Continuing an interesting eSports trend, Valve has reintroduced Fantasy Dota.

"Fantasy Dota is a game that you can play with up to nine of your friends, where each of you forms teams made up of pro players to compete against each other, earning points for your team based on how each of your pro players performs in tournament matches."

Valve introduced and tested this out back in February, and now it’s ready for action. Starting on May 19th, Season 1 of Fantasy Dota runs for 70 days until July 28th. If you have a Fantasy Ticket from the The International Compendium, you can start drafting your fantasy teams now.

It works in Dota 2 just like fantasy leagues for other sports: you draft your team, tweak your roster, and add/drop players (no trading yet). Your active players score points during tournaments, and push you closer to winning your weekly matchups.

Here’s how your 8 player team will look:

Active Roster: 2 Core*, 2 Support, 1 Any
Bench: 3 players of any type

*Core means “playing mid, off-lane, or carry.”

And here’s how the scoring works:

• 0.3 points per kill
• -0.3 points per death
• 0.15 points per assist
• 0.003 points per last hit
• 0.002 points per gold per minute
• 0.002 points per XP per minute
• 0.07 points per seconds of enemy stuns
• 0.0004 points per allied healing done
• 1 point per tower kill
• 1 point per Roshan kill

With this news, it seems like fantasy leagues in eSports are The Next Big Thing™. Riot Games very recently introduced their own official platform for League of Legends. As far as we're concerned, it's great to see eSports expand the crowd experience even further.

Colt "ShdwFlm" Casey
Deputy Editor