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

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

The last month has been nothing but a hive of activity at home and abroad, but for a nice change of pace, Australians have been right in the thick of it.

While the World Championship Series was a great weekend for many Australians – and the handful of New Zealanders who made the flight up – it was only the start of proceedings for Jared “PiG” Krensel and Andrew “mOOnGlaDe” Pender, who caught a flight the next day to fly to Gamescom in Germany.

Krensel, who won the Australian part of the local WCS double-header (but only made it as far as 6th the following day) had qualified with Pender to participate in the Intel Extreme Masters tour stop. Pender’s an old hand – IEM traditionally brings out the best in the Queenslander – while Krensel was able to call on the experience of having played in Guangzhou last year for another leg of the event.

Despite starting the week a few thousand dollars richer, the wind was taken out of both boys’ sails early on. Krensel got hit the hardest with a difficult draw, being asked to overcome three of the world’s most feared Koreans (Violet, MVP and Nestea) and one of the more reliable foreigners (Kas). His 1-10 score looked bad, but understandable given the circumstances.

Pender’s ride, for his standards, was much more achievable but it didn’t work out all the same. Despite a comfortable 2-0 put down of Choi “Bomber” Ji Sung, who qualified from the group stages first, the Queenslander surprisingly away games against the Protoss and Zerg opponents, and his 2-3 score wasn’t enough to get him out of the group stage.

One Australian outfit that did get past groups recently was Absolute Legends (pictured at top), which had the honour of being the sole representative for Oceania at the recent DOTA 2 International.

With the laconic Toby “TobiWanKenobi” Dawson overseeing the action along with a team of casters, aL found themselves in a group with LGD Gaming and DK, two Chinese teams that were (rightly) hyped up by the casters and feared by many. LGD and DK would end up taking out 3rd and 4th for the entire tournament, with the former not dropping a single game until the winner bracket finals of the play-off stage.

The Australians were paired off against Darer from Ukraine in an elimination match, which saw them finishing 12th-16th for the tournament. It’s always disappointing to never make it past the first round, but to be even playing at a tournament featuring all the best players in the world is always something special.

Sadly, the magic didn’t last for very long with news breaking in the past week that the European organisation had dropped its DOTA 2 squad. It’s not sure what the cause behind the breakup of a relationship that had been running since the start of the year, where the Australians burst onto the scene as one of the most promising teams in the world.

Someone who’s managed to breach the limitations of Australia’s geography was Dawson, who started from the humble beginnings as a Call of Duty fan to become one of the most well-known commentators in professional gaming. He now lives in Berlin spending most of his time shoutcasting, but was able to spend a couple of hours sharing a side of eSports that most people don’t often see.

Dawson admits that he doesn’t have a lot of love for League of Legends, but that wasn’t the case last night at The Republic Hotel in Sydney, which hosted the first BarCraft-esque event for the free-to-play MOBA.

Given that most people are still recovering from last night’s shenanigans, photos aren’t immediately available, but I’ve heard that the event was a success, which should provide a little bit of competition to the Paragon in Sydney for local BarCraft events.

People looking for a bit of social gaming outside of the city centre, with a small event being held next weekend at the Ryde Eastwood Leagues Club for the Australian qualifiers for the International eSports Federation World Finals. The event’s looking like it’ll be much smaller than the traditional fare at the Paragon – around 50 people have committed to going so far. That sounds like a disadvantage, but on the other hand it’ll be nice to actually be able to hear the person next to you.

Australia has always been praised for its small, tight-knit, dedicated community. Over the last month or so, I think we can safely say we’ve upheld that reputation quite nicely. Except for the small part.

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

Valve’s upcoming DotA 2 has confirmed that it will be a free-to-play game, and that, while it will feature an item shop, all items in the game will be purely cosmetic with no gameplay effects. Additionally, all heroes will be available free of charge. DotA 2 players will be able to create and submit items through the Steam Workshop in a manner similar to the current system for Team Fortress 2. DotA 2‘s new FAQ also makes mention of using the game’s economy to “directly contribute to professional players”, which is good news for e-sports fans.

Source: DotA 2