Dota 2 News

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.

[h2]The Schedule[/h2]

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).

[h2]The Road to The International[/h2]

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.

[h2]Group Stage[/h2]

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.

[h2]Playoffs[/h2]

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.



[h2]The International[/h2]

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.



[h2]Putting It All Together[/h2]

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.