Valve changed the format for this year's The International to ensure “every single match had stakes.”
Dota 2 developer Valve Corporation has revamped the format for The International (TI) 2025, this year's iteration of Dota 2's annual world championship tournament, by adding a new Swiss-format Group Stage and Special Elimination Round along with tweaks to the Playoff seeding.
Valve revealed the changes to TI 2025's format, along with the full schedule for the tournament and the starting date for ticket sales, in an official blog post on Wednesday (2 April).
TI 2025 to feature new Swiss-format Group Stage
TI 2025 is set to take place from 4 to 14 September in Hamburg, Germany, with the Playoffs being hosted in the Barclays Arena. In line with the changes introduced to the TI format in 2023, TI 2025 will be split into two distinct phases: The Road to The International and The International proper. The Road to The International will feature the new Swiss-format Group Stage and Special Elimination Round while The International proper will feature the Playoffs.
TI 2025's Group Stage and Special Elimination Round will run from 4 to 7 September. The new Swiss-format Group Stage will feature the 16 participating teams competing in a five-round Swiss bracket with best-of-three matches. Teams can only face opponents with the same record in this format (e.g. a 2:0 team will face another 2:0 team, a 1:3 team will face another 1:3 team, etc.).
Teams will need to win four series in order to advance to the Playoffs while those that suffer four losses will be eliminated, with three teams advancing to the Playoffs and three others getting eliminated after the Group Stage.
The 10 other teams will then have to play in the Special Elimination Round, where the high seeds will face the low seeds, with the winners advancing to the Playoffs and the losers getting eliminated. In total, this year's Road to The International will see eight teams advance to The International itself while eight others will have their journeys cut short early.
The International proper, i.e. the Playoffs, will take place from 11 to 14 September, and still follow the tried-and-tested double-elimination format that fans have grown accustomed to. However, instead of having some teams start in the lower bracket as in previous editions, TI 2025's Playoffs will have all eight Playoff-qualified teams start in the upper bracket.
As usual, TI 2025's Playoffs will feature best-of-three matches except for the Grand Finals, which will be a full best-of-five series for the coveted Aegis of Champions.
Valve said in their blog post that the decision to change the format for TI 2025 was made to ensure “every single match had stakes” and avoid issues they faced in previous iterations of the tournament where some games didn't matter at all.
“We set out this year to create a structure such that every single match had stakes, and that those stakes were clear to the teams and the viewers. We wanted to do this without losing the massive amount of foundational, tournament-meta-defining games that fans of the group stage enjoy every year. And at the same time, the new format needed to avoid issues we've seen in previous years, where individual round robin games didn't matter at all, or only mattered to teams that weren't in the match.
Swiss formats come with unique challenges, and we've taken special care to make sure fans can know in advance when their favorite teams are playing, and that no team with a winning record ever has to play two series in a row (including a last-game-of-the-night followed by a first-game-of-the-morning)."
TI 2025 tickets to go on sale on 15 April
Single-day and multi-day bundle tickets for TI 2025 will go on sale on AXS starting 10am CEST on 15 April, though Valve has yet to reveal any details on ticket pricing for the tournament.
TI 2024, which saw the final three days of the tournament take place in front of a live crowd in Copenhagen's Royal Arena, notably had single-day tickets that ranged from US$180 to US$300, while two-day bundles ranged from US$400 to US$512. Meanwhile, three-day ticket bundles were priced at US$686.
What is The International?
TI is Dota 2's annual world championship tournament, The series began all the way back in 2011, when the game was first officially revealed to the world. TI 2025 will see the return of Dota 2's world championship tournament to Germany a full 14 years after the country hosted the inaugural event of the series. All the way back in 2011, the first-ever TI was hosted in the Koelnmesse in Cologne as part of Gamescom 2011, with 
Natus Vincere becoming the first team to claim the Aegis of Champions.
A total of 16 teams will compete in TI 2025, with teams earning their spots in the event through direct invites and a series of regional qualifiers.
Last year's tournament, TI 2024, notably saw Team Liquid become the third team in the history of Dota 2 to raise the Aegis of Champions for the second time.
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