota, even at this low level, reminds me of the comedy scene. I made the comparison between Dota and improv only a few weeks after I started playing, and that connection has deepened since. I was an improviser for a couple of years, and my group followed the American method the Chicago style, as it happens and that meant lots of trust exercises and lessons in mutual respect and selflessness and putting the show before yourself and so on.

Stand-up was different: nastier, much of the time, with a lot more ego floating around, particularly among men. A culture of being pointedly dismissive because you were afraid of being pointedly dismissed. Competitive to the extreme. Young competitive men have a habit of cloaking everything they do in irony, because it's uncool to try and uncool to trust and deeply uncool to give a shit.

The reason that this is not something to clasp your hands and look concerned about is that it gets results. It produces sharp, funny, uncompromising comedians just as it creates assertive, entertaining Dota pros. But it is not the only way to get results, which is something that the comedy scene has understood for a while but that pro gaming, with its different balance of age, gender and attitude, has been slower to catch up on at least in the west. With the Dukes I wanted to build a Dota team with the attitude of an improv group, so I pulled together people with a very particular attitude: cooperative, relaxed, moderate. I wanted to prove to myself that it was possible to build a competitive apparatus without the strife and ego and snark that'd put me off e-sports in the past.

One of the first things we did as a team was establish a structure for giving and receiving criticism after a loss. We're not allowed to flame each other, even in the heat of the moment. Criticism has to be simple and direct and grounded in practical instructions. We've not got a perfect track record, but we're getting better at it, and most importantly it's this attitude that has allowed us to absorb last night's big loss and walk away smiling with a plan for the future. No arguments, no ego. Well, some ego.

And that was our Chicago Pile moment. The theory can be reproduced in reality. We lost soundly but understood why, and have arrived at a point where we were capable of quickly and collectively processing a negative result into something we can work with. There's a long road ahead, but at least the road exists - and we've already taken a few tiny steps along it. We've proven the existence of success in microscale, a few flickering watts of winning in a hollow chamber full of fail. The yeti is in the garden.

That is still a shitty metaphor.

Click here to read previous Three Lane Highway columns.

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

Later this month I'll be attending ESL One Frankfurt to cover the tournament for PC Gamer. It's one of the last high profile Dota 2 competitions before The International, and the best chance most European fans are going to get to watch some of these teams play before they win eleventy million dollars at TI4, buy private islands, and vanish.

If you're considering attending then you probably play Dota 2. You know something about the meta, drafting, laning, teamfights, whatever. You're capable of replicating many of the things that you watch professional teams do albeit imperfectly on your own time, and doing so constitutes a big part of your hobby. You watch Dota because you play Dota.

That might seem like an obvious point to make but it is the single most glaring distinction between electronic sport and physical sport, traditional sport, meat sport, whatever you want to call it. Dota 2 spectators are also players because it's easy to be a player, even if it's difficult to play well; the distinction between a professional and the rest of us isn't quite as pronounced as it is in other forms of sport. Spectators learn to look for the innumerable infintessimally small ways in which professional players express their talent over the course of a match: the things they don't do, the space that a small action creates, the late-game impact of an early-game twist of the knife.

It's for this reason that professional Dota 2 is incredibly hard to watch if you don't play the game. The same is true for StarCraft, to an extent, but StarCraft benefits from the fact that is a contest between armies, a unit of competition that most people will understand. Dota 2 is about ghosts and fish people and bears who really hate each other's rock gardens. You can make comparisons to basketball and chess all you like, but nobody has ever included a sapient ball of beep-booping light on a basketball team and Gary Kasparov never won a match from the back of a prowling jungle panther, much to everybody's great loss.

I don't think that this necessarily needs to be the case. The difficulty of watching professional Dota, I mean, not the thing about Gary Kasparov and a panther. That's not going to happen. But it's not impossible for newcomers to get something out of watching ESL One or The International. They just need to be told where to look, and what to look for. In a game that overwhelms with detail, the easiest way to access the good stuff is to refine and simplify.

When heroes fight, look at positioning not abilties. Teamfights are the single most difficult thing for a new spectator to parse. They're an expression of the game's churning background algorithms. Economics and skills smash into one another and create a new variable that is woven back into the match itself. Eventually, you're going to need to understand all of it the abilities being used, the items, the heroes, the phase of the game, all of it. At first, though, look at where people are standing.

Pay attention to the relative positions of opposing heroes. Who's alone or unprotected? Who is moving aggressively forward? Who is being forced to move, either by threat of danger or a particular spell? Much of Dota 2 is forcing the other guy to make a sub-optimal play, and you can detect inefficiency by figuring out which team is leading and which team is reacting. Strip away the map and the characters and the casters for a bit and see the heroes as pieces on a board. If you're familiar with other team sports or strategy games then thinking of Dota in terms of movement makes it much easier to parse. Don't worry about skillshots or stun-stacking or whatever: think about flanking movements, feints, counter-attacks and the rest will follow. If somebody is bellowing "BLACK HOOOLE!", accept that it is exciting and concentrate on the important fact: a whole bunch of characters are now squashed together where they don't want to be.

At the beginning of the game, watch how teams arrange themselves on the map and how they change it up after a few minutes. A lot of arcane thinking goes into the laning phase. Support characters will spend this time doing unfathomable things in the jungle to prepare their teams for the midgame. Carries will wave their weapons in little statacco 'no-no-no-yes' motions before smacking creeps so that money falls out. Midlaners will periodically rush off up or down the river to gather up a magic rune (?) that is actually a glowing coloured rock (?) with magic properties including the ability to refill a bottle with water (?)

You're probably not going to understand any of this on day one, so look at the minimap instead. Treat the early game as one very large, very slow teamfight, and figure out who is moving to get the jump on the other team and who is moving to react. That'll give you a sense of who is leading the game, and their success or failure will almost certainly become the narrative of the match as a whole.

Worry about objectives, not graphs or battles. An objective is anything that a team can claim or destroy to get themselves closer to the enemy ancient. This is normally a tower, and sometimes Roshan. Even in the professional scene you'll sometimes see teams focus on winning fights to the exclusion of the objectives that actually win the game. If it's not obvious who is coming out on top of teamfights, look at who is managing to claim objectives afterwards. You can tell the difference by the way the commentators respond. Teamfights are exciting. People yell. People talk very quickly. Afterwards, though, somebody will say something slowly and clearly about towers lost or space created or Roshan attempts uncontested, and this is the main thing you should be paying attention to at this point.

Concentrate on a caster's tone, not what they're saying. Knowledge is important, and imparting it is a crucial part of a caster's job, but it's not the part that a newcomer is going to find especially useful. Or, to put a finer point on it, game knowledge is best absorbed slowly. If you try to understand everything that gets said you'll be turned off the game. Somebody will say something about someone called "Lunar Russian, Herman the Dominator" and you will have no idea that he's talking about a panther-riding moon lady opting for lifesteal over magic immunity. You don't need to. That's fine. Their tone tells you that this might be a risky thing to have happened, whatever it is: Herman the Dominator might be in trouble. That's all you need to know.

Let casters steer the mood of the game and accept that you'll figure out the details slowly. This is more or less the only way to do it. Besides: it's as easy as it gets. The amount of worthy action occurring on screen is directly proportional to the number of people who are currently screaming. Unless you are in the Korean casting booth during The International 2013. In that case, well, disregard everything I just said.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

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.