The International is fast approaching! After months of competition, twelve teams have secured their invites to TI, with eight more set to join them after the upcoming regional qualifiers.

The International is watched by millions, from casual players to seasoned veterans and retired pros. Every year we look for new opportunities to make The International even more exciting, entertaining and accessible than ever before. This year, we've focused on improving the viewing experience for a broader range of fans. While no format can be perfect, we're always trying to strike a balance between things that have worked in the past and things that could work even better in the future.

So with TI 2023 on the horizon, we wanted to walk you through every detail of the format changes we’re trying out this year, and our thought process behind them.


One obvious difference this year is the event schedule. A live competition is always more exciting when people can watch it as it’s actually happening, not hours or days later, and we wanted to make it easier for more people to do that.

To that end, we're scheduling nearly every game over a Friday-through-Sunday weekend break. It'll take three weekends to fit in all the games for a twenty-team tournament — a weekend for Group Stage (October 12-15), a weekend for Playoffs (October 20-22), and a weekend for The Finals (October 27-29).


As a landmark esports event, The International attracts viewers who have never played Dota, or even watched a live gaming event. We hear a consistent message from first-time watchers: that TI is exciting, but can sometimes feel overwhelming. There are so many matches happening, new viewers can find it difficult to understand which to focus on.

So, this year we've split "The International" into two distinct phases, with two distinct names: The Road To The International, which includes Group Stage and Playoffs and captures all of the drama of pitting the best 20 Dota teams against each other until only eight remain; and The International itself, where those final eight teams battle to claim the Aegis of Champions.

So if you're already invested in Dota (and if you've read this far, that’s probably a yes), and want to watch every step of every journey, you'll still start it with The Road to The International — you can watch the Group Stage as you usually would, and the Playoffs will still be played live in front of an audience. And if you're new to Dota or The International, and just want to experience the biggest moments of the event, we’ve made it clearer what they are and when you can see them.


In the old Group Stage format, two groups of ten teams would play Round Robin over the course of four frantic days, usually five games at a time. This meant that each team was playing so many matches that early games just didn't feel meaningful. It also meant that a lot of matches in the final days of Group Stage were literally meaningless, because they wouldn’t actually affect the final standings. The challenge, then, was to come up with a Group Stage format that heightened the stakes of each and every game.



In the new Group Stage format, instead of two groups of ten teams playing for four days, four groups of five will now play for two, with the bottom team in each group getting eliminated. This means that every team will now only play four games instead of the previous nine, making every game impactful to a team’s final standings in the group.

Additionally, the second half of Group Stage is now composed of head-to-head matches between the remaining 16 teams, which will decide which teams enter the Playoffs in the Upper Bracket.


Playoffs kick off on Friday, October 20th at the Seattle Convention Center’s Summit, featuring the top eight teams fighting for the four Upper Bracket slots of The International. Saturday and Sunday will consist of a series of elimination matches, with the four survivors making it into TI’s Lower Bracket. Unlike previous years, all matches will be played in a best-of-three format.




The International will feature the final eight teams of the event, competing in Climate Pledge Arena October 27th to 29th to determine which team is the best in the world. Friday and Saturday will feature four best-of-three matches each day, and Sunday will feature a battle between the top three teams — first in the Lower Bracket Finals, and finally in the best-of-five Grand Finals.




We’re thrilled to bring you year twelve of The International. It’s our goal to make every incarnation as exciting for invested fans as it is welcoming for newer players.

Tickets for both The Road To The International’s Playoff Stage at The Seattle Convention Center’s Summit, and The International itself at Climate Pledge Arena, will go on sale in the second half of August. We'll post additional details as soon as we get them.

Introducing Between the Lanes, a new blog feature where we let members of our development team walk through some of the challenges, bugfixes, and occasional happy accidents we encounter while working on a game as unique as Dota.

Every Dota update gives us a chance to introduce new heroes, items, and abilities into the game — not to mention tweak countless old ones. This keeps Dota evolving as a game, but it also introduces an incalculable number of potential interactions. While this means there’s always something new to experience in every match, it also increases the likelihood that some of our changes introduce the occasional bug or two. Or twenty.

Fortunately, the Dota community is constantly experimenting and exploring, and is quick to discover hidden advantages, new meta, and outright game-breaking bugs that catch even us by surprise.

The Techies’ Sticky Bomb bug is a perfect example of this. The roots of the bug were introduced as far back as the Techies update last year, when we unveiled a rework of their abilities and playstyle. This rework created a bug where Techies’ Sticky Bombs didn't expire, and in some cases became controllable by the casting player. But interestingly, because of the parameters of the game at the time, there were no circumstances where the bug could actually occur in a match. So it laid dormant until the Twin Gates appeared with The New Frontiers 7.33 Update this past spring.



Suddenly, Techies players were able to create guided Sticky Bombs they could move around the map, raining down unlimited lethal explosives on enemy players. This was... a bit of an advantage. So it wasn't long before we started hearing rumblings on our github.



A common pattern in gameplay programming generally, and especially in Dota, is to create something new (that doesn’t break the game) by finding something similar that already exists (and works and is not game-breaking) and using it as a starting point to evolve changes. Sticky Bombs were based on the classic Techies’ Remote Mines. They’re implemented as a summon of a "npc_dota_techies_remote_mine" — the same base NPC type as the old Remote Mine NPC.

Techies’ Sticky Bombs utilize a “toss”/”chase”/”countdown to explode” sequence that is managed by a series of server-side modifiers (buffs) on the NPC to handle the unit motion and behavior of each step in the sequence. The "chase" and "countdown" modifiers prevented player orders via state flags in the modifier itself. The "toss" modifier prevented many types of player commands as a result of being a motion controller, along with the nature of the npc_dota_techies_remote_mine itself (specifically, that the NPC has AttackCapability DOTA_UNIT_CAP_NO_ATTACK).



Because Remote Mines could be manually detonated by Techies using an ability on the mine itself, the Remote Mine NPC was permitted to use abilities. This means it was flagged as both owned by the casting player (for kill credit) and as controllable by the casting player. Right-clicking on a Twin Gate (or any channelable map entity) mechanically functions by converting an attack click into an ability cast on the channel target (you're "casting" on the Twin Gate while channeling). Other map entities require a hero to do the channeling. However, because Roshan can use the Twin Gates, non-hero units are permitted to channel them.

Which brings us to the Sticky Bomb bug: during the very short duration that a Sticky Bomb is in the air after being tossed, if a player clicked on a Twin Gate with both Techies and the Bomb selected with unified unit orders, the Bomb would also channel the Twin Gate. This put the Sticky Bomb in a channeling state that ended the “toss” and broke the sequence of modifiers, resulting in unintended behavior.

The solution, once all this was understood, was pretty simple. The Sticky Bomb does not ever need to be controllable by the casting player. Removing this flag from the Bomb meant that the expected sequence of modifiers always executed as they were supposed to, leading to an eventual detonation.


As with so many bugs, 99% of the time spent fixing it is usually in trying to track it down. The actual solution usually boils down to changing a single line of code — possibly the same line of code you wrote to fix a previous bug. (This is why it’s often said that debugging code is like trying to solve a murder where you’re both the murderer and the detective.)

So: That’s how the Sticky Bomb bug was accidentally brought into existence; the brief chaos it created; and how it was brought to our attention by the community and fixed. What happens next? Well, now we sit and wait to discover whatever new bug we created by deleting that line of code to fix the original bug. If you stumble on it, we’ll see you over on GitHub.

Patch 7.33e is out now. You can check the notes here.

Over the last few days we've addressed several gameplay issues:

• Kobolds that are dug up from Trusty Shovel are now ordered to follow their owner (same behavior as Juggernaut's Healing Ward)
  
• Fix newly spawned enemy units in Fog of War flashing on the minimap for a frame before becoming hidden
  
• Fix spells not being able to target invisible units that were revealed by a sentry ward
  
• Fix an issue where the hero stats tooltip for Evasion was not correctly rounding to the nearest integer value
  
• Fix Tormentor treating creep heroes as summons that should be killed instantly when no valid hero units are within range
  
• Fix a bug in the treasure UI causing rarity text to be clipped when an item is hovered
  
• Fix Lich Sinister Gaze duration ignoring status resistance
  
• Fix Phantom Lancer's Phantom Rush toggling off after dying
  
• Fix rare crash when Spirit Breaker's Charge of Darkness is interrupted
  
• Fix Oracle's "Fate's Edict Magic Damage Prevented" relic to properly count all damage that is prevented with the spell
  
• Fix hero relics not progressing in Turbo

Patch 7.34 will arrive in August before The International Regional Qualifiers start.

The International is just a few months away, and we're pleased to announce that submissions are now open for this year's Dota 2 Short Film Contest. Filmmakers have until 3:00pm PDT on September 14, 2023 to submit their short film creations of 90 seconds or less to the Dota 2 Steam Workshop to be eligible for consideration.

Dota fans around the world are invited to visit the Workshop to discuss and vote on their favorites to help us select the best entries to be showcased as part of The International 2023 broadcast. Upon review of the Workshop ratings and discussions, Valve will nominate the top entries to be featured in the Dota client for a final voting process by the community to determine the winners.

Each finalist that reaches the top ten will be guaranteed to win $500, and the top three selections will score prizes of $25,000, $10,000, and $5,000 in recognition of their contributions to the Dota community.

Check out the Dota 2 Short Film Contest site for more information and guidelines on the submission process. And be sure to stop by the Workshop page regularly to help review the submissions you would like to see showcased at The International 2023, coming to you live from Seattle in October.

The International 2023 will return to a roaring crowd in Seattle this October, and we are now accepting proposals from companies who are interested in partnering with Valve to produce and distribute regional language broadcasts.

As in recent years, we are accepting proposals for the Live Event Broadcast Production of The International 2023 in Russian, Chinese, and Spanish language broadcasts. The RFP (Request For Proposal) documentation and instructions for submissions can be found here.

New this year, we are also accepting proposals for companies who are interested in bringing small content teams on-site for sideline reporting in additional languages (not English, Russian, Chinese, or Spanish). These teams would have the ability to film on-site, including participating in post-match and crowd interviews, for audiences not served by the languages of the official broadcast. The RFP for Limited Live Event Broadcast Access can be found here.

Please reach out to theinternationalrfp@valvesoftware.com with any additional questions regarding this process, or the details of either RFP.

Lastly, this year we've streamlined additional license and feed requests:

• Production companies who are simply seeking a commercial license to produce a regional language broadcast of The International 2023 without additional access to the event can fill out this form here.
  
• Streaming platforms who are only interested in restreaming the official broadcast feeds to their platform can apply to do so here.

We thank everyone for their interest in working with us on The International 2023.

The International is almost upon us, as the top eighteen teams converge in Indonesia for the third and final showdown of The 2023 Dota Pro Circuit: The Bali Major, presented by IO Esports. Catch the action live online from the Group Stage from June 29th to July 3rd, then tune in for the Playoffs on July 5th to July 9th. As always, keep up to date on all the tournament teams and match standings at https://www.dota2.com/esports.

As the final Major approaches, show your fan pride and unlock custom equippables by purchasing your favorite team's Supporters Club, now 75% off until the end of the Summer Tour. As always, 50% of every Supporters Club sale goes directly to the team.

With the conclusion of the regional leagues and the start of the Bali Major, Fantasy has been adjusted for the different format. As with the previous Majors, Player Card packs now contain only players from Major-qualified teams, and Fantasy will run daily instead of weekly. If you're new to Fantasy or just need a refresher, check out this Fantasy rundown from the start of the Tour.

When The Bali Major concludes, the top 12 teams in the DPC will be directly invited to The International. The remaining teams will be competing in 6 regional qualifiers for the final 8 slots throughout the month of August on the following dates:

• North America and China: August 17th-21st (1 slot each)
  
• South America and Eastern Europe: August 22nd-26th (2 slots for South America, 1 slot for Eastern Europe)
  
• Southeast Asia and Western Europe: August 27th-31st (2 slots for Western Europe, 1 slot for Southeast Asia)

Stay tuned for more news about The International Qualifiers and The International 2023 in the upcoming weeks.

Update: The Regional Qualifier regions and dates were initially in the wrong order. They have since been fixed.

The ten year anniversary of Dota's public release is coming up (yes, we're working on some fun stuff for it; no, we're definitely not going to hit the July 9th date listed on Steam). As anniversaries go ten years is a big one, and while looking back is important, what's more important is how we approach the ten years to come. So we'd like to take this opportunity to share with you our thoughts on the long history of Dota updates, what we've learned, and how that helps our plans to make Dota even better in the decade ahead.


Early Dota updates were diverse in form and scale, themed around everything from new heroes to new cosmetics, new gameplay modes to new client features. While details varied, all of these updates shared the same goal: generate a bunch of excitement and entertainment for existing Dota players and bring new players in. Some were successful (Diretide 2012); some were less successful (Diretide 2013). We learned from all of them and continued to experiment.

In 2013, two years into running The International, we saw how much fun people were having at the event and had a new idea: What if we could bring some of that fun to anybody who couldn't attend in person? So we created a digital companion to the event and called it The International Interactive Compendium.

The Compendium grew in scope over the years, and ultimately transformed into the Battle Pass, acquiring a reward line and spawning a wide variety of content. Features that earlier in Dota's history might have been fun themed updates, minigames and item sets, arcanas and voice lines, gradually got swallowed by the Battle Pass — new game modes, new functionality, new cosmetics, anything that could fit.

The nature of the Battle Pass is such that it could grow to encompass just about any content we produce for Dota over the year. And, over the last few years, it did — Battle Pass season has grown to be a tremendously exciting time in Dota, but it leaves the rest of the year feeling barren by comparison.


Last year, we started to ask ourselves whether Dota was well-served by having this single focal point around which all content delivery was designed. Each step we had taken made sense when considered independently: any single piece of content would be more valuable when bundled as part of the Battle Pass, so we bundled more and more. This led to a momentous content drop every year, but it also greatly limited our ability to do things that were exciting and valuable for players but didn't fit into the Battle Pass reward line.

When we recognized this, we made a deliberate choice earlier this year to run an experiment: to take some of the resources that would normally produce Battle Pass content and instead put them towards more speculative updates, including features and content that couldn't fit into a Battle Pass. While work is still in progress on future updates, the first of these has shipped: New Frontiers and patch 7.33 couldn't have shipped as they did if we were focusing all our efforts on producing Battle Pass content.

Most Dota players never buy a Battle Pass and never get any rewards from it. Every Dota player has gotten to explore the new map, play with the new items, and accidentally die to a Tormentor; every Dota player benefits from UI improvements and new client features. Community response to New Frontiers has helped us build confidence that working less on cosmetic content for the Battle Pass and more on a variety of exciting updates is the right long-term path for Dota as both a game and a community.


We're going to continue on the path that started with New Frontiers. This means we're building a wide variety of features and content for the game, delivered in different ways. We'll still ship a range of cosmetics over the year, but we're also going to ship more diverse updates for all Dota players to enjoy.

We recognize this affects The International. We're still huge fans of TI and we're excited for this year's event — both as organizers and as attendees ourselves — and work is well underway on a TI-themed update to ship in September. The update will still contribute directly to the prize pool, with a focus on the event, the players, and the games, but new cosmetic items won't play a notable part. This is a significant change from the last few years, so to make it clear that we're shifting focus towards the event and away from the giant reward line of cosmetics, we're intentionally not calling this update a Battle Pass.

We're excited for the future of Dota and for what these changes allow us to do. We're already working on the next updates, and a host of new cosmetic items — and we've already started conversations with venues for TI 2024. By freeing Dota's update and content cycle from the timing and structural constraints of the Battle Pass, we can go back to making content in the way we know best: by coming up with fun ideas of all scales and shapes, and exploring them with you.

Patch 7.33d is out now. You can check the notes here.

Over the last few days we've addressed several gameplay issues:

• Fix the interaction of Phantom Assassin's Stifling Dagger and Dragon Knight's Dragon's Breath
  
• Fix Phantom Lancer's Phantom Rush not being able to be toggled off while on cooldown
  
• Fix Rubick's Spell Steal interaction with Multishot and Frost Arrows
  
• Fix Spirit Breaker's Charge of Darkness going on indefinite cooldown in certain remaining rare circumstances
  
• Fix Tiny having infinite Tree Tosses when affected by Muerta's Parting Shot
  
• Fix Tiny's death animation playing on soul unit when affected by Muerta's Parting Shot
  
• Fix Warlock's Minor Imp imps not exploding when expiring
  
• Fix Pangolier's Rolling Thunder being blocked by Mars' Arena of Blood
  
• Fix Arc Warden shard giving some of its bonuses to enemies
  
• Fix Tormentor Bounty being 5x the value on Meepo when everybody in the team already has a shard

If you’re reading this from one of the parts of the planet lucky enough to get a Vin Diesel movie every two years (Sweden, others), you’re probably happy with how fast everything is, but you might be wondering why everyone’s always so angry about it.

Look, it’s a great point, and we’re glad you were brave enough to say something: Going fast should never be a cause for fury. We've been reading all your feedback on Turbo Mode, and as part of our More Fast, Less Furious initiative, we’re rolling out a batch of changes to improve the overall Turbo play experience.

• Wisdom Rune experience amount increased by 100%
  
• Lotus Pool lotus spawn interval decreased from 3 minutes to 90 seconds
  
• Aghanim's Shard initial availability time reduced from 9:45 to 7:30
  
• Infused Raindrop initial availability time reduced from 3:30 to 1:30
  
• The hero selection interface has been updated to show how many players have selected a hero on each team
  
• Random hero selection are no longer revealed to the enemy team
  
• Players who select a random hero no longer receive a free Mango and Faerie Fire
  
• There is no longer a restriction against selecting a random hero for the last 10 seconds of the picking phase
  
• Phantom Assassin's Manifold Paradox Arcana will now count wins in Turbo for half credit.
  
• Pudge's Feast of Abscession Arcana will now count wins against Rubick in Turbo for half credit.

In addition to Turbo updates, the team has also addressed more gameplay issues

• Fixed various interactions with Phylactery when targeting low-health units.
  
• Fixed Stormcrafter proccing immediately if dropped and picked up again.
  
• Fixed a bug where issuing an attack order while using quick attack against an invulnerable target would cause the cursor to remain in attack mode after failing to issue the order.
  
• Hero Relics are now purple for universal heroes.
  
• Fixed Universal heroes having incorrect attack damage displayed during picking phase.
  
• Fixed Dota Plus neutral item suggestions showing NaN
  
• Message displayed when killing tormentor changed to be a combat event message that will display who received the shard or how much gold and experience is awarded to the team in the event all available shard upgrades have already been acquired.
  
• You can now add and remove 'Pinned Items' when editing them rather than just replacing the existing ones.

As seasons go, spring doesn’t have much going for it. It’s wet, there’s too many insects, idiots are all over the place skipping through parks and falling in love. Luckily, our global spring nightmare is finally almost over — and that’s because the Summer 2023 Dota Plus update* is here, dropping from the sky like a meteor on the grateful people below. The update includes refreshed seasonal quests and guild rewards, plus an all-new treasure to explore.

* Attention, web designer! Make sure these words are in Impact font! **

** Not these words.

The Summer 2023 Seasonal Treasure is here and available for purchase with shards. This treasure features all new sets for Axe, Ember Spirit, Troll Warlord, Zeus, Oracle, Queen of Pain, Sand King, and Treant Protector. There's also a chance to unlock Moil the Fettered courier, who haunts the lanes bearing random prismatic and ethereal gems.

We've also taken sets that were available in the Spring Treasure 2022 and made them available for direct purchase for 15,000 shards each as part of the collection of legacy sets in the Shard Shop.

Today’s update also comes with a new set of Dota Plus quests to shore up your shard stash for new relics and the Seasonal Treasure — offering up to 115,200 shards over the course of the season. Guild rewards have also been updated, making new emoticons, sprays, and chat wheels available to high-scoring guilds.



Let’s all take a moment to remember Mi "YammerS" Hongwei, a beloved member of the Chinese caster community, who sadly passed away earlier this week. In memory, we’re including one of his most popular voice lines as a platinum-tier guild reward.