Dota 2 is a 2013
multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game developed by
Valve. In it, two teams of five players compete by selecting characters known as "heroes", each with a variety of innate
skills and abilities, and cooperate together to be the first to destroy the base of the other team, which ends the match. The game is played from a top-down perspective, and the player sees a segment of the game's map near their character as well as a mini-map that shows their allies, with any enemies revealed outside the
fog of war. The game's map has three roughly symmetric "lanes" between each base, with a number of defensive towers protecting each side. Periodically, the team's base spawns a group of weak CPU-controlled creatures, called "creeps", that march down each of the three lanes towards the opponents' base, fighting any enemy hero, creep, or structure they encounter. If a hero character is killed, that character
respawns back at their base after a delay period, which gets progressively longer the farther into the match. As with previous years of the tournament, a corresponding
battle pass for
Dota 2 was released in June 2021, allowing the prize pool to be
crowdfunded by players of the game, who purchase the pass both to support the tournament and to access the rewards within it. A quarter of all revenue made by it was added directly towards the prize pool, which finalized at 40,018,195. At the time of event,
Dota 2 featured 121 playable characters, called "heroes". Prior to each game in the tournament, a draft is held between the opposing team captains to select which heroes their teams use, going back and forth until each side has banned seven and selected five heroes. Once a hero is picked it can no longer be selected by any other player that match, so teams used the draft to strategically plan ahead and deny the opponents' heroes that may be good counters or would be able to take advantage of weaknesses to their current lineup. ==Format==