Why This International Is a Uniquely Unpredictable 'Dota 2' Tournament

For most major sports, the fundamental rules of play rarely change from season to season. One year's Super Bowl or NBA Finals series normally looks pretty similar to the one before. Sure, there might be a team that executes at a strategy at a higher level, or an individual athlete who excels in a way that forces opponents to adjust in pretty big ways. But the basic building blocks of the game largely stay the same year to year.

But in the world of esports, that's not always the case. You don't have to look any further than The International, Dota 2's season closing "major" tournament, to see that.

When The International 6 rolled around last August, Dota was in version 6.88—an edition of the game that was balanced in such a way to produce a great deal of tactical variety in play. The "meta"—the ascendent paradigm of popular strategies—of 6.88 allowed for a new use cases, broader strategies, and surprising character choices all the way through the final stages of play.

Despite continued claims that 6.88 was in fact the strongest the Dota meta had ever been, six months is a long time with no substantial changes. But rather than continuing their incremental updates towards 6.89, Valve shocked the Dota community this past December by announcing version 7.00 at the Boston Major. Not only would this be the largest patch in the history of Dota 2, but it marked the single most dramatic set of changes applied to Dota since before IceFrog—the figurehead of Dota—gained creative control in 2005.

On top of the standard series of character and item rebalancing players expect from the larger patches, dozens of new mechanics were added dramatically changing every single character and item in the game, the map was greatly reorganized, the first new hero was created in over four years, and the entire pace of the game was shifted. The patch was such a gigantic change that it was lovingly referred to by fans as Dota 3. For the first time ever, top level teams were left without any sort of detailed knowledge of top level strategies.

The next few months were tumultuous. There was a combination of experimentation with new strategies, given how different the game was, and heavy reliance on tried and true historical strategies. Any hero that seemed strong instantly became meta-centralizing.

As one example, take the Root mechanic—which briefly locks a character in place, making them vulnerable—was changed to be effectively inescapable, so characters with inherent Roots immediately became more popular—leading teams to choose (or ban) them during the pre-match character drafting phase.

By itself, a change like this is meaningful. But when you also consider its knock on effects, it's easy to see how large the shift the 7.0 really is. In response to the changes to the Root mechanic, players experimented to find new strategies; in the process, they discovered that Ember Spirit was the only character in the game who could shrug off Roots, and over the course of only a few games, the meta which had entirely focused on those Root characters jumped to being about Ember Spirit.

Beyond this, teams returned to strategies that had proven their strength in years past. Many tried and true character combos quickly came into vogue, simply because they would consistently beat out teams who were experimenting with new synergies. As 7.00 quickly turned to 7.01 and 7.02, characters jumped in and out of "top tier" status.

While this kind of patching is exciting and leads to variety on a tournament to tournament basis, it risks of making each individual tournament feel disconnected from the others. Each can have the feeling of a lopsided meta quickly sorting itself out, rather than a deep meta with a variety of strategies developing over time. Needless to say, with a substantial patch released between the qualifiers for this years International and the main event, people were concerned that we would be in for a somewhat limited meta once the teams got to Seattle.

This was not the case.

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To give you some context for the numbers I'm about to mention, last year's League of Legends World Championships saw a total of 77 games played between the group stage and the main event combined. Throughout the entire event, a total of 56 characters were picked from a catalog of 133 champions. The International 6, which received so much praise for its pick diversity, saw a total of 105 unique picks (from a collection of 110 heroes) over the course of the two weeks combined.

On the first day of TI7's group stage, 40 games were played, and 93 characters were picked from the now 112 available. By the end of group stages, that number had already risen to match that of the entire event from the year before. As of the time of writing, 107 heroes have been picked and counting. In the group stages, nearly every single game had some unexpected pick, and what consistency did develop was unlike anything people had expected.

Niche picks who had seen nearly no competitive play since 7.00 saw game time from a variety of teams. And, perhaps even more surprisingly, as quickly as this meta had developed, it was tossed aside. Despite playing on the single largest stage in esports, for the largest prize pool in video game history, people were experimenting in a way they hadn't in nearly a year, and the experimentation was paying dividends. Imagine a Super Bowl contender scrapping their entire playbook just as the game started, only to do the same thing again at half time. Not only is this diversity incredibly exciting from the viewer's perspective, but it allows for an international clash of styles in a way that otherwise leads to monolithic domination.

Regardless of any meta-contributing factors, each team has preferred playstyles. These preferences can be honed or pushed aside, depending on what teams think is required of them to win, but those factors still exist. In imbalanced metas, teams are advantaged or disadvantaged based on how much their playstyles happen to benefit from the dominant strategies; Those metas encourage teams who don't naturally tend towards those strategies to spend time working out of their old habits in order to be able to compete.

Metas like the one currently being seen at TI7 have the opposite effect, encouraging each team to embrace their unique strengths, rather than spend any time forcibly changing them. Instead of seeing "One-Patch-Wonder" teams who are likely to excel only for a short period of time, we are treated to a wide array of strategies. For example, very quick, aggressive teams like Virtus Pro are able to double down on those aspects of their play, while slower, more methodical teams like Invictus Gaming can opt towards drawing a game out. This factor is especially relevant in the increasingly globalized Dota world, where an imbalance in playstyle strength can even further disadvantage teams from parts of the world that are only just now getting chances to play on international stages.

There are likely several factors that have contributed to the current state of the meta, most predictably the patch balance, but Valve has also made relevant changes outside of the game client. Specifically, there has been a substantial effort by the organizers of Dota's major tournaments to help diversify the player pools in these events.

At this time last year, the world of Dota was split up into four regions: Americas, Europe, China, and Southeast Asia. Before this year's spring major tournament, though, a change to the global Dota cartography split the Americas into North America and South America, and created a CIS region. However, rather than a smooth distribution of qualification slots across the redefined regions, China and SEA retained their extra qualification slots, while South America and CIS both gained one guaranteed spot in every major tournament.

While North American teams have seen international success over the past three years, South American teams have rarely even been given opportunities to compete. Despite SA being home to some of the highest individually ranked players in the world, their official matches have been played on North American servers with 100+ ms of lag, discouraging esports organizations from getting involved. With the new change to tournament qualifications mandating a slot be contended for on South American servers, these talented players and teams are finally being given a chance at international recognition.

Beyond the new scenes, Southeast Asia, a region that has seen steady growth over the past half decade, is finally being represented proportionally to the size of its player base. While a number of the most legendary players from Dota history have come from SEA, they have mostly made their names playing for Chinese organizations under experienced captains, which contributed to a regional reputation for strong players and weak leadership. However, the confluence of SEA's growing elite player community and the region's additional guaranteed spots in major tournaments has led to multiple developments. Players are being recruited from the region to play as the stars of teams all over the world, while local organizations have begun bringing in foreign captains with international experience. Both SEA players and teams are globally seeing more opportunity.

These changes to the geography of Dota both contribute to and are driven by a diverse meta. Not only does a major patch encourage the exploration of different playstyles in way that level the playing field for less experienced regional teams, but the arrival of those teams and players also forces experienced international competitors to diversify their strategies.

South American teams will not only learn from their international opponents and incorporate aspects of their play, but they will bring those lessons back to their home communities. Likewise, they will introduce new ideas and novel strategies to the global meta simply by their participation.

And that is what makes The International so special, this year more than most others. Every summer, it seems to outdo all expectations and understandings of how Dota is played, bringing to light new approaches and rewarding tactical creativity. In only a decade and a half, Dota has proven its strategical longevity, as it endlessly challenges players and viewers alike to explore what it has to offer.