Valve released Dota 2's long-awaited summer battle pass yesterday and it’s packed full of stuff to get DOTA gamers all excited about playing again.
The International Battle Pass is Valve’s main mechanism for funding the prize pool for its big annual Dota 2 tournament and building up excitement around it. While the event has been delayed into 2021 due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, 25 percent of all proceeds from the $10 battle pass (and any extra levels players buy) will still go toward it.
As per the expected standard, this isn’t just your standard level one to 100 battle pass. Valve is also injecting a handful of other prizes and new meta systems into the game as part of the package.
Here’s a rough breakdown of some of the bigger additions:
Guilds are returning to Dota 2! Players can join up in clans or groups working collectively towards daily contracts and Guild Challenges to earn points & gold
A new limited-time mode based around navigating four-player mazes
Ticket-based Battle Guantlets where you try to get three wins before suffering two losses in order to earn points and gold
A new set of Immortal Treasures (of course) with skins for Tinker, Medusa, and others Rank up rewards
A new tavern crawl, side-shop mini game, and tweaks to how things like betting and gifting battle passes works
These are this year’s rank-up rewards:
Level 160: Sanctums of the Divine terrain.
Level 200: Living towers.
Level 255: The Toy Butcher Pudge Persona.
Level 305 The Disciple’s Path Anti-Mage Persona.
Level 375: The One True King Wraith King Arcana.
Level 445: The Eminence of Ristul Queen of Pain Arcana.
Level 575: Compass of the Rising Gale Windranger Arcana.
There are also new chat wheel sounds, emoticons, taunts, sprays, ping cosmetics, and consumables and a bunch of other things. Its actually quite alot of content, and do make us feel that buying a Battle Pass is worth its price just by itself, on top of crowd-funding the most prestigious Esports tournament prize pool in the world.
Even if you don't enjoy the additional content, are you sure you don't want some of latest skins and cosmetics to add on to your collection? I mean the end-game is equipping yourself with the latest arcana and not MMR right? Right?
DOTA 2 The International - Historical Performance
Taking a step back, we took a look at the past prize pools collected from our fellow DOTA 2 gamers and it has being an impressive ride - never failing to up its previous records every single year:
However this year, there could be a potential buck in the trend due to the disruption caused by the corona virus. e.g. you are effectively crowd-funding towards a prize pool for a tournament which has no fixed date yet, and definitely won't happen in 2020. Would that dampen the demand and excitment?
The player base, although having recovered from an all-time low of 616,415 in Jan 2020, is also still hovering sluggishly at <800,000. How would that affect the collective ability to outdo ourselves again?
Despite the above, we have faith in the DOTA 2 community and bet that it will once again be a new record for the following reasons:
It has almost become a religion for the community to push for higher record every year (despite a worrying trend of downwards falling player base)
The content for this year's BattlePass is very well worth the US$10 price tag
While not a new approach, but Valve has committed 10K Battle Points if the prize pool exceeds last year and another 10K if it exceeds $40,000,000
Its not clear when does the Battle Pass end. Potentially it could be extended much further along than the usual, until TI 2020 has a confirmed date
Well, mark our words when we say this is a tenacious community! Let the battle begin!
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