Dota 2
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Valve partners with Nexon to bring Dota 2 to Japan and Korea
Online game publisher Nexon has announced that it's teaming up with Valve to bring the free-to-play Dota 2 to the Japanese and Korean markets. Dota 2 is of course based on a Warcraft 3 mod named Defense of the Ancients, and the multiplayer online battle arena style of gameplay, inspired by real-time strategy games, will likely appeal very much to those overseas markets. Valve's Gabe Newell says, according to the press release, that "partnering with Nexon will allow us to deliver Dota 2 to a massive audience of Asian gamers via a premium service."Dota 2's competitor League of Legends has already been enormously popular in Korea, with a South Korean team nabbing the world title at the last championships. So Valve is likely expecting a lot from Nexon, in terms of delivering the game to these new markets. Dota 2 is currently in closed beta and heading toward a free-to-play launch soon.
Surviving the basics of DOTA 2
DOTA 2 is Valve's updated version of the classic WarCraft 3 custom map Defense of the Ancients, known colloquially as DotA. Though the game is currently in development and still carries the beta label, DOTA 2 has become an addiction for some for nearly a year, including myself.The original DotA mod is credited with launching the multiplayer online battle arena genre (MOBA), spawning multiple titles, including League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth, Bloodline Champions, Awesomenauts, and even the shooter Super Monday Night Combat. After a legal battle over the DOTA name, Blizzard and Valve have settled. Blizzard's own MOBA title – now named Blizzard All-Stars – remains in development and has been playable at a number of events.Although League of Legends was created by two of the original curators of the Defense of the Ancients mod, it was a man known "IceFrog" that helped bring DotA into the height of its popularity as a mod. Now working at Valve, Abdul "Icefrog" Ismail and a team of developers have been tasked with injecting the classic mod into the malleable Source Engine with hopes to deliver a new experience with fresh artwork, effects, and features not originally possible within WarCraft 3.The highly competitive game gets swarms of new beta users on a regular basis and its pending official launch will pile more into Valve's latest game. For those new users to Valve's free-to-play MOBA experience, we offer this breakdown of what the game is about and what strategies you should employ to be successful.%Gallery-170519%
SOE Live 2012: John Smedley on EQ Next and SOE's future
There's been a never-ending news stream this weekend at SOE Live, and underlying all the announcements has been a single theme: a fundamental shift towards emergent gameplay. We had the chance to talk to SOE President John Smedley about that philosophical change and how it fits in to current and upcoming titles. He spoke about the growing popularity of MMOs as viewing entertainment and how it's caught on in PlanetSide 2. And while he wouldn't go into details about EQ Next, he did give some exciting hints about what players will get to experience with this third EverQuest title. Read on for a look at the future of SOE!
League of Legends 'Honor' system is now live
Riot Games has added a feature called "Honor" to its popular online PvP game, League of Legends, partially in the hopes of solving the issue of community management. Honor is something that players will be able to distribute amongst each other after every matchmaking game. After finishing matches, players will be able to award either their teammates or opponents with Honor for being friendly, helpful, or for showing great teamwork in the game they just played.Honor is "not a currency," says Riot (and it can't be traded or spammed), but it will be used to recognize worthy players over time, and the company says it is looking into possible "bonuses for the most Honorable summoners." For a long time, League of Legends players have been able to "report" each other for negative actions like being offensive or leaving a game early, but Honor seems designed to go the other way and reward positive actions instead. It remains to be seen how it will play out in the future. Riot is experimenting here, to see how players use the system before it's fully implemented.Valve's Dota 2 also has some innovative social features planned, including a reward system like this for working together with other players in the game. These MOBA games are very complicated to play, and so companies like Riot and Valve are doing their best to get players to work together and create a solid community, rather than lose new players to widespread offensive behavior.
EVE Evolved: The $10,000 New Eden Open
Competitive tournaments are nothing new to gaming, but the past few years have seen an an absolute e-sports explosion. The rise of the MOBA genre is partly responsible, with new games taking DotA's tradition of industry-sponsored tournaments to new heights. Both Dota 2 and League of Legends have world championship top prizes of over a million dollars, and smaller MOBAs regularly hand out tens of thousands to winners. The recent surge in livestreaming has had an equally big part to play, with some games netting more home viewers than real televised sports. There's no doubt about it: This is the year that e-sports takes over. EVE Online has always had a tradition of in-game tournaments, with thousands of people tuning in every year to watch its annual Alliance Tournament. The tournament turns EVE's normally asymmetric PvP on its head by putting everyone on a roughly level playing field to compete for huge in-game prizes. Players were excited this week to learn that CCP Games is launching its very first competitive tournament with a real cash prize. The $10,000 New Eden Open could be the start of something really big, but will EVE's famous political and spying metagame get in the way? In this week's EVE Evolved, I investigate the details of EVE's $10,000 tournament, the source of the money pouring into e-sports, the potential of a big EVE e-sports scene, and how EVE's metagame could interfere with the New Eden Open.
Some Assembly Required: Creating content for cash
Housing. Mission generators. Player-run festivals. Music. Overall general sandboxy goodness. Since its debut over a year ago, Some Assembly Required has covered a number of topics related to player-generated content as well as the games that offer such features. However, recent events have turned my attention toward a different aspect of PGC. Between the Dota 2 incident and last week's announcement from Sony Online Entertainment, I am actually looking at player-generated content in a whole new way: as a revenue generator. That's right -- collecting cold hard cash for your creativity. Although plenty of titles allow players to create content and share it within the games, very few let players sell that content for real-world money. This column explores the cash-for-content phenomenon in MMOs: what games have it, how to use it, and whether it is likely to become the next big thing.
iG wins DOTA 2 International, takes home a million dollars
DOTA 2 isn't even available for real yet, but there are already massive competitions in it, which strikes us as insane.The Grand Final of the International 2012 tournament took place over the weekend, awarding Chinese team Invictus Gaming (above) $1,000,000 for successfully defeating Natus Vincere in a best-of-five battle. NaVi gets $250k, which seems like great compensation for being good at a game.The video is not available yet, but soon you'll be able to go here to watch all the matches, and to prepare yourself for when DOTA 2 is out of beta.
PSA: Valve's Dota 2 championships begin prelims today, watch live
The International Dota 2 Championships begin today with preliminary rounds, running through August 28. The preliminary rounds don't eliminate any teams, but they decide the seed for the main competition starting Friday, August 31, at PAX Prime. The International runs through September 2, offering a first-place prize of $1 million.The preliminary rounds begin at 9 a.m. PDT each day from August 26 - 28, while the main event will begin at 10 a.m. PDT August 31 - September 2. Watch all the action of the preliminary rounds here, with main event streams to be posted as those games start.
DOTA 2 gets a spectator client
Today, every Steam user can install a free spectator app for DOTA 2. The spectator app lets you watch any recent or live matches, plus all of the upcoming matches going down as part of The International tournament.You'll be able to check out DOTA 2 matches from the perspective of players, or via a directed view of the match, complete with commentary. Eventually the spectator client will be rolled into the final game client ,once DOTA 2 officially launches. The spectator client is a standalone app for the time being.
Valve's film project is a DOTA 2 documentary
During tonight's Valve-centric episode of GTTV, head honcho Gabe Newell revealed information on an upcoming documentary that Valve is producing. This documentary will focus on Dota 2 and several players on the pro circuit as they attempt to win The International tournament going on later this month during PAX Prime.The teaser trailer above focuses on three different individuals from different parts of the world, and not only what it takes for them to pursue excellence in competition, but also their families and how they're dealing with it all.
Valve removes 'player-created' Aion mace from Dota 2
After discovering that a mace supposedly created by a player in the Steam Workshop and then added to Dota 2 was actually copied from NCsoft's MMORPG Aion, Valve removed the item and issued a warning to players. Believing the mace model the author's original work, Valve made it available to Dota 2 players who purchased a key to unlock a special chest. But Valve's community noticed the mace was Aion's Marchutan's Blessed Mace and reported the IP infringement. All 24,603 players who previously acquired the mace were issued replacement weapons for the confiscated one. The uploader of the mace has been banned, and all proceeds from the sale of the weapon have been stripped from his account. Valve posted a reminder that contributors to the Workshop must respect the intellectual property of others and encouraged the community to continue to report infringements.
The Soapbox: League of Legends is the new World of Warcraft
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Every now and then, a game comes out of nowhere with such incredible financial success that it causes the games industry to completely lose perspective. All it takes is one game to start raking in the millions for developers, publishers and investors to stumble around with dollar signs in their eyes for years to come. Innovation grinds to a halt and everyone starts blindly copying whichever game just hit the jackpot. It's like some huge industry-wide superstition takes over and convinces people that if they do the same dance the same way, it'll rain again. World of Warcraft has consistently had this effect since shortly after its launch in 2004. To this day, several studios per year excitedly announce yet another fantasy MMO that lifts its entire feature set and every gameplay mechanic wholesale from World of Warcraft as if it were a model for automatic success. The same thing is happening again in online gaming today, not from MMOs but from MOBAs, a new genre based on the competitive gaming classic DotA. Developers are still chasing the massive money made by yet another hugely successful game, and this time it's League of Legends.
Dota 2 enhances support for competitive play
Valve is adding new tournament-focused features to the DOTA 2 beta, intended to make the game more attractive and user-friendly for competitive players (and open up a new source of revenue from spectators).In addition to improved support for teams, including additional stats, team matchmaking, and logos, the new update adds a "Tournament View" feature that allows fans to pay to watch current and past tournaments from within the game. "For the tournaments you've purchased," the Dota Team explains, "you'll find a complete breakdown of the tournament's matches, and be able to quickly jump in and watch them in your game client (whether it's a live match, or a replay)."DOTA 2 is now officially the weirdest free-to-play game ever. It's free to play, but you can buy into the beta before launch, and you can now pay to watch other people play it.
DOTA 2 update adds custom UI layouts
PC gaming and UI customization go together like chocolate and peanut butter, or Nutella and literally anything else on the planet. It makes sense, then, that Valve would introduce the ability to completely customize DOTA 2's grid interface. Once created, players can export and share interface configurations they're especially proud of.The mouse-over text of the image above was originally "don't do this," so we assume that Valve's example isn't necessarily a paragon of intuitive interface design from which to extrapolate ideas. A complete list of the other, much more esoteric changes included with this patch can be found here.
Valve has an economist now
Economist Yanis Varoufakis was analyzing the financial crisis in Europe, focusing on Greece, when he got a proposal seemingly out of nowhere. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell saw similarities between the situation in Europe and Valve's troubles with its own virtual economies (for DOTA 2 and Team Fortress 2, presumably.)"Here at my company we were discussing an issue of linking economies in two virtual environments (creating a shared currency), and wrestling with some of the thornier problems of balance of payments," Newell said in an email to Varoufakis, "when it occurred to me 'this is Germany and Greece', a thought that wouldn't have occurred to me without having followed your blog. Rather than continuing to run an emulator of you in my head, I thought I'd check to see if we couldn't get the real you interested in what we are doing."Varoufakis stopped by Valve HQ during a speaking tour and became excited about the possibility of researching a digital, fully recordable economy. "Think of it," he said, "An economy where every action leaves a digital trail, every transaction is recorded; indeed, an economy where we do not need statistics since we have all the data!" And now he's writing a weekly blog called Valve Economics. Unless, of course, he decides to do something else.
SteelSeries shows off new WoW wireless mouse, cache of corded rodents and a headset at E3
This time last year, SteelSeries showed us a headset and mouse meant for Diablo III, but at E3 2012, the company showed us a bunch of goodies. The highlight is the inaugural SteelSeries cordless offering, aptly named the World of Warcraft wireless mouse, which sports a themed skin and glowing white runes and logo on the palmrest (at least that's the plan, the prototype unit we saw didn't light up). Similarly, the charging base is studded in true Azeroth style and ringed in blue runes to let you know when it's powered up, plus it can be connected to your computer via microUSB if you want to play and charge simultaneously. It's PC and Mac compatible, comes with 11 programmable buttons, and once you've given it 60 minutes to fill its tank, you'll get up to 16 hours of continuous, intensive game play. It's set for a release in the latter half of this year and will cost $129. Along with the WoW model, we also got to see the gunmetal grey MLG edition Sensei and a pair of special-edition Kana mice -- for Dota 2 and CounterStrike: Global Offensive -- each uniquely skinned in the style of their namesake games. To go along with the CS:GO rodent, there's an accompanying headset (a Siberia v2 with a camo paint job) as well. Rounding things out is a GuildWars 2 branded headset and Sensei mouse. The stereo headset is the on-ear variety, and its flexible white frame can be folded down during travel. A 3.5mm input resides at the base of each earcup, and the open jack can be used to connect another set of headphones to share your audio with a friend. The headset's priced at $100, while the mouse will retail for $70 and will land on store shelves when Guildwars 2 is released.%Gallery-157403%
DOTA 2 is free to play, 'DOTA Store' open now and selling beta access
Valve confirmed tonight that DOTA 2, its upcoming MOBA and guaranteed Basshunter reminder, will be free to play. But don't worry, you'll still spend plenty of money on it, as Valve simultaneously announced an in-game DOTA Store, which will sell items created both by Valve staff and by users in the Steam Workshop. The store will sell items, but not heroes – "We believe restricting player access to heroes could be destructive to game design, so it's something we plan to avoid," the team said on the official site.The store opened tonight, and offers a $39.99 "Early Access Bundle" of in-game items that also lets the buyer into the ongoing beta. It'll be free to play when the game officially launches this year, but you can buy access to it now. That's something to think about tonight.
Blizzard and Valve settle DOTA dispute, Blizzard DOTA officially Blizzard All-Stars
Blizzard and Valve have been going back and forth about ownership of the DOTA title for awhile now. It's a complicated issue that's been summed up very well by Joystiq's JC Fletcher: "Which giant company has the rights to the fan-created, community-promoted word 'Dota?'" As of today, it turns out Valve has those rights. The two giant companies have amicably settled the issue amongst themselves. Valve will release its DOTA title as Dota 2, and Blizzard will release its as Blizzard All-Stars. Personally, I'm a bigger fan of All-Stars, anyway. It gives the name some real flavor and, as stated by Blizzard VP Rob Pardo, "ultimately better reflects the design of our game." Of course, regardless of the decisions made here, the fan community will inevitably continue calling this genre of games DOTA or some variation thereof. If you care to read the full press release regarding this agreement, hop behind the cut below.
Blizzard renames Blizzard DotA to Blizzard All-Stars
What's in a name? Quite a lot, as it turns out. A name alone was enough to send Blizzard and Valve to man the lawyer cannons over two upcoming games, DOTA 2 from Valve and Blizzard DOTA from Blizzard. The companies have reached an agreement, however, which includes Blizzard renaming its game to Blizzard All-Stars while retaining use of the "dota" name for noncommercial use in the fan community. Valve retains the commercial use of the name. It sounds like a little matter until you remember that Warcraft III was the source of the map that spawned this game type, leading to both companies developing competing versions of a sequel. Blizzard All-Stars currently has no release date, while DOTA 2 is due out sometime next year and is currently in beta testing. Luckily, the terminology is only being changed on the corporate side, meaning players are free to continue discussing the games as they would have anyway.
Blizzard and Valve settle DOTA argument, Blizzard DOTA is now Blizzard All-Stars
Blizzard has dropped a short-and-sweet press release (reprinted below) informing us that it has landed on a "mutual agreement" with Valve regarding the contested "DOTA" trademark. DOTA, of course, stands for "Defense of the Ancients," which is a fanmade map and mode for Blizzard's Warcraft 3, originally based on a Starcraft map. Developer "IceFrog," who's overseen the DOTA map since 2005, has gone to work for Valve on DOTA 2, while Blizzard has been working on its official variation of the game, previously called Blizzard DOTA.The mutual agreement means that Valve will get the rights to use the "DOTA" trademark commercially, so DOTA 2's name won't change. Blizzard reserves the right for fans to use the trademark noncommercially, but will give up the DOTA name for its official variant. That game will instead be called Blizzard All-Stars, "which ultimately better reflects the design of our game," said Blizzard executive VP Rob Pardo. "We look forward to going into more detail on that at a later date."Valve's Gabe Newell also gave comment, saying that Valve is "pleased that we could come to an agreement with Blizzard without drawing things out in a way that would benefit no one." Blizzard All-Stars doesn't have a release date yet, and DOTA 2 is due out next year.
