Valve increases team slots for the Dota 2 major by four

Valve’s upcoming Dota 2 major in Manila will feature 12 teams instead of the usual eight.

The full list of teams for the second major in June was announced yesterday. Valve has increased the slots partially because it thought that third-party LAN tournaments should have a “lasting impact” on the major invites, rather than depending mostly on qualifiers.

“A lot of things change during the year, from team compositions to new results in LAN tournaments, so we tend to take a more holistic approach to how we do invites,” Valve said in the announcement. “We try to always invite the teams that we think have demonstrated their ability to perform well, either from very strong recent results or from a longer history of top finishes.”

The invited teams are:

• Team Secret

• Team Liquid

• Evil Geniuses

• MVP.Phoenix

• Wings Gaming

• Vici Gaming Reborn

• Fnatic

• OG

• Alliance

• compLexity

• Na`Vi

• LGD

Valve also said that previously it did not use a formulaic approach to deciding which teams received invitations.

This decision was very likely taken following the the most recent major in Shanghai, as several international LANs saw darkhorse teams make unexpected tournament runs against the very best teams in the world, such as MVP.Phoenix and Wings Gaming. These recent events, in combination with teams that performed at a consistent level at both third-party tournaments as well as the last major itself, are most likely the reasons behind Valve’s decision to expand their list of invites.

The four remaining slots will be settled in the regional qualifiers, which are set to start tomorrow.