Dota 2's The International 2024 world championship will be hosted in the Royal Arena in Copenhagen, Denmark in September
This year's iteration of The International will only feature 16 teams and will also have Valve choosing which teams will get direct invites.
Dota 2 developer Valve Software announced on Saturday (9 March) that The International (TI) 2024, this year's iteration of Dota 2's annual multimillion-dollar world championship tournament, will be hosted at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Valve revealed TI 2024's venue in their latest post on the official Dota 2 blog, where they also announced that this year's Dota 2 world championship tournament will be held in September.
TI 2024 will feature multiple changes to the tournament format, most noteworthy being that the number of participating teams has been reduced to 16. The last time that TI featured 16 participants was in 2016, with the 2017 to 2021 tournaments having 18 teams while the last two events had 20 squads in contention.
TI 2024 will also mark the first time since 2017 that Valve themselves will be choosing which teams will receive a direct invite to the tournament. From 2018 to 2023, the best-performing teams in the Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) earned direct invites to TI.
We can surely expect that one of the directly-invited teams to TI 2024 will be reigning champions Team Spirit, who claimed their second Aegis of Champions in TI 2023 after winning their first in TI 2021.
The return to Valve choosing the direct invitees to TI this year notably comes after the developer ended the DPC after six seasons last September.
Valve said that they will place higher consideration on tournaments based with a higher number of teams participating as well as those that feature cross-regional competition and regional qualifiers.
But while the direct invites to TI will be determined by Valve this year, the rest of the field will still be filled out by teams coming from the regional qualifiers.
While we can expect the usual qualifiers for Western Europe, Eastern Europe, China, Southeast Asia, North America, and South America, it remains to be seen if Valve will also add a new qualifier for the Middle-East and North Africa (MENA) region following its rise to relevance this year.
This will also be the first time that Denmark will host a TI, or any Tier 1 Dota 2 tournament for that matter. But while Denmark is not known for hosting Dota 2 tournaments, it is known for producing some of the greatest players in the history of the game.
Some of them include two-time TI champion with OG Johan "Notail" Sundstein, Gaimin Gladiators offlaner Marcus "Ace" Hoelgaard, Team Falcons support Andreas "Cr1t-" Nielsen, and even renown player-turned-caster Troels "syndereN" Nielsen.
TI 2024 also marks the first time since TI 2021 in Bucharest, Romania that the tournament has been hosted in Europe and the third overall for the region.
"War banners are being washed clean of blood stains and scorch marks. Trumpets are being tested for their ability to sound the imminent approach of battle. Lanes are getting swept clean of body parts, and the Ancients are getting a good crack replastering and surface buffing. The forest air itself crackles with anticipation, because we had new forest air shipped in at considerable cost that crackles on command," Valve said in the blog post.
"The stage is being set, is the point we’re trying to get across here. And why? For The International, returning this September to Europe, where the best Dota teams from around the world will clash for the Aegis in Copenhagen's Royal Arena."
Valve added that they will be announcing ticketing and scheduling information for TI 2024 in the next few months.
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