The Aegis of Champions is heading to Europe and the path to The International gets a bit clearer.
The International 2024 location has been announced – the Royal Arena in Copenhagen, Denmark, along with info on how to qualify. This comes after developers Valve went dark for six months after announcing the end of the Dota Pro Circuit. Needless to say, any clarification on the direction of the professional season was greatly appreciated, no matter how little or late it arrives.
According to the announcement, 16 teams will be playing in The International this year. These teams will be chosen through a mix of open and regional qualifiers along with direct invites. This is similar to how teams made it into The International before the DPC so we are ironically treading familiar waters here.
Key Questions Moving Forward
The first question is what the split between open, regional, and invitational teams will be. In previous Internationals a majority of participating teams were invited and the rest had to make it through the qualifiers. Will Valve keep a similar split or will they even it out a bit more?
Questions need to be asked about how the open and regional qualifiers will be handled as well. For many teams, these qualifiers may also serve as their last chance to enter The International 2024 in Copenhagen. Previous qualifiers had limited slots available for teams and it was difficult to discern what made a team eligible to play in these qualifiers.
This leads into the most important question: what are the metrics being used to determine which teams will be invited? The reason the DPC was set up in the first place was so that teams had a clear path to The International. Valve states that the invitations are based on a team’s performance, but what exactly are they using to measure “performance”? It wasn’t clear in the past and there’s a risk that we could run into the same problems if Valve isn’t transparent moving forward.
There’s still time before The International 2024 this September, so hopefully we get more information soon.
Banner photo by Dota 2 The International.
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