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Valve's The International 3 championships for DOTA 2 kicked off this week with a prize pool worth $2.8 million, the biggest for a single event in eSports history, Gamespot reported on Saturday.

The event began on August 2 with a 1v1 Solo Championship and a Wild Card match. The roster for the Solo Championship and the upcoming All-Star match were chosen by fans using the Compendium, an interactive tool that rewards players with virtual item drops for predicting the outcome of matches. Each purchase of the $10 Compendium contributes $2.50 to the prize pool.

Valve writer Ted Kosmatka tweeted that The International had 400,000 concurrent viewers during its first day. Riot's Season 2 Championship series for League of Legends peaked at 1.1 million concurrent viewers last year, making it the most-watched competitive gaming event of all time.

The International's main event begins on August 7 and will conclude on August 11.

The International, the world's largest Dota 2 championship tournament, commences on Friday with group stage play. This year the field would be competing for a $1.6 million prize pool, but that's been fattened by a million thanks to the sale of a virtual item to their fellow gamers, and the pot may increase.Read more...

Vinny just found this game on Steam. Sounds like Brad's heard of it, so let's give it a shot, I guess?

The world of eSports is growing day by day and that means more events with larger prize pools then ever before. But that can also lead to collisions in scheduling for some of the biggest eSports tournaments.Read more...

If the Skyrim prank didn't tip you off, calling people using a soundboard of a video game character is a popular trick. While funny, the prank works best when the person on the other end plays along—like this guy from a magic shop does when he receives a call from Dota 2's Anti-Mage.Read more...

Now that Dota 2 is officially out in the wild, check out our report from last year's Dota 2 International, where people gathered from around the world to compete over $1.6 million.Read more...

We live in strange times. Food chains are trying to poison us, we can probably save lives by putting heads on dead people’s bodies, and games can corral a million-gajillion players without ever being “released”. Madness. Nothing makes sense anymore. Civilization has been replaced by a steaming crater of contradiction. And while those first two things have much further-reaching, highly disturbing implications, this is a videogame site so let’s talk about the last one. DOTA 2‘s beta ran for two years. During that time, it dominated all lanes of Steam’s most-played list because people like MOBAs a little bit maybe. But now – finally, amazingly – Valve Time has aligned with Real Time for a brief, shining moment. DOTA 2 is out. Oh, but you might still have to wait if you want to actually play. Why? Because – as I said earlier - nothing makes sense anymore.

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Guess the earlier accidental release of Dota 2 wasn't quite a false alarm: now the game is officially out of beta. Finally! Here's how the launch will work according to Valve: Like we mentioned before, the launch of Dota 2 is going to take on a different shape than products we've shipped in the past. Our thinking is that we want the existing audience have uninterrupted access during the launch, in addition to bringing new players into Dota 2 in a way that isn't frustrating. Simply put, we want to smooth out the traditional launch spike, but at the same time allow anyone to come in and try out Dota 2. Dota 2's user base is already larger than any game we've ever made, and it continues to grow. Knowing this launch moment was coming, we've spent the past year working on getting both the backend infrastructure and new user experience into a state where we can welcome in anyone that wants to give the game a try. With that work now complete, it is time for us to invite anyone and everyone to come play. If you want to give Dota a try, or you have a friend you want to bring into the community, click the button above and you can get in the launch queue. You'll see your place in line, and when it is your turn we'll send you an email letting you know you're in. We'll begin sending those emails this week. We also have an update from our world-travelling server installation team, who in addition to achieving triple diamond platinum/uranium/aegis level frequent flyer status, also have added significant game server capacity. Most of this trip has been to add capacity to Stockholm and Luxembourg, but we've also recently added servers to US West and our new cluster in Korea. Don't worry if your cluster isn't listed here, we're ready to add as many servers as needed as the user base grows. Here are some photos from the Luxembourg datacenter: These servers represent the ability to host an additional 450,000 players concurrently. Figuring out how much capacity to add, and where, is one important aspect of this launch. For the stats people out there, concurrent numbers are more useful when predicting what capacity we need for specific regions, because Dota players in the same region tend to play during similar hours. Our worldwide active user base is roughly twelve times the peak concurrency. Hopefully the Dota 2 beta has been as fun for you as it has been for us. While it has come to an end, we'll be building the game for a long time, and listening to what direction to take.

Dota 2 was in beta for ages—long enough that many Steam users have beta keys just lying about. But today? Today the game launched and was available to everyone...and then, just like that, it was pulled. Back to being an early access thing. Dang! Well, we're probably close to launch. It's supposed to be officially out sometime this summer.

In my day, kids used to actually play videogames, you know. Now they just sit around watching other people play them. Disgraceful, it is. They’ll never develop life-long RSI and lower back problems that way. They’ll probably still get the limited attention span thing, of course.

It’s going to get even worse now that Twitch, market leader of such inactivity, has officially gotten into bed with Steam, market leader of selling the games that people gawp at on Twitch. Now those kids don’t even have to load up two seperate services. They can just sit there, staring at the same webpage forever. Down the mines with them all, I say.(more…)

Look at me, I’m a Dota 2 player! I just killed my first… Cara, is that a creep? Hooray, I killed a creep! And now I’m going to something something the other somethings. Oh, alright. You got me. I am a fraud. I’ve had Dota 2 on my PC for six months now, and all I’ve ever managed to do was watch a few matches and click around on the interface. It’s brick wall to me. A beautifully animated and intriguing brick wall, but nonetheless rather stubbornly impassable. But with Valve about to launch the game to everyone and anyone, they’ve just added an honest-to-glob tutorial, adding plenty more sections to the paltry single map that served as an introduction. Did Dota 2 just become welcoming?(more…)

When they’re not spinning around and around in their expensive chairs, weaving hats, or thinking up other ways to not make games that people want (“Shall we all got to Hawaii this week, or shall we crack open that HL3 design document?” “Aloha! Aloha! Aloha!”), Valve’s brain drones are at least attempting to create a community of people that can earn a living from making and contributing to games. Sometimes it’s a bit broken, like Greenlight is right now. Other times it can be so successful that Valve can afford to share the wealth between organisations that contributed to the success, but had no way to monetise their involvement. So now, when a community item in Team Fortress 2 or Dota 2 is sold in either game’s store, it’s possible for some of Valve’s take to be directed to the likes of Blender and Polycount. Ooh, just thought up a new word for it: Valvetruism.(more…)

I recently 3D printed a Faceless Void in color. It came out super nice. I have a mini-tutorial for 3D printing non-colored DOTA heroes, but someone asked me how to print the colored version. Here you go! Step One Like before, download your favorite Hero from Valve’s DOTA2 workshop. Heroes that would not be too good for printing are those with thin components (like, Death Prophet’s trailing scarf) or those with clear alpha-mapped areas (like, Naga Siren’s earlobes). Thin components are not printable, unless manually scaled up. The alpha-mapped areas will just print black. My Faceless Void actually has a bit of alpha-mapped areas on the bottom of his loin cloth, but I figured he’d be ok. Step Two I used Sculpteo to handle my 3D printing. Once I packaged my model, I handled to them, and a few weeks later, they shipped me a tiny Faceless Void. With Sculpteo, shipping is $6 when the order is over $50. They usually print super fast (almost 3-day turnaround) so my delay was probably a special case. My Faceless Void cost about $18, and measured 1.9 x 2.1 x 1.1 inches (price scales with size). There’s a slew of other services available, as well as the possibility of using an at-home 3D printer, but I really like Sculpteo. Step Three To get everything Sculpteo ready, the model needs to be packaged in a zip file. The model needs to be in an OBJ format, along with a MTL file, and the texture files. The OBJ will dictate the 3D shape of the model. It can be used by itself to print (like what I did with my Mini-Furion). The textures (Valve provides them as TGA files) will dictate the colors of the model. The MTL file will tell Sculpteo what parts are colored what. Step Four After downloading the Hero and unzipping the model files, there’ll be two folders. One is materialsrc, which will contain the materials. The other is models, which will contain the 3D models. Go into the materialsrc, and find _color TGA’s for each component. Copy those files to a new folder. These will be the color of the printed Hero. Step Five To get the OBJ and MTL files, open up 3ds Max 2013. If Valve provides an OBJ, it’s not really possible to use it since the MTL files produced will be incorrect (the texture mappings are wrong). Instead, find the fbx files in the models folder. Each fbx file will contain a component of the Hero. Step Six For each one of those fbx files, select the solid-looking mesh and export the selected as an OBJ. The wire structures are bones, used for animating the Hero, and can be ignored. Create a new scene after each export to clear the screen. Step Seven Once all the components are exported as an OBJ, import all of the OBJs into a single scene. They should be all positioned correctly to form the hero. Step Eight Press M to texture the hero. Click on a white sphere, and click on the box next to Diffuse. This will bring up the Material/Map Browser. Clicking on Bitmap, and browse for one of the TGA textures. Drag and drop that texture on to the corresponding component to color the Hero. Hopefully all the mapping are correct and the Hero will look like it popped right out of DOTA2. Sometimes the mapping isn’t correct and it’s a pain to fix (like Faceless Void’s mace). Step Nine Once everything is texture, select the components you want to print and export them as an OBJ. Make sure “Export materials” and “Create mat-library” is checked. Click the Map-Export button and it will tell you where the final MTL file will be created. Step Ten Gather the final OBJ, the MTL, and the TGAs into a zip file and upload onto Sculpteo. Sculpteo is super nice in that it allows you to scale, and gives you a price quote. Be sure to check for solidity, which will tell you what areas are too thin / easy to break. When you’re ready, choose multicolor as the material, select your size, and add to cart. Good luck! Republished with permission. Jenny is a gamer and 3D printing enthusiast. Caret Dash Caret is a blog about her adventures, her explorations in DIY, and her favorite knick-knacks.

You might not believe this, but Valve's multiplayer arena game Dota 2 is technically still in beta. It'll be officially out this summer, reports PC Gamer—just in time for the third International tournament in August.

Dota 2 is due to launch this summer in its full form throughout North America and Europe, Valve's VP of Marketing Doug Lombardi tells Gamespot. It will hit before this year's The International championship, which runs August 7 - 11 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, Washington. This is the third installment of Dota 2's The International tournament, which offers a prize of $1 million for the Dota 2 team that proves it's the best in the world.

Dota 2 entered beta in 2011, and nearly anyone can now purchase an early access key and start playing immediately. The early access key costs $30 and adds some downloadable goodies, though Dota 2 is a free-to-play game and it should live up to that descriptor when it goes live sometime before August.

It’s true! The screenshot has probably already spoiled the surprise but, yeah, it’s DOTA 2, a game that I already have installed on my PC and once had twenty invites for. Despite the access I have been granted to the long-running beta, the only things I really know about DOTA are the nuggets of information in RPS posts. For example, I know that a ridiculous number of people play every day but the League of Legends community still outnumbers them a billion to one. I also know that there’s a tutorial and that it is a terrible tutor. Maybe that’s one of the things that will be improved this summer when the beta becomes brave, truthful and unselfish, and transforms into a real game?

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It takes a lot to make me laugh out loud at some video game character design. Game artist Hunter Mortenson and his wife Sadies have made their own DOTA 2 character, and he's available in the Steam Workshop. His name? The Dallying Llama Courier. God, it's so stupid, but when you see it together with the little guy's twitchy little llama face, you can't help but chuckle. Or at least I did. If you can't, well, I can't help thaw your icy heart. The Dallying Llama Courier [Steam, via CGHub]

Last night, after a grueling episode of Game of Thrones, a good number of people swore they would never watch the show again. Take a look at the retweets on this Twitter account, which chronicles the extreme reaction to the Rains of Castamere episode, to see what I mean. (Don't visit the link if you're trying to avoid spoilers!) You might say they "rage quit" Game of Thrones. While not unique to multiplayer games—there's the Game of Thrones example, and I've definitely rage quit single-player games—chances are that if you play online games, you're well-acquainted with rage-quitters. These are the people who end up leaving a match mid-progress instead of waiting for the game to end. Maybe they were losing. Maybe the match was annoying because they kept teleporting everywhere—bad connection. Maybe they're a bad sport. Maybe the same person kept killing them again and again just 30 seconds after they'd spawn. The reason doesn't matter so much as the act of leaving in frustration does. Hence, you know, the rage part of rage quitting. But it's not always as simple as being pushed to the brink of your tolerance. While quitting mid-match can be seen as 'rage-quitting,' there are a lot of different scenarios that will illicit a similar response. It sounds silly—and it is—but it's still a huge part of multiplayer games. People rage quit all the time, to the point that some games have measures or achievements associated with the practice. Some games might give you a penalty of some sort: if you leave a match early, you don't get any experience in your next game. That's a common measure. Sometimes, games like to have more fun with the practice—Team Fortress 2's "BarbeQueQ" achievement comes to mind, which Pyros can get if the player they "dominate" leaves the server. On the whole, rage-quitting is seen as an act of bad sportsmanship, although troll-culture makes it so that a rage quit isn't necessarily an undesired outcome. Sure, it sucks if you have someone on your team leave a game before it ends—but on the flipside, it can also feel gratifying to think you are the specific reason someone feels angry. The fact there's an entire culture around this should not be understated: there are forums, websites and more dedicated to presenting people with irritating material, posing that if you let it affect you, you've lost. Only the stoic can win—or, put another way, you rage you lose! Of course there's such a big problem with bullying online when that's the case. Hazing breeds hazing, and only those able to keep it together even when under immense, possibly unfair pressure, are worthy of respect. Seen in that light, there's always a bigger 'game' going on when you play against someone. You can lose the video game, but you can still win the more important 'game.' You can still be the better man and leave with your head held high, so to speak—or at least you can make it look that way. You can lose the video game, but you can still win the more important 'game.' Appearances and dignity are a huge part of rage quitting, after all—and so the feeling of frustration is not the whole picture here. Remember, we've got stats and leaderboards to consider as well. A match that doesn't go in your favor is not a thing you can hide when most games keep track of information like win/loss ratio or kill/death ratio. As a result, many people are willing to take a loss by disconnecting from a game if it means they can keep their precious statistics intact. They might not necessarily be raging because they're losing: they might simply leave because it's a way to save face. It's just as (arguably) scummy of a reason, but there's technically no "rage" happening in that rage quit. Which is to say, the reasons that someone leaves a match might be more complex than losing a game, or even just because "they mad." A recent look into the practice in DOTA 2 by Valve reveals the following: The outcome of matches doesn’t correlate at all to the likelihood of quitting. Losing a bunch of Dota 2 games doesn’t seem to cause people to quit. Instead, one of the primary reasons why people left matches was because of unpleasant communication between players. The things that make people rage quit, then, may not be related to the immediate game at all. This makes me curious about other people's rage-quitting habits—because let's be real, many of us have probably left a match before it was over. I've definitely left a match before I got too pissed off to be able to have any fun or contribute meaningfully to the team's effort. In the case where my repeated death can have consequences for the entire team, leaving seems like an imperative. I don't want to be fodder for someone to repeatedly get a kill streak, or make it so that the team's life pool becomes endangered because I can't keep my shit together. In that case, leaving might even be a boon for the team. That's a whole lot of justification for a kind of shitty act, but hey, these things happen. I find that more often than not, I see rage-quitting as an opportunity to prove myself—situations where my team wins despite being a man down feel that much more rewarding. I'll stay in these matches just to prove a point. But that's enough about me. I'm curious about you guys. Do you have hard rules about when you can leave a game? Do you care about how it might affect others at all, or do you put your own enjoyment of the game before sportsmanship? And if you don't really play online games, have you ever found yourself rage-quitting media—like Game of Thrones? What does it take to push you to the brink such that you give something up, be that a match or a show? The Multiplayer is a weekly column that looks at how people crash into each other while playing games. It runs every Monday at 6PM ET. Image credit: Shutterstock.

It’s time to look at what $20 will actually get you in the landscape of “free” to play gaming. What does it actually mean? And what is that crisp, all-too-real twenty actually worth in various imaginary economies? In the first of an ongoing series we sent Cara off to do some shopping in DOTA 2. Just what could she get for twenty bucks?

Daddy RPS said he’d give me this $20 note to shop with, but what happened was RPS was out of change that day and so RPS patted me on the head and said “Okay off you go, go and buy yourself something nice in a Free To Play and we will reimburse you.” Challenge Accepted. I gathered the Fashion Police, which largely resembled a troupe of models from Zoolander (Tom, Alice, Dan, Philippa and I all have razor sharp cheekbones) and we went shopping with Daddy’s money. Which I hope Daddy actually has or this may be some sort of elaborate prank…

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Valve has supplemented its upcoming "The International" Dota 2 tournament with a new virtual book, the "International 2013 Interactive Compendium." Available for $10 on the official Dota 2 shop, the Interactive Compendium will deliver news on the tournament and allow players to vote on tournament-related matters, such as post-tournament competitor awards.

The Interactive Compendium also unlocks "special virtual item drops throughout the tournament," according to Valve, in addition to matchmaking tournament-minded players and letting folks make predictions on tournament match outcomes. Once the August 7 event has come to a close, players will be able to read each other's Compendiums to see how accurate those predictions ended up being.

Dota 2 isn't out yet. So let's bide our time with some DotA cosplay, m'kay? DotA or Defense of the Ancients was originally a multiplayer mod for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and its expansion. Subsequently, other modders added more content to DotA, creating a thriving and ever expanding experience. Since then, IceFrog, DotA's original modder, has joined Valve and is working on a sequel called Dota 2. While Dota 2 is a standalone sequel, let's use this opportunity to look back at some, but not all, of the best cosplay for DotA and the forthcoming Dota 2. [ver1sa] [KiraHokuten] [EnvytheOne] [jiocosplay] [mr-neko-juanito] [VictoriaF-W] [MyrtleSarroski] [kitarakuro] [QTCosplay] [jiocosplay_2] (Top photo: EnvytheOne/VictoriaF/MyrtleSarroski)

The Dota 2 tournament called "The International" is set to return for a third round this year, with two different qualifiers leading up to a championship on August 7. The West Qualifier will run May 13-19, and be hosted by eSports outfit GDStudio, and the East Qualifier, hosted by BeyondtheSummit, will go from May 20-26.

Those two qualifier winners will be joined by last year's winners from Invictus Gaming, twelve other contenders, and a special Wild Card contender, to be determined from the qualifier runner-ups right before the final showdown.

The contest itself will take place at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, WA, and all of the matches will be broadcast online to watch for free. No official prizes have been announced yet, but traditionally The International boasts a $1 million payout for the winner, so the stakes will undoubtedly be high.

Several rounds of a DOTA 2 tournament have had to be postponed after somebody launched persistent DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, which in some cases knocked out players and in other cases entire teams. The Chinese league, G-1, says that several matches involving European players were affected, and that further qualifiers have been postponed until a workaround can be implemented. Here's the official statement from the organiser's website: Season 5 of the G-1 Champions League has been streaming smoothly and successfully for over 20 match days now. However, over the past few days, matches on the DOTA2 European servers have been faced with a serious series of DDoS attacks from unknown sources, which has caused players to continuously disconnect and ultimately made it impossible to carry on the competition. In light of the current situation, 17173 and 2P.com have decided to postpone the G-1 Western Qualifiers while waiting for advice on technical solutions from Valve. Apart from this season of the G-1 League, disconnections also interrupted the recent DreamHack Invitationals, and both competitions are serious competitions with large amounts of prize money on the line. What next? We've shared a guide with all the teams in the G-1 Western Qualifiers yesterday on steps to take to prevent DDoS attacks. Additionally, communications are established with Valve, reporting what has happened in the past few days of G-1 Champions League, along with related details regarding what we know about the as-yet unidentified DDoS attacker(s). We are truly sorry about this decision for all of our fans and viewers at G-1, especially those that support G-1 by purchasing in-game tickets via the Steam store. We promise that the G-1 team will do our best to address the matter, and take any and all actions needed to ensure that G-1 Champions League Season 5 is back as soon as possible. We remain optimistic, and hope to see you all again soon! Why would people bother with stuff like this? One possibility is mentioned in the statement above. The part about "large amounts of prize money on the line". Similar problems have long plagued DOTA 2's main rival, League of Legends. We are Taking Actions to Ensure G1 Champions Back ASAP [G1]

An invite-only sequel to a free Warcraft mod is how the West was won. That’s the claim, anyway, but so long as Valve keeps its internal figures locked up there’s no entirely reliable way of knowing exactly who’s playing what in PC-land. League of Legends has, of late, been hailed the most-played PC game in the the Western World, but the DFC Intelligence PC Game Meter (via GamesIndustry) has used assorted surveys (primarily of Xfire’s apparent 23m users) and magick to determine that Valve’s Dota 2 has now overtaken it. A victory for Valve – except LoL is actually far, far bigger than that.(more…)

Even those who are less knowledgeable about MOBAs than they’d like to be but plan to rectify that as soon as humanly possible (IT’S ME, OK FINE JEEZ IT’S ME OH GOD I’M SUCH A MESS) know this much about DOTA 2: it’s the hard one. Thus far, League of Legends has paved my road to vague competence with copious pointers, helping hands, and utterly heroic shoves in the right direction, but DOTA’s idea of a red carpet involves my blood. Lots of my blood. So Valve’s decided to change that. Well, a little, at least. The storefront, hardware, and fuuuuuture creator that occasionally develops games has added an in-game tutorial to its arena battling opus. But this is just the beginning, and it wants your help.

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#dota I'm finding it increasingly difficult to get excited about DOTA 2, since my dalliances with League of Legends ended in me promptly uninstalling League of Legends, but I still check the game's blog every single day. Why? Because there's always the chance Valve will release more character art of the game's heroes, which are some of the best of their kind in the business. More »

There are quite a few communities bustling away in the General Sociability forum, and some of those have produced of videos of their antics. I’ve embedded just a few of those below. There are many more, and I am sure others still I haven’t seen.

Are you doing video stuff with the RPS community? Link your work/play in the comments!(more…)

#dota The latest update for DOTA 2's beta now delivers a "Least Played" mode, which will match players who are forced to use characters other the 20 that have given them the most wins. It's meant to get players in the game's closed beta to explore the game's full roster, which now runs 96 character deep. More »

#dota One of the neat things about Dota 2 is that you can download "Announcer Packs" that change the voice of the in-game announcer to any of a number of other characters. More »