Watch Party Seattle

Similar to last year, our group, the Crimson Witnesses are considering organising another watch-party for TI this year to cater to all those that didn't get tickets for the finals (Three days). We are currently in the process of sourcing a venue should the demand be there. If you're going to be in Seattle and looking for a watchparty/pubstomp (A place to watch the games together with other people), please fill out this form, no emails collected, this will help us to obtain an appropriate venue based on the demand: https://forms.gle/qmnLu1XmqKQ4xujs9

Any watch party we organise will only be for finals (three days) as won't arrive in Seattle early enough to ensure appropriate quality for a playoffs watch party sadly.

We will also be posting about various Pubstomps/Watchparties in Seattle and around the world as we hear about them. If you know of any in your area, please do let us know so we can relay that to anyone else looking for a place to watch Dota with others. For those looking to host a watchparty we have resources in there for people looking to host their first courtesy of Barcraft United.

The Side Shop 2023

Article about the Side Shop Event.

Location: Block41 (15 minute walk from Climate Pledge Arena)

Date: 25th October 10am-4pm (Limited time as this event is entirely self-funded in the hopes that sponsor conflicts can be avoided to allow for inclusivity amongst teams and those with sponsors.)

Free attendance.

Since the last post about The Side Shop I have shared our plans to many of the teams qualified for The International, currently have 5 of the teams at TI confirmed for attendance at the event since that initial post, more to be announced soon in our discord and on their own time as they wish to do so.

The goal of this event is to create a free space for all Dota related artists, teams, orgs and communities the access to vendor their items and facilitate player signing sessions at centralised location unlike in Singapore where there was various merch stores all over the city for individual teams (Team merch hasn't been being sold at the Secret Shops for a while now. Figure people attending the finals might want merch from their favourite teams ahead of that)

Along with this, obviously, the original idea for this event was provide a space for all of the artists in the Dota 2 community to showcase their work. This venue will be completely free for all artists to have a space and we will provide showcase stands to all artists, the difficulty for the artists will be bringing stock, especially if travelling internationally or shipping out to our shipping location ahead of their travel. However, we will provide a free location to ship all their goods to.

If you are a team rep, an org rep (We will have a section for various amateur organisation communities), an artist of any kind or a content creator with a merch line that you would like to share with the community, please either reach out to me via discord or through DM's as I would love to provide you a free location to vendor your merchandise to your supporters and the community. If you have any questions, I can answer them publicly here or privately.

The International Meetups

Solavi recently posted his International 2023 Survival Guide which is a great reference to start with for anyone attending TI this year either to go to a Watchparty or the event itself for anyone who missed it.

For the playoffs and for the finals, we will be arranging a meetup at the Climate Pledge Arena, there are some fun plans in the works:

• Will be organising an early meetup the morning of the events in order to get appropriate seating for our relatively large group (100+)
• Getting in touch with local board-game creators (If you know of any who want to showcase their games, feel free to DM!) to host a full showcase event where we can play various unique boardgames while we wait in the queue and if anyone has any fun ideas for this, feel free to share! Obviously there will be no costs associated with attending this, all are welcome, it's just to kill the tedium of waiting in a line for several hours.
• We will also work with a local cafe or early opening food service to have food delivered to those waiting in the queue with us so that everyone can get a snack and some drinks while they wait.
• Will be customising a section so that we are identifiable to all those attending. By sitting together with others you will be able to ensure if for whatever reason, you get up, your seat won't be taken.
• For those looking to get food in between series: Arena food is pretty pricey and the queue times may be undesirable. In order to combat that, for members of our group we'll be placing orders to outside of the arena to go out and collect from various local restaurants and stores (These will be chosen by community feedback ahead of the event days) to eat outside of the arena at cheaper prices and to get higher quality food.

Lots of other meetups are being planned by community members within the server and we are creating events for them as are suggested. For example, day before the playoffs Aunty Donna is playing in the Moore theatre so we will host a meetup event for that. There are lots of people in our community staying at the Green Tortoise Hostel over the TI dates so there is an event in the server to get to know others staying there. We'll be doing tours, restaurant meetups, brewery crawls, climbing meetups, Halloween meetup(for day after TI), bar meetups, parties and much more.

Attendance at TI itself is not mandatory. If you are in Seattle and just want to hang out with other Dota players, come along to any of the events and have fun!