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#leagueoflegends There's a new way to play popular multiplayer online battle arena game League of Legends today, as Riot Games goes live with its brand-new Dominion game mode. More »

#dota2 Valve's series of "Meet the..." videos for Team Fortress 2 are some of the smartest, funniest clips this industry has ever seen. So it shouldn't surprise you that the company is looking at doing something similar for the upcoming DOTA 2. More »

#leagueoflegends Lately, Defense of the Ancients-style games have exploded in popularity. Valve is working on DotA 2, and has already held their first international tournament. Meanwhile, Riot Games is releasing an update to their widely played League of Legends called Dominion. More »

Valve has posted the schedule and brackets for the upcoming International DOTA 2 Championships. Starting tomorrow, 48 players will go head-to-head, making their way through the tournament towards a best-of-five championship match on Sunday, August 21st. More »

A number for you: $5 million.

A context for that number: the total prize pool for the tournaments dubbed ‘Season Two’ of League of Legends.(more…)

I note there was a lot of surprise that Valve would offer a $1m prize for their Dota 2 tournament at Gamescom: maybe this goes a little way to explaining why that sum is perhaps not so extraordinary (y’know, other than the fact that Valve live in houses made of platinum). Chinese DotA 1/StarCraft 2/Warcraft 3 team Catostrophic Cruel Memories, aka CCM, was earlier this week bought out by businessman Sicong Wang, director of Wanda Enterprises, for the sum of 40,000,000 Chinese yuan – about $6.2 million. Whaaaaat. The five (that’s all) people involved have reformed as a new team owned by Wang called Invictus. CCM was due to play in the Dota 2 tournament; Invictus will take their place, by dint of being exactly the same people.

Valve’s tournament cashpot may have seemed absurd, but this rather seems like a vote of confidence in how lucrative an e-sport Dota 2 might prove to be.

Commenter Aikage returns to Speak Up on Kotaku for the second time in as many days, wondering if you every iamgine where life would have taken you if not for all of that time spent gaming. More »

#gameon Who would win in a fight, Zeus or Anubis? Hi-Rez Studios, the creators of Global Agenda and the upcoming Tribes: Ascend are taking a divine stab at the defense of the ancients genre with Smite, full-on arena battles between mythical gods. More »

The Defense of the Ancients mod for Warcraft 3 has spawned no less than four retail titles now (Heroes of Newerth, Demigod, League of Legends, and Valve's upcoming Dota 2), and Las Vegas' Petroglyph Games is throwing its hat into the ring with another, called Rise of Immortals. Petroglyph, which has its roots in EA's Westwood Studios and is also working on an MMORTS for Trion, showed the game to me at GDC last week and, while it's safe to say that the growing "MOBA" (multiplayer online battle arena) genre is probably well covered already, they are planning to put a few new twists and turns on the still-developing formula.

The most central of these is more of an emphasis on PvE -- while League of Legends or Heroes of Newerth is centered around five players battling it out with five others online, Rise of Immortals plans to make playing versus the environment a viable goal, with levels that spawn monsters to fight and even award persistent items for you and your team. There are some other innovations, too, and Rise of Immortals seems like it will be an interesting experimental entry into this quickly evolving genre.

#gameface Gabe Newell from Valve gets in a few rounds of DOTA. As seen on HalfLife2.net. Thanks, lamba! More »

#legal Defence of the Ancients Allstars was a Warcraft III mod. Now, Valve <a href="Valve Will Have To Fight To Trademark New Game Based On Warcraft III Mod">is trying to trademark the name. That doesn't sit very well with Blizzard, the developers of Warcraft III. More »

Blizzard announced that it will be continuing to support StarCraft 2 and its community with the release of four developer-created mod maps. All four of the maps were on display at BlizzCon 2010, and all but one are parodies of existing gameplay concepts. In creating these mods, StarCraft 2's developers said during a panel on Friday that they were aiming not only to show off what the game's editor can do, but to put really push its limits to see where they had work to do on it.

I played all four of the mods, from the complex Left 2 Die to the silly-but-addictive Aiur Chef. All of them, along with their textures and assets, will be released inside the StarCraft 2 community for free, available to play by anyone who owns the game.

Valve's newly announced Dota 2 will bring back all of the WarCraft 3 mod's hundred-plus heroes, and bring some new social features in as well. A writeup over at Game Informer says that Valve is updating its Steamworks system specifically for the game, and in addition to including in-game features like the ability to point out and recommend certain strategies and items for beginning players, veterans will get rewarded for helping outside of the game as well, by writing and editing strategy guides and tips. There will also be an in-game coaching system available with voice chat and screen sharing, all designed to help a wider audience adapt to the hardcore world of "action RTS" gameplay.

As for gameplay, there will be still only one map to play on, though there will be different match types available, some added after launch. "Denying" is in -- DoTA remake League of Legends decided not to include the controversial mechanic in its gameplay, but Valve's version will let you kill your own creeps to prevent the enemy from getting XP. And AI bots will be available, but not for a full singleplayer experience, just to fill in when human players drop out or aren't around.

Graphics will of course be updated -- GI says Valve has "a sizable art team" working on the game, and there are other design tweaks as well, like the environments getting the saturation tuned down so players can focus on the gameplay. Characters will have all new voicework, too, and not just toss out one-liners in certain situations, but sometimes even interact when they have a past with one of their teammates or opponents (we already know who one of those voices will be). And Valve promises the game will get the same community support as its other titles like Team Fortress 2, including possibly more hat-related shenanigans.

It all sounds quite fun. Too bad we have to wait until 2011 to actually sit in Ventrilo Valve's own voice chat, and play Dota.

A couple of the developers who helped evolve the popular Defense of the Ancients mod are concerned with Valve's recent DOTA trademark filing, as well as its implications for the future of the game. Steve "Pendragon" Mescon and Steve "Guinsoo" Feak, who helped with the creation of DotA Allstars and now work at Riot Games on the free-to-play DotA-inspired League of Legends, believe DotA should remain a "community-owned product that modders, independent developers and game fans can continue to modify and play as often as they'd like."

Mescon said he understands why Valve would want to make a DotA-inspired game, but told Joystiq that he was "surprised that [Valve have] decided to try to trademark the DotA name, because it goes against what [he] and others believe DotA means to the community." He suggested that by trademarking the name, Valve is attempting to take ownership of the name and "exercising control over its future." Mescon believes the "DotA name should remain the property of the community at-large, as it always has."

Despite these issues, Mescon said, "We are actually really interested to see what they can do with this genre because we are excited to see companies of Valve's caliber to enter the space that we've been working in for the last few years."

We contacted Valve for comment on this piece, but as the company has yet to officially announce the game, we'll just have to continue following this story as it develops.

Trademark filng spills the beans on unannounced title.