Valve has drastically changed the format and schedule of The International 12
Valve has released a blog, in the Dota 2 developers shared the details of the future The International 12. The championship will be held in 3 stages: Group stage, Play-offs and Final.
Valve has tried to make sure that a large number of people will have the opportunity to watch the games of The International 12, so the decision was made to hold the games from Friday to Sunday.
"One of the obvious differences this year is the tournament schedule. It's always more interesting to watch the competition live rather than a few hours or days later, and we wanted to give that opportunity to more people.
That's why we decided to organize the schedule so that almost every game would take place on the most free days – from Friday to Sunday".
The International 12 schedule:
- Group Stage will take place from October 12-15
- Play-off will take place from October 20-22
- Final will take place from October 27-29
The naming of the stages is also important: the "Road to The International" is the group stage matches and the play-off. The main The International is the "Final" phase, where only the 8 strongest teams will remain in the battle for Aegis.
The group stage format has undergone a significant change: there will be 4 groups of 5 teams instead of 2 groups of 10 teams as it was before:
"Because of the old format of two groups of ten clubs, each team played so much that the first matches simply didn't seem important. On top of that, it meant that many matches in the last days of the group stage were really not important because they didn't affect the teams' final position. So we had to develop a group stage format that raised the stakes with each game."
Play-off will be held at the Summit Convention Center, Seattle. The top 8 teams will play for 4 slots on the upper bracket of The International 12. There will also be 4 matches to find out 4 more participants of the lower bracket. An important clarification here is that now the games in the first round of the lower bracket will be played in the best-of-3 format, not in BO1 as it was before.
Final (the main The International) will take place at Climate Pledge Arena, and that's where the best team in the world will be determined. On Friday and Saturday there will be 4 games each in BO3, and on Sunday the top 3 will determine the champion. Traditionally, there will be a BO3 lower bracket final and then a BO5 grand final.
Tickets for The International 12 should go on sale in mid-August – they will be for the Play-off and Final.