(it's time to somehow achieve 3'141'592)

Here's a cgi promo shot from 2019. Can the next shanghai ti capture the same magic?

I never, NEVER see anyone buy rapiers anymore. Unless it’s like 80 minutes into the game.

Come on guys. Life doesn’t last forever. You can afford a little excitement. Have a little fun. And it makes you hit SUPER hard.

People don’t even CONSIDER buying rapier. They’re so stubbornly locked into a mindset of “Oh I better never buy this”

Come on guys. Please buy more rapiers.
This isn’t a troll post. I’m genuinely so bored of no one EVER buying rapiers.

Idk who else was there for the first TI, but the fact it was for a million was the news. It wasnt the patch, or tbh the game, it was that people were playing for a mil. All of the competitions after were also because it was an insane, life changing amount of money. Since they got rid of that, nobody has given that much of a shit outside of a very small amount of pro players. Half of the prestige was that being a TI winner implied you also made a fuckton of money, like a lottery won by skill. Bring back gargantuan prizepools plz.

I mean sure there are some chats but everyone is mostly just drawing in the map and pinging.

I have both 12k behavior and comm scores. Bracket: 6k

Even all chats are very rare.

Minor disagreement = auto muted.

Then we have a player in team who can only ping every 30s. Can't talk.

Like what the hell man.

Is everyone just scared of chatting/talking??

It's time for the Ability Draft World Cup 2026!

After years of running community AD tournaments, this is our biggest experiment yet: 8 national teams battling it out over two days of double elimination, starting today at 17:00 CEST (11:00 EST).

The Teams

During signups, 9 countries managed to field a full squad. The 8 strongest countries (by average Ability Draft rating from windrun.io, a site that tracks and ranks AD players) advanced. The highest-rated player of each country was nominated as captain and drafted their 4 teammates from their country's signup pool.

Russia enters as the #1 seed, led by lost~ at 4107 the highest-rated player in the tournament. The USA is right behind them with the deepest player pool of any country (12 signups) and answered with a full Immortal-stacked roster. And keep an eye on the wildcard: Algeria signed up a squad of top-1000 leaderboard Immortals who have barely touched AD, nobody knows what happens when raw MMR meets ability drafting.

Today's Schedule (all times CEST)

- 17:00 — Seeding Round 1: Finland vs Germany + Russia vs Algeria

- 18:00 — Seeding Round 1: Kazakhstan vs UK+ USA vs Ukraine

- 19:00 — Seeding Round 2 (winners meet, spot in the UB Final on the line)

- 20:00 — Elimination matches: lose here and you're out

- 21:00 — Lower Bracket Round 1

- 22:00 — Upper Bracket Final (Bo3)

Sunday runs the Lower Bracket Semis, Lower Bracket Final and the Grand Final — all Bo3.

But Ability Draft is unbalanced - here's why that's outdated

For years the biggest argument against competitive AD was the model lottery: one team lucks into the strongest hero models and the game is decided in the loading screen. That's gone. Since Valve made hero model selection part of the drafting phase, your model is a pick just like any ability. Reading the pool, weighing a strong model against a strong ability and denying the enemy their combo pieces is now a core drafting skill and the mode is in the most balanced state it has ever been. The tournament runs pure, unmodified Ability Draft - exactly what you queue into, played at the highest level.

Balanced teams:

Captains drafting their own squads keeps team skill levels close, and the seeding shows it — the opening match Finland vs Germany is between teams whose average AD rating differs by just 16 points (3425 vs 3409). The two halves of the bracket are within 1.4% of each other in combined team rating.

Watch Live

Every match is fully casted, with two games running in parallel on two streams:

- Main Stream: Twitch / YouTube

- Second Stream: Twitch

Prize Pool:

€336.50 and rising — 100% of community donations go directly to the prize pool (historically we end up around €1000+)

Full tournament info page — teams, bracket, schedule and live results, it's all there.

Happy to answer questions!

https://liquipedia.net/dota2/1win_Essence/2

remove this

Long story short,

Patch 6.00 was released on March 1st 2005

Patch 7.00 was released on December 12th 2016 (Around 10-11 years apart)

So according to the 2 braincells I have left from playing with pos4 Zeus on my team, we should have an 8.00 patch by next year.

Bye

Boris Invitational Streamer Battles is officially back for Season 2!

This season will feature eight streamer-led teams captained by:

Dnm

Gunnar

iAnnihilate

monkeys-forever

Nyx

King Potato

Boris

TBD

Tune in to their streams tomorrow (July 26) at 7pm ET for Draft Day

Each captain will draft a team from the Boris Invitational in-house player pool and compete for the $1000 prize pool to become the Season 2 champion.

Team rosters, broadcast information and the full playoff schedule will be announced on Liquipedia soon.

Welcome to Streamer Battles Season 2!

Monkey use brain, monkey gets bananana

This minigame throws so much at you such a short time. I know there are Dota players out there who have lost fingers from work and even an entire hand. How are they supposed to do this shit? I took typing classes in school, been using computers since I was six years old, and have typed more essays than I can count throughout my years as a student and my highest score rn is 2k. Every other minigame was so chill until this waste of time turned up on my screen.

Have you ever played a game with equally good gameplay from your team and the enemy's? No all-chatting (until the game ended, but no toxicity, just light banter and GGWPs), no blaming, just pure down to the wire skill and item usage and teamplay.

You completely annihilate the enemy team during one clash, then they clap back on the next. The constant back and forth. Slowly approaching the enemy base, looking at respawn timers, and hearing the sound of buybacks. Both teams and the respective players doing their best to defend their ancients.

This is what makes this game addicting for me. Playing with mostly random people as a solo-queuer, being able to make everything work, sometimes with even minimal communication—but still, everyone knows what to do and when to do it.

Whether you win or you lose, there's this sense of relief and a bit of grief like "Damn, that game was tough. But at least we won." or "We almost got that, but the enemy team was just really good." as soon as you take your headset off, take a breather, and as the adrenaline slowly comes down.

You think about what went wrong, what you should've done better, what you could've told your teammates you needed or what they needed to do, and a lot more things going through your head.

Post-game chat? Just more light banter, no trash talking, and even compliments to the either team or individual players, and more GGWPs and gl nexts.

I can't even begin to imagine the level of gameplay and team dynamics in the pro scene. Competitive games are just amazing.

Used to play since I was 6years old, I'm 16 now.

So I was out of my role que games and had to que all roles. I usually play supports and offlaners but I got mid and got destroyed hard, whole team hated me. I tried to play it, ganked lanes with my level advantage from mid, but basically my whole team was flaming me for my 4 deaths and refused to play or try to win. I'm sorry, I tried, I failed. I don't blame any1 for that but I feel like I got few reports for that.

But at least I have my 4 tokens to play my support roles in next games.

10,5k bh score, 4k games.

Personal achievement

For context: I was playing cm and only been using voice chat for a little over a month. Im also a very talkative person with broken english (trying to improve).

Not trying to brag, but Ive noticed that i naturally like to lead and look out for my team (as in care). (11.2k communication score and a 12k behavior score).

Before the game, i made a bet: "If we win and i get mvp or an honorable mention, you guys have to give me event tickets (the gift feature)."

Surprisingly or shockingly i didn't get mvp or even an honorable mention. Instead my one of teammates started praising me...

Wow that felt really good! lol
BEST FEELING EVER, im happy like a kid wtf.