Some people in this community seem to be confused about the TI5 format. TI5 was a hybrid event that combined two standard tourney formats:
1) invitational event where players are invited directly
2) open qualifier event where teams from around the world are allowed to fight their way through a grueling bracket with hundreds of other teams.
These 12 teams were invited directly into the main event in Seattle:
- Vici Gaming
- Evil Geniuses
- Team Secret
- Invictus Gaming
- LCG Gaming
- Cloud9
- Team Empire
- Virtus.pro
- Newbee
- Fanatic
These teams were invited based on recent tournament performance, such as the DOTA2 Asia Championships. One team, Newbee, may not have deserved an invite based on their recent performances, but Newbee won TI4, so it makes perfect sense for last year's winner to be invited as well.
The 12 invites were joined in Seattle by 4 qualified teams and 4 wild card teams. These 8 teams fought through insanely difficult, short-time-span open qualifier events in their regions. First they had to get ahead of 100s of teams in one of four 2-day Open Qualifier events (one for each region). Then they had to play a mini Main-Event style tournament over a one week period to be narrowed down to 2 teams from each region (one qualifier and one wildcard).
Qualified teams: EHOME, compLexity Gaming, MVP Hot6, NAVI
Wildcards: CDEC, Archon, MVP Phoenix, Vega Squadron
These 8 joined the invited 12 in Seattle for an awesome group stage at the end of July (almost purely for seeding purposes), and finally the Main Event at the Key Arena from August 3rd-8th. EG defeated CDEC (wildcard) and won 18 million dollars, which was $1 million from Valve to get it going, and ~$17 million raised via crowd-funding, where 25% of all compendium proceeds went to the Prize Pool, and 75% (approx. $51 million) went to Valve. The success of TI5 has reverberated throughout gaming and international media.
You could even say that it has touched COH2.
