Dota 2 – Valve postpones ticket sales for The International 10

In just over a month, the biggest Dota 2 event of the year is scheduled to take place. Whether there will be a live audience is unfortunately still questionable. Yesterday Valve, the developer of Dota 2, explained why they are going to postpone their ticket sales for the tournament.

Via a blogpost the company indicates that they had a start date for sales in mind but the emergence of the Covid-19 Delta variant comes with new challenges. Valve said that: “Due to circumstances that are constantly changing, we have to be careful. We want to make a wise and safe decision regarding the ticket sales.” At the moment it is still unknown when the company will come out with more information regarding ticket sales.

Corona perils

This is not the first time The International has run into problems due to the pandemic. The TI10, as this year’s edition is called, was actually supposed to take place last year. The tournament was scheduled to take place in Stockholm in August 2020. Due to the pandemic, Valve had the event moved to August this year.

However, in June, the Swedish Sports Association informed Valve that the staff and players of the tournament would not receive visas to host the event in Stockholm. This forced Valve to reschedule and move the tournament once again. The travel restrictions combined with the late ticket sales information is causing a lot of problems for fans. It is going to be difficult for many fans to attend the tournament and to make any bookings for trains, flights or hotels.

With the rise of the delta variant, there might be more and even stricter travel restrictions coming toward us, as delta is spreading much faster than covid-19 did. The way things are developing at the moment, it could still be possible that Valve decides to host the tournament with a smaller audience or even no live audience at all.

It is probably going to be very challenging for the teams to plan anything regarding the TI10. Teams that are located in countrys that have a lot of ongoing covid-cases like Malaysia or the Phillippines, could have a very hard time to find a way to travel to Romania. Just recently it was announced by Riot Games, that Bren Esports won’t be able to participate in Valorant Masters Berlin, because the team wasn’t granted a visa in time.

Similar things have happened to a lot of players, one of them being to malaysian Valorant- Pro Khalish “d4141” Rusyaidee who wasn’t allowed to go to Berlin and turned to twitter in

hopes to find help (which he did, read the whole story here).

The International 10 in 2021

At The International, the best Dota 2 teams in the world will come together. The group phase of the tournament starts on October 7 and takes place in Bucharest, Romania. The main event starts on October 12 and ends with the final on October 17. The tournament can be followed via the official Dota 2 channels.

There are definitely going to be a lot of challenges for everyone participating in the tournament and if we have more information regarding the ticket sales for the TI10 or the competing teams, we will keep you updated here on fragster.