RPS Feature Points win invites to win prizes!
With the biggest event in the competitive Dota 2 [official site] calendar – The International 2017 – due to take place next month, it might be a little early to start thinking about The International 2018. Unless, that is, you’re Valve, who have revealed a massive overhaul to how the entire next professional season will play out.
Here’s an in-depth look at why these changes are so promising for the pro scene. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Something fishy
Remember how Dota 2’s current seasonal Battle Pass/money pit has an under the sea theme? WELL, my Battle Pass is now sufficiently levelled up that I can swap the usual map with its trees and woodland wildlife for an underwater variant called Reef’s Edge! After booting up a game replay I swapped to the free camera mode, ditched the HUD elements that were getting in the way of my watery tourism and went exploring. Seahorses, eels and clams were just some of the things I found! Come see! Read the rest of this entry »
Ooooh! The first part of Dota 2 [official site] co-op campaign, Siltbreaker, has arrived! Act 1: The Sands of Fate is the game’s first co-op multiplayer campaign (unless you count crowding round a screen with a friend to take turns playing Warcraft 3 or something). Read the rest of this entry »
Hot on the heels of his hero Erik Wolpaw, Valve’s VR top-dog and grizzled bossman Chet Faliszek has announced that he’s leaving the company. Amicably, he claims, but anyone who’s ever met him will know that’s not possible. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a joke you can borrow for when you’re necking jars and dropping bantbombs with the lads tonight:
Q: What do Gargamel and Dota 2 Ranked matchmaking have in common?
A: They both hate smurfs.
Steel yourself for some jolly vigorous high-fives from the lads there.
To crack down on Doters playing across multiple accounts, Valve will soon start requiring players register a phone number to play Ranked Dota 2 [official site]. Smurfs muck up the fun, you see, dropping into lower-level games with their higher-tier skillz. Ooo those smurfs make me sick! I must catch them! Read the rest of this entry »
It looks like Valve are experimenting with machine learning to deal with cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [official site]. The snippet of insight comes from a Reddit thread about spinbots in Valve’s first-person shooter.
The gist is that Valve are investigating using an artificial intelligence system capable of constantly retraining itself to spot cheaters and try to stay ahead in the cheat creation/cheat detection arms race. Read the rest of this entry »
Valve has announced that the iconic Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [official site] map, Dust2 will be removed from active duty and replaced with the Inferno map. Dust2 will still be playable, but it exists as a separate map group for the casual and deathmatch game modes. As a result of this swap, you’ll no longer see Dust2 in professional esports tournaments. Read the rest of this entry »
We can all agree that the Christmas season doesn’t begin just because John Lewis tries to punch you in the heart or because Ian Starbucks cracks open the syrups again. That’s crass commercialism denigrating the season where people buy me presents. No, the only corporation I trust managing Christmas is Valve Corporation, who each year put cute little festive jumpers on the chickens in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [official site]. That’s real Christmas to me. Ladies and germs, Christmas is here.
Oh, and Valve added some fancy technology to improve positional audio to help folks play the game better but look, the chickens are what really matters. Read the rest of this entry »
In January and February of 2015, Valve handed down “indefinite” bans to a number of players found taking part in matchfixing in professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [official site]. Now an update on the game’s blog says that those bans are permanent.
RPS Feature But no sandstorm
I’ve spent my afternoon watching the wildlife of the Dota 2 [official site] desert terrain. There are some newcomers who aren’t native to the vanilla map which is cool – scorpions and vultures and the like. There’s also a proliferation of beetles and I love looking at the new trees and the cacti. This isn’t an exhaustive animal catalogue – there are definitely some butterflies and fish and spiders I wanted to include but the Reborn launch Dota crashes a lot and I was getting fed up! HOWEVER here are some nice shots of little creatures going about their business :)
RPS Feature Getting to know you
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart.
I spent the last few Dote Nights talking about tutorials in three MOBAs – what they did well and what they did poorly. I realise I didn’t make any suggestions of my own for where to start in terms of characters, though. This post is about which heroes I learned to play Dota 2 [official site] on:
The Majors have been on the horizon for the Dota 2 [official site] pro scene for a while now. They’re a series of big tournaments spaced through the year and around the globe culminating in The International. But Valve were reluctant to go into further detail until this year’s International was done and dusted – i.e. now.
The bit I’m most interested in is the restrictions this places on teams with regard to kicking players or reworking the lineup but first here’s some basic detail:
Tutorials and practice in MOBAs is something I think about a lot. It came up again over the last couple of weeks because Riot ventured the opinion that a sandbox mode in League of Legends would introduce problems and take away from fun of the game.
I already talked about the sandbox situation in greater detail here but I figured I’d put forward a few of my own ideas for useful practice scenarios. Before doing so, though, I wanted to check on the current state of tutorials in MOBAs. A quick peek turned into a longer look because Dota 2’s Reborn beta has introduced a whole bunch of new tutorial stuff in the form of these guided bot games you can play in their entirety as well as a demo hero mode. What I’ll do, then, is go into Reborn’s guided bot matches in more detail to say what’s good and bad about them – how they work and what’s still not covered. Next week’s Dote Night will be for broader thoughts about MOBA tutorials in general. Feel free to pitch in with your own in the comment section!
RPS Feature Tales from TI5
Pip is currently in Seattle to cover The International 2015 – Valve’s six day Dota 2 [official site] tournament. There’s over $18m on the line and a rich tapestry of professional gaming to enjoy (or unpick) – we did a cheat sheet to explain the basics. There was also a virtual reality secret shop to be visited and a game of “cornhole” to be played. Here’s what happened on day 5…
RPS Feature Tales from TI5
Pip is currently in Seattle to cover The International 2015 – Valve’s six day Dota 2 [official site] tournament. There’s over $18m on the line and a rich tapestry of professional gaming to enjoy (or unpick) – we did a cheat sheet to explain the basics. There are also lemon curd cakes to be eaten and fountains be be enjoyed. Here’s what happened on day 4…
Pip is currently in Seattle to cover The International 2015 – Valve’s six day Dota 2 [official site] tournament. There’s over $18m on the line and a rich tapestry of professional gaming to enjoy (or unpick) – we did a cheat sheet to explain the basics. There are also 25 minute videos of shoes to be filmed and Arnold Palmers to be consumed. Here’s what happened on day 3…
RPS Feature Tales from TI
Pip is currently in Seattle to cover The International 2015 – Valve’s six day Dota 2 [official site] tournament. There’s over $18m on the line and a rich tapestry of professional gaming to enjoy (or unpick) – we did a cheat sheet to explain the basics. There are also bags to be clambered into and DDoS attacks to withstand. Here is what happened on Day Two…
RPS Feature Tales of TI5
Pip is currently in Seattle to cover The International 2015 – Valve’s six day Dota 2 [official site] tournament. There’s over $18m on the line and a rich tapestry of professional gaming to enjoy (or unpick) – we did a cheat sheet to explain the basics too. There is also beef chilli to be spilled in shoes and explanatory diagrams to show how Fnatic’s logo tells the story of a man being strangled by butts. Here is what happened on Day One…
“Hey, remember Team Fortress 2?” I think to myself, sometimes. I played that game every day for months, squeezing rounds into lunch breaks and evenings till eventually I lost interest. “The big updates slowed,” I explain to myself. “The steady stream of community content made each release feel like less of an event, and eventually time moved on and everyone’s focus moved elsewhere, right?” Right.
What definitely didn’t happen is that the game continued to grow in popularity indefinitely. It certainly didn’t become the third most played game on Steam, with tens of thousands playing it at any moment. Absolutely there is not a regular and regularly excellent series of free comics about it, with a fourth part that went online earlier this month. That’d be mad.
Team Fortress 2‘s Steam Workshop is a font of creativity, introducing all manner of new models and maps to the now seven-year-old multiplayer shooter. But what if you’re tired of new guns in-game and instead want more real world materials you can stick to your wall or wrap around your meatform?
Valve are now accepting Steam Workshop submissions for proposed TF2 merchandise. Anyone can submit a design, the community will then upvote/downvote as is their wont, and then Valve will swoop in and select the most popoular few for production and distribution via WeLoveFine. As always, the original creator receives a cut of the profits, and players get new dresses to wear like the one above.
