The American group qualifiers started last night so even though the main event doesn't begin until July I thought I'd start talking about this early.
The International, which most of you probably already know by now, is Valve's annual Dota 2 tournament. It has a $6m prize fund at the time of writing and it's pretty damned polished - the main event in Seattle draws nerds from all over the world to spectate and it has professional sport levels of production.
It's e-sports then, which has a reputation for being pants, so why should you watch it? Well if you don't play Dota then there's probably no reason why you should, but if you do it might be worth catching a few games if you have time just to see. I was pretty cynical but I was surprised how much I enjoyed seeing how the pros play, watching the incredible stuff they pull off or feeling smug that they sometimes make the same mistakes as me. It's mostly like they're playing a different game with the same graphics though. One of the things I struggled with in other e-sports I tried to watch was that I couldn't follow the action. This is where the commentators come in. In the tournament proper they follow the action for you and enthusiastically talk you through it, and it made a huge difference for me. It's not all action all the time, but it's much faster paced than our Friday 5punky games.
Enough evangelising then. For anyone who fancies it you can watch it live in the game client (I think you might need a ticket for this), or as a replay. Both have a selection of commentators and it's surprisingly smooth. You can also watch on Twitch with their set of commentators, who are doing the group stages at the moment and seem like a nerd version of Big Brother with about a dozen of them in a house. It feels a bit amateurish at the moment, but they might tune it up as the competition progresses. They also have cats. Finally, you can catch replays on Youtube. This is a bit hit-or-miss with finding the right commentators, and it's not live, but it's an easy way of seeing the games as you would have in the game client.
For following along and winning in-game shit you can buy the Compendium. I assume this gives you a ticket to watch the matches live in-game (it had fucking better do), and it gives you a little rundown on each team to help you follow, as well as recording the results. Just like those ones you get for the World Cup. On top of that you can get stickers for it by playing games and watching matches, which can be traded on the marketplace, and you can predict various things (most courier kills in one match, for example). These net you points, along with some in-game stuff, which earns you stuff like boosts, a parrot courier, and loading screens. Unfortunately it's also £6, which I reckon is about £2 too much, but I gave it a shot anyway since I'll be trying to watch a lot.
I might post some of the better games here (YouTube links) for anyone with a passing interest, but for the most part hopefully a few of us will want to talk about matches and compendium stuff. I know there was half a dozen or so of us last year.
was just about to come on and say to keep eyes out for the noob friendly stream, i know one of the commentators for it is 
Really? I only managed to catch the first game and Newbee got completely curbstomped in that. What changed?