Valve has chosen 13 teams to take part in this years Dota 2 world championships, The International.

Naturally, you’ll recognise most of the names, coming as they do from the best and brightest teams; Invictus, Team Liquid, Team Dignitas and both LGD and LGD International are among the lucky few.

Three slots remain to be filled; there will be a series of qualifiers to select the remaining competitors before the final in Seattle in August.

On the off chance you happen to be heading over to the US – perhaps for PAX Prime which takes place a few days later – tickets will go on sale early this week.

The prize pool has not been announced but the tourney has previously fronted a $1 million grand prize.

Source: The Inetrnational

It’s been a big day for Dota 2 fans, with Valve announcing a major tournament and issuing a substantial list of updates.

Technically still in beta, this MOBA fantasy sequel has already attracted a large audience. The International will take place from 6-11 August in Seattle, which also hosted last year’s competition. The roster will consist of 16 teams, with 13 to receive direct invitations and three to battle it out in qualifying events. A prize pool is yet to be announced.

Competitors will doubtlessly use the three month lead up to The International to acclimatise themselves to the range of adjustments announced today. Valve’s full patch notes follow:

GAMEPLAY

• Enabled Drow and Tusk in Captain’s Mode (Tournament Version)
• Enabled Bristleback, Slark and Skywrath Mage in Captain’s Mode (Latest Version)
• Brewmaster: Fixed primal splits not always starting with the correct unit selected.
• Skywrath Mage: Fixed hitbox being too small.
• Slark: Fixed Shadow Dance giving Slark flying vision.
• Slark: Fixed Shadow Dance granting passive bonuses to Slark illusions.
• Slark: Fixed an issue causing Shadow Dance’s passive modifier to not update in the UI, despite being active.
• Slark: Fixed Dark Pact continuing while Slark is dead.
• Slark: Essence Shift counters on both Slark and enemy heroes will show the total duration ( i.e. the time that the most recent stack will expire.)
• Slark: Fixed a number of incorrect spell interactions with Dark Pact.
• Slark: Fixed a number of horizontal movement ability interactions with Pounce.
• Troll Warlord: Fixed Berserker’s Rage bonus damage not being applied as base damage.
• Tusk: Fixed Frozen Sigil not affecting magic immune units.

ECONOMY

• All Defense 2 War Dogs are now Vintage quality.
• Dota 2 Vintage quality items can now be traded on the Steam Community Marketplace.

WORKSHOP

• Added HUD Skins to the Workshop Importer.

PERFORMANCE

• Reduced CPU usage for rendering

Source: PC Gamer and Valve

Yesterday, a company called DFC Intelligence produced a report which stated that DotA 2 was the most-played “core” PC title in the West, passing League of Legends in popularity throughout the first quarter of 2013. DFC quoted a number of source including XFire, and went on to claim that MOBA players far outweighed even MMO heavyweights like World of Warcraft.

Overnight, however, Riot have challenged these findings. A Riot spokesperson revealed that League of Legends sees “over 500,000 peak concurrent players every day on just the EU West shard,” which doesn’t even take into account the number of US and China players. Meanwhile, Valve’s Steamgraph shows that the highest all-time number of DotA 2 players is 325,879 — vastly below that offered by LoL.

“You can see how we would have some issues with the accuracy of this report,” said Riot’s spokesperson.

DFC — who are not actually affiliated with Valve — claimed that the discrepancy was due to them only tracking “key Western markets”.

Source: Games Industry International

During an interview following last week’s BAFTA awards, Valve’s head honcho Gabe Newell dropped some rather impressive figures about the company’s recent growth.

“There’s sort of an insatiable demand for gaming right now,” Newell claimed.

“I think our business has grown by about 50 percent on the back of opportunities created by having these open platforms.

He went on to claim that DOTA 2 is so popular that it actually accounts for several percentage points of total internet traffic during its last update.

“And just so people understand how big this sort of scale is getting, we were generating 3.5 terabits per second during the last DOTA 2 update. That’s about 2 percent of all the mobile- and land-based Internet activity.”

Well then! DOTA 2, everybody. It is the game with the most concurrent Steam users, after all.

Source: PC Gamer

When Skyrim launched at the end of 2011 it garnered at record-breaking 287,411 concurrent online players beavering away on Steam — a record that has since been untouched. Now, however, DOTA 2 has overtaken that record.

A Reddit user by the name of scherzocrk noted that March 1st brought a peak of 297,010 concurrent players, significantly eclipsing the previous record.

If you like graphs, here is one showing an impressively consistent rise in concurrent player activity.

With DOTA 2 still in beta, these numbers are expected to rise even more over time. Impressive stuff.

Source: Reddit via PCGamesN

Valve has gleefully announced that DOTA 2, its sequel to the original MOBA, has managed to tot up 100,000,000 matches played. DOTA 2 now attracts 3 million unique users a monthw hich Valve describes as the community “bolossoming into a beautiful flower”. Ha! Ha! Well, there’s less name calling than in League of Legends, I guess.

In other DOTA 2 news, an update is available with an interesting new feature – Least Played Mode. This option dumps you into the most unpopular kinds of games, which should mean you end up trying new things and learning new skills – as well as helping to tip the balance so other modes end up highlighted eventually. If patch notes make you hot and bothered, by all means view the latest update in its entirety.

DOTA 2 is still in closed beta; bug your Steam friends for an invite.

Source: DOTA 2 Blog

The DOTA 2 store is now offering the Bastion Announcer Pack for $9.99, which contains both the Announcer and the Mega-Kills Announcer.

Contributed by Bastion developers Supergiant Games, the pack puts the voice of Rucks, the Narrator, into your DOTA 2 games, where he has something to say about ever character, apparently.

Rucks joins other announcer packs, including Half-Life 2‘s Dr. Kleiner.

Source: Kotaku

Valve’s developers have posted on the official DotA 2 forums overnight to reveal that Australian servers are on the way.

Posting on the developer forums, Valve dev milton revealed that “The equipment for our Australian (not Austrian) datacenter has just arrived in Sydney.”

“It will be a few weeks to get this racked and configured. But we should be up and running by January 2013.”

Source: Thanks Giblet!

After analysing a total of 39,626 different possible DotA 2 team combinations, a Reddit user by the name of KjellJagland has discovered what appears to be the optimal team composition for DotA 2 — or at least, the one that is currently leading the pack in terms of matches won.

The results may surprise you: the most successful team composition — winning 54.2% of all matches — is four strength heroes and one intelligence hero. Ranged heroes also perform better on average: a team of five ranged heroes is successful 55.3% of the time, whereas one of five melee heroes pulls througth only 42.6% of the time.

And when it comes to carries, the results are even more surprising: the best results come from teams with zero carries, who win 14% more often than teams with a carry hero. If there’s no disablers on a team you’re more likely to lose, but adding them in makes very little difference to actual victory.

It’s fascinating stuff, and there’s some good analysis over at PC Gamer if you want to read more. Take a look!

Source: Reddit via PC Gamer

There’s been an awful lot of drama and intrigue in the world of professional gaming, but also been a return to normality with a round of local and international competitions. Alex Walker has the lowdown.

Valve has issued a stern warning to its lively community of modders and creators following a copyright infringement case. Someone had the bright idea of copying a mace design from MMORPG Aion and making it available in DOTA 2; the weapon, called Timebreaker, was very highly rated and purchased nearly 25,000 times before it came to Valve’s attention. The offending item is no longer for sale, the creator has been banned and won’t see any proceeds, and unlucky buyers have received an alternate weapon, but Valve is getting tired of wasting its time on such skullduggery, with over 1,400 copycat items identified and removed so far.

“Please help us out by contributing only original work, and continue to help us to spot these issues when they do appear on the Workshop,” the publisher asked, which seems fair enough to me.

Source: Steam

Valve has updated the DOTA 2 client with an emphasis on Spectator Mode. The patch has added a number of beginner-friendly features like the opportunity to check out heroes and their abilities as they’re chosen, as well as the ability to rate matches and leave comments – but also adds a couple of banner ad spaces. The banners currently invite players to check out the upcoming Invitationals tourney, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason why they couldn’t be rented commercially to help offset the cost of hosting the extensive Spectator Mode service. If it does go commercial, the advertising space will be just one of a number of Valve’s initiatives for making money from the free-to-play MOBA, some of which reward the community as much as the developer; box office proceeds on premium streams are split with tournament organisers, for example.

Source: DOTA 2 Blog