I’m astonished to find no threads up on this yet. I suppose clutchfans is now more of a LoL site, but the difference in payouts between leagues is immense, demonstrating the wide gap in competitive gameplay and hero balance between the two games. Who’s watching this, and what do you think? Clearly to me this is the future of sports.
Can you leave some links to the live streaming/VoDs you're watching and the info on the tournaments for the fellow CFers who're missing out? Btw, I don't think CFers are more into LoL, tbh.
I livestream everything through the free dota steam game, but if you want the production value of commentary and graphics it's best to watch the twitch live feed: Video replays are not quite my thing, I like playing more. But here's a list with highlights of the best games played so far in TI8: https://www.dbltap.com/posts/6147631-5-best-ti8-dota-2-group-stage-matches-so-far And then, I'd never seen mega-creeps comebacks in Dota2 before this, but apparently one team did it TWICE: Finally, a solid analysis of the evolving meta of this year's TI: If you don't know what any of this, I suggest downloading the free dota game and giving it a try. Real fun, and it's had staying power as I recently just got back into this in February of this year after not playing from 2008 onwards (I started in college around 2004 when it was just a Bnet custom game made by guinsoo, or icefrog) to see it now balloon into the massive phenomenon it is. The total pot of this year's tournament is 25M to give you perspective.
Yeah, DotA2's prize pool has been famously exceeding other games for a while, probably average 5-6 or more times LoL's. Thanks for the links and so forth. I'll check out some of Team Liquid games. I'll add YT link here.
I just realized that the YT link above would be only good during LIVE streaming. WATCH LIVE & VoD: Full Match: twitch.tv/dota2ti and [Youtube] The International Highlights: [Youtube] DotA Digest
GG OG. Incredible run of comebacks this tournament from them. It's a Hollywood storyline too, as their team didn't exist two months ago. When Fly ditched the team to form EG with Sumail, and they lost s4 to EG as well, it seemed impossible that Notail would be able to scrap a team together in time. But he picked up Topson off the street and instantly put him in their most important spot in mid-lane. Even if Topson couldn't win the lane 1v1 versus the world's best, he still did well enough for the team to survive the mid-game and position Ana with just some totally imba builds. The most amazing game to me has to be game 3 in the grudge match with EG in the winner's bracket semis: Sumail absolutely torched them and started 24-1 on Tiny, but one push into OG's base and all of a sudden they picked up one team win, then another, and by the end Spectre had like 90% evasion lol. But beating LGD was even more impressive. LGD had just flat out dominated all the other top seeds in this tournament. Virtus Pro. Team Liquid. No one could go toe to toe with them in the early and mid-game. OG vs LGD was a true Rocky vs Drago fight where even the Chinese fans in the audience had to root for OG after their amazing series of comebacks. It felt like OG never won a game in the last three series without being down for most of it. Until the last minute against LGD I don't even think they had a kills lead in their five games. Dota is going to trounce LoL in the coming months. They announced their next TI to be in Shanghai, so you can assume that the total pot of the next tournament will be even higher than this one, already the highest in e-sports history.
It seems like 2018 is the year of the dark horses in the world of esports. Look at the winners of OWL (the last of the 6 playoff teams), NBA2K League (14th in the regular season), and now DotA2 TI. It can happen again if Griffin (all newbies in their inaugural season) wins in LoL World Champ.