"The International" Dota 2 Tournament

Last week, Valve officially opened "The International" Dota2 Tournament. It is the very first event giving millions of gamers worldwide the first look at Valve's newest game, Dota 2, which  is based on Defense of the Ancients a.k.a DoTA,  a custom real-time strategy map created for Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. I'm sure some of you are familiar and addicted (just like me) with this game. The tournament took place on Cologne, Germany, during the Gamescom 2011 and formatted as group-stage double elimination.

Geeks everywhere. (image source)

During the five-day event, the tournament has been witnessed with over tens of millions of fans and viewers worldwide since it was streamed online in four different languages (English, German, Chinese and Russian). Sixteen (16) teams from different parts of the world took part on the tourney and a whooping prize pool of USD $1 MILLION.

Teams in four groups (image source)

One of the best highlight of the game, besides the game itself and the teams, is the Player Excitement Level, which measures players' excitement periodically. It is displayed in a small graph in-game.

(image source)

You may have seen graphs displaying the players’ excitement levels displayed periodically during The International tournament matches. This biofeedback data is collected using a wristband with custom hardware and works by measuring the electrical conductivity of the skin and sending signals to the player’s PC. The game collects this data continuously and plots the last two minutes of the player’s biofeedback history. Swings in a player’s emotional state, both positively and negatively, are represented by spikes in the graph. --via Dota2 Blog

And after a five-day battle, Na'Vi (Natus Vincera) from Ukraine, took all the loot, a head-smashing one million dollars and the first Dota 2 champion. They beat EHOME from China, via 3 wins on a best-of-five elimination series. Fortunately, EHOME took $250,000 as second prize, not bad right?

Oh! Virgins. Kidding. :D (image source)

Anyway, Valve will release the Open Beta for Dota 2 this fall or sooner (fingers crossed), everyone (especially me) is so excited than a horny camel. Let's all hope Valve uses Reverse Valve Time instead of Valve Time.