The hype train is going strong! Hoping for an MVP-Liquid wild card finals. Despite my love for Black and him playing pudge in the main tournament.

http://www.dota2.com/international/watch/

There is a begginer stream being run as well, worth checking out if you are new.

(Going to make a thread for each phase of the tournament.)

So it's the 1v1 and the playoffs for the last spot first isn't it?

Really looking forward to it.

@mister_v: Yep, I believe they're doing the Wildcard matches first, will have our last team in the playoffs when they're done. Then we have the solo championship with these players:

Artour 'Arteezy' Babaev

Daryl 'IceIceIce' Koh Pei Xiang

Chai 'Mushi' Yee Fung

Roman 'Resolution' Fominok

Gustav 's4' Magnusson

Danil 'Dendi' Ishutin

Linsen 'FY' Xu

Fei Chi 'Ferrari 430' Luo

Will GBchat be up for the international?

Not sure, will tweet @brad and see if we can get it thrown up. Gonna spend most of my day in a car so I won't be able to chat in it until tomorrow :(

I'm trying to watch it now and the stream seems not good at all. And the audio is pretty bad (low and echoing), there's video skipping, and that's even if I backup to buffer. I'm not sure what's going on, but really strange. Does not seem very good.

Is this not the main start of the tournament? Seems like when I watched it last year it seemed..... more professional. Anyone else having an issue with it?

@cloudyimpulse: Yeah the proper tournament starts next week Friday. The setup of this play-in series seems SUPER janky though with audio issues all over the place, though it's probably for the best that they figure out all this stuff before the real TI4.

@hadoken101: Yeah so weird. I watch various gaming tournament streams (can't wait for Evo this week), but compared to the League of Legends stream, this was not good for today's match. Hopefully when the actual tournament starts, it's like last year, cause that was well done. This not so much.

I should of tried that newbie friendly channel. Wonder if it was any better or the same. Also curious what actual new players thought about it. I may check it out on the next match.

Side note, the 4 commentator panel is PERFECT. Though it sounds like there is a restaurant kitchen behind them working.

@cloudyimpulse: I checked the "noob" stream out just to see if the audio was much better, but the issues were about as bad but different than the main channel. Instead of echoing audio, the commentary was kind of buried by the in game audio which was just booming. The content seemed ok, explaining what different items do and stuff, but I guess I can't really say if it was helpful for newer players since I've played both Dota 2 and LoL for so long.

@hadoken101: Yeah the picks just started and I've opened up the newbie friendly stream and since they are directly in the game, the skipping is already a problem again. Sounds kind of interesting though listening to it when it is working (though they seem to kind of wander off in conversation). Kind of skipped over a character that was picked (or three).

Kind of unfortunate.

Edit: OH MAN, they moved off the 4 person commentary team and faded to the same guys again and it just went back to the skipping again. So whatever feed they are using for the two man announce team is pretty bad. I wonder if they even know.

If you're going to do that, please at least put them in the Dota 2 forum. I'll move this one.

For those who has already watched the stream, did we get any Yames and Bruno or was it Sheever and Co. all the way through? My fail Chinese internet is failing hard this morning.

@mb: Woops, thought it was. must have been on the general when I thought I was on the dota board.

Sadly, there was only one really good game. Here's hoping the rest of the tournament is more exciting than stomp after stomp.