Two teams appear to have been denied US visas for next month s Dota 2 International tournament. China-based CIS-Game and Southeast Asian team Arrow Gaming are both facing the possibility that they ll lose their place in the tournament, which takes place July 18-21 and offers a prize pool of nearly $10 million dollars.
According to posts on the LiquidDota forums, using Chinese social media platform Weibo as a source, CIS-Game was offered no reason for the denial except an apology. Translated by a member of the LiquidDota forums, a spokesperson from CIS-Game reportedly said the team will reapply for the visa. The 4 Chinese players as well as manager of CIS have been denied American visas, they're currently preparing for their second try.
While at least five members of CIS-Game have been denied visas, other veteran representatives from the team have had success. In addition to applying a second time, the team will also appeal to Valve for support.
Meanwhile, Southeast Asian team Arrow Gaming has also had problems securing visas, prompting them to apply a second time. A spokesperson for the team provided the following statement to OnGamers.

"With the help from the Minister our chances to receive the visa is higher. Me and Johnny received our visas. However, the other 4 were not so lucky. Valve will also provide us with a stronger letter of invitation to the embassy. So yes, we are hopeful about the second interview. We haven't talked about what will happen if our applications were denied a second time. Valve pretty much guaranteed to help us the best they can to bring our team to Seattle."

eSports competitors have had a hard time being recognised by the US government. League of Legends was last year deemed a professional sport by the US government, meaning international competitors can now travel to the US as professional athletes.

The Dota 2 International championships commence July 18 at KeyArena in Seattle, Washington.

(via PCGamesN)

A few days ago, members of the Steam community schemed to rig the Steam Summer Adventure competition, a metagame running in parallel with Valve s 12-day Summer Sale. Surprisingly, it wasn t the sort of malicious plan you might expect, but a kind of cease-fire alliance meant to bring equal victory to everyone on Steam. As intended, Team Pink won Sunday. Blue won Monday. Purple will win next, if things go smoothly. On Wednesday, a Red victory is scheduled, then Green.

Is a small collective actually having this big of an influence on a Steam-wide, public competition? Valve has already amended the contest to encourage more competition. I took a look at the evidence and spoke to a few of the people caught up in the dark business of virtual trading card market-manipulation.
How Valve makes money from the metagame
First, a run-down of how the Steam Summer Adventure works if you ve been blissfully unaware over the past week, buying and playing discounted PC games rather than being concerned with your gamified game client. Most of Steam s seasonal sales have included a unique trading card set. Craft a full set of these seasonal cards, and you get something like a unique wallpaper or Steam chat emoticon or in-game reward for a few participating games. The 2014 Steam Summer Sale has its own special set of cards you can badge-ify, but with a twist: participating Steam users are randomly assigned to one of five teams during the sale: Red, Pink, Purple, Blue, or Green. Crafting a badge earns points for your team, and 30 members of the winning team get three free Steam games off their wishlists. Oh, and a few extra cards that they can use to keep crafting.

In review: buying games earns virtual cards which can be crafted into virtual badges which increase the rate at which you earn booster packs which contain cards which you can use to upgrade your badges. It s a circular system designed to keep you inside the Steam client, either nickel and diming you to complete your incomplete set of cards or by selling the cards you ve been given to encourage you to spend that money on a game.

A competition to see who can craft the most badges, of course, makes money directly for Valve and developers by creating more activity on the Steam Market. Valve takes a 5% cut of all transactions, and the developer of the corresponding game takes 10% (a minimum of $0.01 in both cases).

If I sold one of my Steam Summer Adventure cards for its current value, $0.25, Valve would take three pennies and I d get $0.22. The Steam Market tells me that 91,650 copies of that card have been sold in the past 24 hours, meaning Valve s profit of a single Summer Adventure card in a single day could be about $2,800. There are 10 of these cards, and another 10 foil variants, which run about $2 each.


The community s plan
Bottom line: we celebrate Steam s price cuts, but in the middle of the Summer Sale Valve has integrated a system that stimulates the Steam economy and nets them thousands of dollars a day from virtual, non-existent goods. Many cards and booster packs have risen in price throughout the sale; Dota 2 booster packs, for example, went from trading consistently at about $0.25 for the past month to hovering near $0.40 over the past six days.

The more trading volume and competition, the more the house wins. But a segment of the Steam community is wise to this. They know that a 12-day period when a five-dollar bill can get you our favorite PC game of all time isn t the best time to be engaged in what s essentially a spending war. So to discourage, or at least mitigate, frivolous trading card spending, some Redditors and Steam forum members have organized a coalition to take competition out of the equation. They ve called themselves Team White, and they ve proposed that each Steam team should win twice, on designated days, through June 28.

I spoke to one of the initial organizers behind the plan, Reddit user DayZ_slayer. It's not really a fun competition when the only real way to win is to spend a lot of cash, the European 20-year-old told me. If they did some kind of event that involved playing games it would be a lot more fun to compete, but they didn't, so I figured we all may as well work as a group and give everyone a fair chance at winning some games.

This seemed to arise naturally, according to DayZ_slayer: many of the teams who had organized individually were planning to compete harder on specific days, he told me, so suggesting that the colored teams take turns simply formalized that process. I checked the Steam groups/subreddits for the teams and saw which days they were planning on winning, the first five days or so didn't really clash. I made the list showing who should craft on what day and then posted it on all of the team's subreddits under the name Operation EWT. A little later I made the thread on /r/gaming and some other guy posted it to /r/steam.

I also spoke to Phil Lendon, a 16-year-old living in England who s bought into the concept of Team White. I first noticed the schedule on Reddit on /r/SteamTeamRed which then spread to /r/Steam and I thought it was a really good idea because here on Team Red we're all about teamwork and communication. When I asked Lendon how much he s spent toward the contest, he told me that he s traded hundreds of pounds to support Red on Wednesday. Too much that it's unhealthy, he says.


Valve's response
Up until today, the plan had gone smoothly. Each team won on its designated day. But today the plan is showing signs of falling apart. Valve, apparently unhappy with the lack of competition between teams, changed the contest to award second- and third-place prizes to the runners-up each day. Purple may still come away with first place, but at the outset of today it s already a tight race between the colors. The game has changed, a post on the Purple team subreddit reads. We need to let purple win but go for second, a member of team Red comments. "What the heck guys? It's purple's day!" a Pink thread exclaims. Lendon, the Red team member I spoke to, wrote back to me this morning after he noticed Valve's change to the competition. "It's turned into a free-for-all, once I had heard of the news I knew it was going to go to hell. However, I believe, as many other Redditors do too, that the new rules for the competition were to prevent the rigging of the competition, as we saw yesterday when Pink one with over a million points above everyone else, Valve had to take action. However, I personally don't believe the changes to the rules are even worth it, as people's chances are even more reduces to win, as-if it wasn't hard enough already to get a winning three games, it'll be even harder for the 2nd place and 3rd place and not even worth the effort."

It s unclear whether this change will encourage competition enough to disrupt Reddit s plan. On the surface, it seemed wild to me that a small percentage of people could be driving the massive point swings we saw in the initial four days. After all, there s only a few hundred people each in these colored Steam groups, and just 140,000 on the Steam subreddit, most of whom probably aren t aggressively participating.



But the Steam Market tells us that just a small number of tokens that steal 1,000 points from another team the most valuable item for influencing the Adventure competition are trading hands. In the past 24 hours, just 88 have been bought off the Steam Market at between $8 and $5 each, and about the same amount of 500-point tokens were sold in that period. Even if a single team were buying those tokens, it isn t that much of a swing relative to the 1.2 million that the Blue team earned yesterday.

More likely, the organized non-competition pact by Reddit and the color-specific Steam communities created single, dominant leader, which not only discouraged the other big spenders who are engaged in this competition but probably discouraged some amount of casual crafters from chipping in too.

With the adjustment made by Valve, today will be an interesting test of the internet s ability to dictate the outcome. Purple, who s meant to win today, has a modest lead as I m publishing this, but we ll have to see if the Steam Trading Card Illuminati s grand plan survives through the week.

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

Dota 2 is a numbers game, but then again they all are, really, aren't they. Counter-Strike is about shooting numberbullets into the other guys' numberfaces until all of their numberbrains fall out. Football (see also: soccer) is about how many goals you score and how many shirts you sell and how much it costs to ship vast premanufactured chunks of stadium up the Amazon.

It's all numbers, and Dota 2 has no greater or fewer than any other game. But it does host some truly, spectacularly, galvanizingly pointless numbers. Digits that communicate nothing and convey no worth. They exist outside of any formula or algorithm, and to treat them as if they mean anything is to slip into the kind of superstition usually reserved for numerologists. We're dealing with the unknowable, here, with un-knowledge: you might want to sit down. Some people can't handle it.

Let's not be those people.

USELESS NUMBER #1: The level of your Dota 2 Steam badge.

I have a level five Steam badge for Dota 2. I have no earthly idea why this is something that I acquired on purpose. At some point last year shortly after TI3, according to my Steam profile I decided that it was important that I collect five full sets of Dota 2 trading cards. I believe I received a discount on capable puzzle platformer Toki Tori for doing so, but that's not why I did it.

If the decision involved any thought at all, it went something like this: I like to play Dota 2, and I like to perform tasks related to Dota 2. It followed that I'd enjoy scanning the Steam market in order to purchase pictures of characters for pennies and then binding these pictures to my profile so that somebody might look at my profile and think "this person considers Dota 2 to be an entertaining way to spend time". As if they couldn't pick that up from the many other numbers at the top of my Recent Game Activity: 42.3 hours past 2 weeks. 1,477 hrs on record.

Whatever the reason, I have a level five Steam badge for Dota 2. Many of my friends have them as well. All I can take from this is that Valve are very good at providing people with opportunities to lose money in ways that seem like total nonsense when considered with the front part of your brain. Impish little money-siphons that vanish when you look right at them, like fairies at the bottom of the garden. Fairies that turn out to be real and force you to remortgage your house every time there's a Steam Sale.

USELESS NUMBER #2: The number of your friends who play Dota 2.

So here's a fun observation: I have 136 friends who play Dota 2 according to Steam. I have 137 friends who play Team Fortress 2. All these numbers indicate is that a fairly substantial chunk of Steam's user base will at some point boot up either of Valve's free to play games. In Dota's case, the number is most useful for giving you some sense of how many people start playing the game and immediately run the other way like Han Solo in A New Hope if he'd burst into a room full of wizards and internet dickheads instead of Stormtroopers.

I'm fascinated by the difference between the two values, though. Who were you, one person who never loaded Dota 2? What was it that put you off? Was it the dickheads? I bet it was the dickheads.

USELESS NUMBER #3: The current count on any of your 'Wards Placed' gems.

A personal milestone: my 'Enemies Culled' gem hit triple figures today. I've only had it for a few months, but that gem means something to me. I love Axe very much, and believe strongly that Culling Blade is the best ability in the game. One hundred dunks is significant: each dunk a happy memory, and each a reminder of the many thousand more dunks that I've been unjustly denied by kill-hungry allies. I die a little bit inside every time some quote-unquote "core" hero decides that their need to buy game-winning items supersedes my need to welcome our enemies to the jam. Those hundred dunks are the few, the brave, the just. Reaching this milestone is a sign that there is still some good left in the world.

I don't feel nearly as strongly about the three hundred or so wards I've placed as Rubick and Crystal Maiden, and I'm not sure anybody else does either. In fact, I think the majority of the strangers I've played with would argue that those wards were never placed at all. My 'Wards Placed' gems are documentary proof of something that the majority of people won't believe anyway: that buying all of the support items didn't actually win us any games, and ultimately has nothing to do with our unfashionable MMR ratings. Better not to track wards placed at all, really.

USELESS NUMBER #4: Commendations.

I'd like a special report function for people who say "commend me" at the end of games. Nothing serious. I don't want Valve to actually act on it, or even pay attention to it. But I want to be able to press a button that says "this person is a dingdong" and have that information recorded somewhere. It would make me feel substantially better about Dota in general if I could quietly add people to the dingdong list, you know? For posterity.

To the point, though: if you've just won the game, you don't need another prize. Asking for a commendation at the end of a match is like turning to your parents at the end of your seventh birthday party and asking if there are any more presents. Of course there aren't. They've given you everything they can give. Now stop being a brat, get out of the fountain, and let us all get along with our days.

In reality, though, all those dingdongs are doing is reflecting something of the meaninglessness of the commendation system. They don't do anything, or particularly signify anything, so why not give them freely? It's a little number hidden at the bottom of your profile. You have to scroll down to see it, for god's sake. What difference does it make?

Commending somebody in Dota 2 is like leaving a Yelp review for your favourite restaurant in the aftermath of global nuclear war. I mean, the sentiment is nice. It's great that you can, you know, register your approval. But it's too late, friend. It's too late for both of us.

USELESS NUMBER #5: The prize pool for every tournament other than The International if you have ever won The International.

Here's what occurred to me while watching Alliance return to form during the DreamLeague finals last week: if I won The International, I wouldn't try for the rest of the year. My invitation to the next tournament would be guaranteed. I'd have enough money to live off the proceeds without winning any other titles. I'd spend that time expanding my hero pool, having a good time, and pointedly not giving anything away about the strategies or drafts that might help me top up my earnings at the end of the year.

The International prize pool is going to top ten million dollars. Is there a universe where this doesn't profoundly change the attitude of top teams towards the other tournaments? I don't think there is.

USELESS NUMBER #6: Your MMR.

I know, right?

Your MMR is probably the most important pointless number in Dota 2. It's the one you see the most of, anyway. If not your personal digits than their implications: your skill level rendered with a specificity which is specifically attractive to a certain kind of player. Since Valve decided to make player ratings public these numbers have taken on totemic significance. It's not enough to have a high MMR: you have to be seen to be utterly dismissive of whatever your number means. "I'm just 5K trash" says everybody. "Don't mind me." A kind of Catholic guilt affected to disguise ego and insecurity. Strife attributed to a four-digit value that nobody is particularly sure how to parse anyway.

Introducing a visible MMR was as close to a balls-to-the-wall mistake as Valve have ever made. Its influence has been almost entirely negative. It armed the community against itself, chucking pointy sticks into a mob already prone to aggressive brinkmanship. I'm still not sure who benefits.

Yet there it is. It's your score, your rating, your place, and you're expected to know it. I say ditch the whole thing. Play like you want to get better and don't worry about whether your MMR goes up or down. Play the same way over and over if that's how you want to spend your time, not because you think it'll buy you access to some higher level of play. You can find that anywhere. Let your MMR become the reason you play Dota and you give up on all that discovery, friendship, meaning that the game turns up when it's firing on all cylinders. Fight the urge to hinge the whole thing on a number. It's poison, friend. Then again I'm 3K trash and I would say that.

Click here to read more Three Lane Highway.

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.