Dota 2: Valve Announces The International Dates, Tickets

Hello. I'm going to talk about Valve's ginormous annual Dota 2 [official site] tournament, The International, for a bit as tickets are going on sale from April 7th and dates for the competition have been announced and so on.

The International 2016/TI/TI6/The Now-Yearly Discussion Of Massive Crowdfunding Via Digital Wizard Hats - whatever you prefer to call it - will be returning to Seattle's KeyArena from 8-13 August.

The tickets are being divided up into "Midweek" and "Finals" with the former giving you access for the first four days (Monday to Thursday) and the latter giving you Friday and Saturday so you can watch the final stages. They're $75 and $100 respectively.

I'm thinking about that and I feel like at least part of the reason for dividing them is it's an attempt to fill the arena for those first few days when people might ordinarily write those off because work. I mean, especially when you put it in context with the finals ticket, that midweek option gives you more days for your money. It's $18.75 a day while the finals work out at $50 a day. I feel like people will look at that and maybe figure that they can see world-class teams play while spending far less cash. Heck, you could go for only two of the four days and it would still work out cheaper. Also, if last year is any yardstick, those games went on late into the evening so you could probably even go about your daily business and then get hours of night Dota.

There's no discount if you want to attend the whole thing in the arena, you just need to buy both tickets. However, if you only have a midweek ticket you can also watch the final two days nearby in a large outdoor viewing area at no extra cost. They had an outdoor viewing area last time that I think pretty much anyone could access as it was just a big screen overlooking the grass near where they were operating the merch shop. I went out there a few times when the weather was nice and I was tired of being indoors in the dark - it was very pleasant. The phrasing of this year's ticketing info makes it read to me like outdoor viewing is only for midweek ticket people now, though you could probably recreate a version of the experience by streaming the Dota games on your phone in the garden.

Attendees also get chances at unique item drops and so on for use in the game. You can find out more in their ticketing FAQ here. Nothing on whether this year has a compendium/what form that will take yet.

Tickets go on sale 7 April in two batches here, one at 10am PST and one at 10pm PST. That's 6am and 6pm BST.