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Sanya12364 Posts
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/PVyQqfg.jpg)
Get hyped for The International!!!! One more year and another premier tournament to be hosted by Valve in Seattle. But even as I look forward to another grand tournament of year, we should take a look at the impact that The International has on the professional scene that we follow.
Competitive Kickoff
The kickstart to professional Dota was a huge bang in 2011. Valve announced a mysterious tournament to be held at GamesCom in Cologne. Valve invited 16 big teams of Warcraft 3 Dota for a 1.6 million dollar tournament of a game that no one had ever played. It was an unheard of prize level in a scene that was more likely . Some Chinese teams didn't know about Valve and thought the whole thing was a scam. Other teams barely touched the barely out of alpha game which was riddled with bugs. NaVi won the tournament and immediately eclipsed the total tournament winnings of all Warcraft Dota tournaments. In a landscape where 25,0000 dollar tournaments were impressive, merely 7th and 8th were awarded as much.
The Only One That Matters
Since then, Valve's The International has loomed over the competitive landscape as a giant elephant completely toppling the scales. Each and every year, it didn't matter what your professional team did throughout the year. As long as the team was invited to the tournament and placed decently well, it overshadowed any other achievement through out the year. In order to fully grasp the magnitude that The International dominates the Dota2 competitive scene, let's take a look at few graphs of Dota2 prizes by months from International to International.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/DOljbbF.png)
2012
The rest of the year are insignificant specks.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/UaGY32m.png)
2013
The bumps are looking a bit bigger.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/I8U5Yu9.png)
2014
Did the bumps grow?
An Big Share
We can also present the the previous graphs in a form of pie charts dividing the one tournament that matters and everything else in the rest of the year.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/IUYARzw.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/TL1n1X3.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/8YpMxWz.png)
The International was almost 90% of the year in 2012. After the introduction of cosmetic bundling, tournament organizers grew to a 27% share in 2013. Professional Dota2 grew by a more than a factor of 5 outside of Valve's own tournament, drastically outpacing Valve's initial compendium idea that bumped up the International prize by 80%. But 2014 reversed that trend as the opportunity to buy plenty of points grew the International by 280%. The prize for The International was almost quadruple that of 2013. Crowd funding of tournaments in the 2014 year was no slouch, more than tripling the 2013 prize, but in the end lost out to Valve's amazing economics.
Complications
With a single tournament dominating the entire competitive landscape, what was recognized as unhealthy pattern in 2013 has become nasty problems. Tournaments in the rest of the year simply do not matter. Even as every organizer to have some money to throw at the scene tries to generate hype for their "global" LAN, it begs the question, "Does the pros care about any of these tournaments?"
For the assured International attendees, it certainly doesn't matter. Their spot in The International is secure, so they're not worried about having to prove themselves to Valve. Instead, they are there to spar against their rivals and seeing what they might need to adjust to do well at the one tournament that matters. Hiding and saving strats in the months leading up to the one tournament that matters is the name of the game.
For everyone else, especially the second tier teams, they are out there desperately looking to build up a CV that get the approval of the Valve selection team or at least get enough of a nod to compete in the qualifier tournament. There's plenty deplorable activities in recent years. Kaipi kicking Arise & Zizou for CWM and RTZ was an unfortunate event in 2013. NewBee forming a team and practicing together for only three months to win happened in 2014. Today, top teams not giving a shit has happened throughout the first half of the competitive year, even as the prize pools has increased dramatically. At this point in time, non-Valve prize money is already above its 2014 total of 3284847 with a full 7 months to spare.
Impressive Growth
Stitching all the years together, Dota2 as a professional has grown astronomically since it all started in Cologne over three years ago. The game has come out of beta. It is open to the public. It has been translated into multiple languages. It has an awesome collection of cosmetics. Nearly all gamebreaking bugs are fixed. The trajectory is encouraging.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/HGdxnxJ.png)
What an amazing growth rate
Even as everyone and their noob friend complains about over-saturation and how there are too many tournaments, what Dota2 suffers most is a lack of tournaments that matter and the inevitable top-heaviness of the economics of professional esports.
The entertainment business is invariably an pyramid in terms of how few superstars there are and an inverted pyramid in terms of how top heavy the payout is. In fact, at the amateur level, the players are probably paying out of pocket to play a game they love rather than reaping any monetary benefits from the game. Dota2 shows a stark disparity between millionaires NewBee and barely surviving teams 16 places lower.
As much as it would be amazing if Valve repeat its 2014 feat and more than triple the prize for 2015 to 30 million, it's going to be horribly bad for professional scene, yet again reinforcing The International as the only tournament that matter. Except this time it will be throwing out multi million dollars to each member of the winning team.
As comparison, this is a rival esports title League of Legends and its prize distribution:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/DCqFtR5.png)
Hattip to www.esportsearnings.com for prize data in CSV format. You can check out his twitter @GGBeyond
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Awesome write up  Im hoping TI5 will exceed TI4's prize pool but change the TI invitation process
paralleluniverse must be creaming with all these charts and graphs
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Cascadia1753 Posts
I think its worth noting that while the prize pool outside of TI went down from 2013->2014, the absolute prize pools went quite a bit up.
2015 also appears to be a good year for outside of TI prize, with DAC pulling everything quite up.
While the best did get filthy rich, the not-best continue to only do better as time goes by.
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A one tournament sport like Cross-country which has the world cup and no one cares about anything else? Yes.
A one tournament sport like Footballs world cup? Yes
A one tournament sport like American handeggs super bowl? Yeah.
Nothing wrong with that.
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Russian Federation3329 Posts
I'd like to see the Dota2 monthly prize chart without TIs (especially TI4) to see the trends.. maybe just in comparison keep the TIs at the LoL levels to see how the scene is growing if Valve didn't make TI so huge?
EDIT: because if you look at the month before TI4 (which at first glance, seems to me as the highest peak outside of TI), it's slightly above 1mil, which is around the highest peak outside of worlds for LoL
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I hope TI5 does not have a 10m prize pool. It would be nice if it was capped or something.
2015
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Russian Federation3329 Posts
On January 14 2015 15:32 Spicy_Curry wrote:
I hope TI4 does not have a 10m prize pool. It would be nice if it was capped or something.
Buddy it's TI5 time already
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On January 14 2015 15:33 Bisu-Fan wrote:Show nested quote +On January 14 2015 15:32 Spicy_Curry wrote:
I hope TI4 does not have a 10m prize pool. It would be nice if it was capped or something. Buddy it's TI5 time already
my face
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On January 14 2015 14:01 PuroYO wrote:
A one tournament sport like Cross-country which has the world cup and no one cares about anything else? Yes.
A one tournament sport like Footballs world cup? Yes
A one tournament sport like American handeggs super bowl? Yeah.
Nothing wrong with that.
Wait, the World Cup is everything? Isn't there national leagues for clubs, regional championships, créme-de-la-créme tournaments for clubs and a variety of different regions renowned for huge differences in play-style that then amounts to a tournament between countries every four years? I'd rather go watch good club football where you see day-to-day effort with sustenance in applied strategy.
Also, the Super Bowl is reached after playing in an affiliated league for 18 or 19 rounds of play over the course of almost half a year. It is a closed league, no team can qualify and no team can drop out. The teams compete over players in a market where players are worth ridiculous amounts of money an can live happily during the off-season without a care in the world that they might have to quit their job for to support themselves financially. (This salary metric can be applied to football as well if you want, but they don't have an off-season in the same way)
_____
This has been an inherent issue with DotA2 since the start. The top teams all compete for the shot at TI and every tournament, however good they may be, are just not TI. $250k Starladder? Good, but not TI. Finally DAC comes along, but damn $10M is a prize pool unwitnessed in the history of esports... But so would everyting above $3.2M be. They could, with $10.2M, break TI3's record in three separate tournaments... This could turn into a QQ post pretty fast so I'm just going to end with, again, stating that handing out $5M to a lone team winning the one and only tournament is not how you support professional esports. (I know that Valve might give about two shits about supporting the pro scene, but it should be within the spectrum of their interest)
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Normalize Y axis scaling between the lol and Dota graphs please
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I categorically disagree. TI being once a year and the biggest is good for Dota, and good for the professional scene.
1) Dota playerbase is healthy, great hype created. this should be obvious to all.
2) imagine if instead of 1 tournament with $10 million prize pool, we had monthly tournaments with $1 million prize pool. then you would really see what it means to be a "one tournament sport"
3) if as asserted other tournaments don't matter, why do all teams participate? even teams such as newbee who are virtually guaranteed an invite to the next TI still participate, so something in your premise is incorrect. even in the case that top teams participate only for practice, this shows that these tournaments have value. teams without a guaranteed invite also feel pressured to participate as much as they can, to build their CV as it were. EE I believe also mentioned this, so indirectly TI has added value to the other tournaments.
3b) even if tournaments were smaller and top teams pulled out (such as starladder/i-league) this creates room for tier 2 teams. because the best teams can choose to focus on the most prestigious tournaments, other teams have a proving ground and opportunity to win some prize money. this is not really a necessary consequence of having one huge tournament during the year, and it is not guaranteed to always be this way, but my point is that one large tournament (or larger tournaments) and other comparatively small ones is not necessarily "bad"
4) what is "deplorable" about a team being formed to win TI, and then actually winning it? what is deplorable about a competitive landscape wherein players try to form the strongest team they can?
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On January 14 2015 17:05 trifecta wrote:
Normalize Y axis scaling between the lol and Dota graphs please
About 10 seconds in Paint
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/7Y9rNCj.png)
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Sanya12364 Posts
If the purpose of League chart was to do an absolute comparison of dollar values, this is what the char would have been instead:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Wz4xdRN.png)
Instead the visuals are there to show how much more concentrated the professional scene is on one single event in comparison to a comparable one.
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God I hope TI5 wont be as bad as TI4 was. Dota really doesn't need another TI4 right now :/
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My only comment is that for the first time in it's history, dota's getting 2nd relevant tournament in DAC.
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pretty sure dota will suck if valve continues ti the way it is right now
there should be 4 majors and a ti at the end of the dota year
u could qualify through doing well in those majors
and then have another qualifier for ti
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Pretty clear this is down to the explosive growth of the International prize pool, though. There is really good money to be won in multiple tournaments now. And most of this comes from the playerbase anyway, so we pay for what we like. Captain's Draft, for example, had a huge prize pool. The distribution is so extreme because the fans love the International.
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Russian Federation3329 Posts
I agree it'd be really cool if Valve could hold mini tournaments like a circuit but that'd be interesting and I don't know how well it could be implemented~ Any implementation and people are likely to riot
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Aside from Valve deciding to break apart TI into smaller bits, this is a solutionless problem. To be honest though, while the OP makes it very clear dota 2 is indeed a one tournament sport, it's not very clear to me why that's a problem.
Financially other tournaments don't matter compared to TI, but how is that a problem? From the viewers point of view, only two things matter in a tournament, hype and game quality (including production value). Production value and hype could be bigger if these tournaments were bigger, but I'm not convinced there would be too big of a change. Hype depends much more on getting the rights teams to play and there not being too many tournaments in the same time frame. Game quality might be better if tournaments were bigger as well, but are teams really goofing off just because TI is far away? Big teams need to guarantee themselves in TI, and small teams need to fight themselves into it.
Also, why is one team kicking players out and another being formed to compete in a tournament considered "deplorable" behaviour?
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I like the one tournament that matters and top-heaviness of it's prize pool. It makes things matter and drives team dynamics over the year.
World Cup wouldn't be that coveted if it happened once a year, and neither would a quarterly mini International.
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On January 15 2015 01:53 teddyoojo wrote:
pretty sure dota will suck if valve continues ti the way it is right now
there should be 4 majors and a ti at the end of the dota year
u could qualify through doing well in those majors
and then have another qualifier for ti
what valve could do since they probably don't want to spend organizing 5 tournaments for year:
make organization like SLTV, MLG, WEC/WPA/DAC, etc turn into major, even thought this would be a lot of trouble still
but they made something similar to CSGO, so it could happens, but I don't think it will
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On January 15 2015 05:31 Kittan wrote:
I like the one tournament that matters and top-heaviness of it's prize pool. It makes things matter and drives team dynamics over the year.
World Cup wouldn't be that coveted if it happened once a year, and neither would a quarterly mini International.
One huge tournament is probably fine but the top-heavy prize pool is not.
1. In the qualifying bracket for top8, one game is the difference between 9th place with $50k versus guaranteed at least 7th with $500k. That's a bigger difference than any elimination game before Loser's Finals. And aside from how unfair that feels intuitively, there's also no hype for that match because it's played off of the main stage.
2. Would providing a slightly flatter distribution of the prize pool really make "things not matter"? Is anyone really going to say "Oh 1st place is 4.5 million instead of 5 million I'm not going to try too hard anymore"?
3. The World Cup isn't the primary compensation for players. Their lives are not revolved around winning the World Cup and the high variability of it doesn't make/break their career.
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These are parallel universe unapproved graphs that I understood
0/5
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Sanya12364 Posts
Wow... I guess I'm not Liquid subculture enough to get what paralleluniverse is all about.
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On January 15 2015 09:03 TanGeng wrote:
Wow... I guess I'm not Liquid subculture enough to get what paralleluniverse is all about.
Neither are 95% of TL / LD ))):
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Sanya12364 Posts
ok I remember kupon's graphs
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This is why DAC is great!
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I have a reflex-aversion of forcibly chopping up the would-be TI prize-pool pie to distribute to other 3rd party tournaments, ala CS:GO. Mostly because I like the idea of TI being a singular event-entity, hosted by Valve and not an outside organisation with its own propriety interests at heart, whilst in a otherwise-open 3rd-party dominated competitive circuit.
P.S. There is nothing deplorable about player changes; like forreals, what's deplorable about Newbee??? And there's certainly nothing to indicate that such happenings are born wholly out of DotA's competitive circuit structure. (see: League's off-season. Shady people gonna be shady)
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Clearly esports must follow the annual gameplan of traditional sports.
Meaning, have different tiers of leagues which have teams play each other twice, over a span of 7-8 months.
The team with most points in the end of the season becomes the league champions! High seeded teams get promoted to higher leagues, bottom seeded teams relegate.
League games happen once a week.
Then have a cup like in football in which all team's can participate, from all leagues. This is a single elimination format.
Then have a Nations/Regions big tournament lets say every second summer.
Like Mym Prime Nations many years ago.
dream is real
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A Riot-approved fully region locked construct where teams like complexity and Ehug would be given plenty of presentation and LAN experience between getting destroyed at the only 1 international cross region even that is allowed to occur a year
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I dont know if one TI a year is "good or bad for esports" but i like it. And the fact that the pricepool at TI4 was so high was in no way valves fault. They just said "Hey guys here is the one turnament we host every year, like every year." and ppl started throung huge amounts of money at them. What should they have told us? "Uh sorry we said the money would be for the prizepool of TI4 but we decided to only take 1/4th of the money oft this turnament and the rest will bespent later."?
In my opinion they just did what they told us they would do. That's a nice thing nowadays.
The only real problem with TI is that its so fucking stupidly hard to tell and secretly messured whos going to get an invite. Valve should rly work on that and make it public. Maybe a little like the WCS system works.
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Well, the only reason TI4 ballooned so much was because of all the shiny cosmetics and Valve allowing people to throw their money at them. I'm sure that if any other tournament came out with similar value for money, they would enjoy a lot of success as well, Summit 2 and XMG CD were pretty successful.
In the end, you get prize money thanks to giving people a good deal, all the talks about "supporting the tournament/players" are usually just somebody whining about not getting enough sales in a politically correct way.
Of course, there's still the problem that Valve are the only ones randomly changing the rules of the game and little bit more transparency regarding their development would certainly help. Sudden removal of battle boosters for example. If an organization could schedule a tournament a year in advance, set the theme, hire the artists, get the hype going, start selling the whole thing ahead of schedule instead of trying to give out all the unlocked rewards after the event has ended, they would surely enjoy a lot of success.
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On January 14 2015 14:01 PuroYO wrote:
A one tournament sport like Cross-country which has the world cup and no one cares about anything else? Yes.
A one tournament sport like Footballs world cup? Yes
A one tournament sport like American handeggs super bowl? Yeah.
Nothing wrong with that.
Super Bowl isn't a tournament, it's a single game between the two best placing teams in two separate leagues to my understanding.
Football isn't a one tournament sport unless you ONLY count the world cup. I also don't see why you would mention the world cup and not Champion's League or whatever. It's in the clubs where the players actually make their money.
To me, the current situation with the International being so much bigger than anything else is both cool and so, so, so boring.
It makes for situations like Newbee that was specifically put together for TI4 and then they stopped playing. It sucks.
On January 14 2015 18:41 aboxcar wrote:+ Show Spoiler +I categorically disagree. TI being once a year and the biggest is good for Dota, and good for the professional scene.
1) Dota playerbase is healthy, great hype created. this should be obvious to all.
2) imagine if instead of 1 tournament with $10 million prize pool, we had monthly tournaments with $1 million prize pool. then you would really see what it means to be a "one tournament sport"
3) if as asserted other tournaments don't matter, why do all teams participate? even teams such as newbee who are virtually guaranteed an invite to the next TI still participate, so something in your premise is incorrect. even in the case that top teams participate only for practice, this shows that these tournaments have value. teams without a guaranteed invite also feel pressured to participate as much as they can, to build their CV as it were. EE I believe also mentioned this, so indirectly TI has added value to the other tournaments.
3b) even if tournaments were smaller and top teams pulled out (such as starladder/i-league) this creates room for tier 2 teams. because the best teams can choose to focus on the most prestigious tournaments, other teams have a proving ground and opportunity to win some prize money. this is not really a necessary consequence of having one huge tournament during the year, and it is not guaranteed to always be this way, but my point is that one large tournament (or larger tournaments) and other comparatively small ones is not necessarily "bad"
4) what is "deplorable" about a team being formed to win TI, and then actually winning it? what is deplorable about a competitive landscape wherein players try to form the strongest team they can?
In your second point, are you trying to imply that having ten 1 million dollar tournaments is the same as having one 10 million dollar tournament? Or are you actually sensible and saying that ten 1 million dollar tournaments is preferable?
I would way prefer that over the current model and I am clearly the embodiment of sensibility.
Maybe Valve could put up a prize pool for the entire year and with a compendium that covers all of Valve's tournaments that year. They could just delegate their tournaments to other organizers like MLG, Dreamhack, Starladder, Perfect World etc. if they feel that doing it themselves would stretch them too thin.
I guess that sounds very much like what Riot's doing but I feel like there's a definite middle ground to explore.
More than anything, I want Valve to stop being so quiet about this sort of stuff. I understand their hesitation to talk about projects that aren't done but they kind of have to understand that Dota 2 is about more people than themselves at this point.
Hopefully the people it affects directly (organizers, players, casters) are more in the loop but it oftentimes seems like Valve does whatever the fuck they feel like without informing anyone.
-Edit- I probably should have read the thread like I usually do before commenting. That way I wouldn't have to repeat the same things that have already been said...
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I think TI should have a little more emphasis on awesomeness and a little less on money.
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On January 14 2015 21:36 BongChambers wrote:
God I hope TI5 wont be as bad as TI4 was. Dota really doesn't need another TI4 right now :/
What was wrong with TI4? I personally enjoyed it a lot and am wondering what it was about it that made people dislike it.
My only complaint was that the schedule wasn't really fluid. Had the WB Finals on the first or second day or something.
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On January 14 2015 14:01 PuroYO wrote:
A one tournament sport like Cross-country which has the world cup and no one cares about anything else? Yes.
A one tournament sport like Footballs world cup? Yes
A one tournament sport like American handeggs super bowl? Yeah.
Nothing wrong with that.
This is absurd both football's are enormous throughout the year. The idea that football only matters once every four years lmao.
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One could argue that TI also has a positive effect on other tournaments prize pools, and thus to a margin of the scene. It drags everything up.
Which, in turns, favors the "lesser" teams. So yeah, maybe the top teams do not give 2 shits, but the lesser ones are now presented with a better chance to grab serious money throughout the year (and maybe even better chances to win them, if the top teams are not interested).
The yang of the yin.
Just my 2 cents,
Very good OP, thank you.
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I think a scene structured similar to tennis would be a good way to organize things. Having 4 major tournaments is definitely not too many for them to still be meaningful while allowing smaller tournaments in between to still be possible. Automatically qualifying highly ranked teams for any tournament they want to attend while still leaving the possibility for unproven teams to qualify. I think it would also increase the stability of teams since their wouldn't be a huge period where winning is relatively meaningless.
Ofcourse the huge thing holding back the scene from this approach or anything similar is the lack of an organization to control and set the groundwork.
Edit: I really like the structure of football (soccer) as well, allowing teams to work their way up into higher leagues. It works a bit better with teams changing rosters and the possibility of a World Cup like tournament sounds fun, and Canada might be competitive unlike football :D
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Seems to me that since alternative prize pools have grown pretty substantially, there is a bit more money floating around for the less-known teams. I guess the biggest problem seems to be when, like the OP says, teams like Newbee throw together a lineup a few months in advance, then win the whole tournament. That's just kind of boring, and what do you know, TI4 ended on a pretty boring note.
I feel like maybe the problem isn't that TI4 has a disproportionately huge prize pool but rather that certain teams/players don't have to follow any sort of clear, story-building trajectory to make it to the grand finale. If you look at the NBA, people follow those teams religiously because the teams themselves are meaningful. TI4 Newbee was not a meaningful team because through an unfortunate combination of circumstances they actually didn't have to craft an image of themselves (at least not that I remember... Certainly not like NoTidehunter in the build-up to TI3) before they became millionaires.
Anyway, definitely agree that it's hard to feel much emotion about the smaller tournaments that happen, even though I'm not sure prize pool is the (only) root cause. I did find my interest in the DAC go up substantially when I realized that you could watch in DotaTV without purchasing the compendium. It felt like it was much more relevant to Dota 2 as a whole, and it might feel even more like that if there were more to keep us engaged with it.
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Poland3748 Posts
I don't think Valve has any interest in tuning TI down. The money in the tournament makes the title - as a whole - more recognizable. People say "wow - 10m$ tournament, more than golf/tennis grand slam tournament". They don't care that golf & tennis have a lot healthier landscape with just few super tournaments on top while dota2 has one super-uber tournament on top and nothing remotely comparable through the rest of the year.
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EPT
