Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes earnest, sometimes silly column about Dota 2.

Dota 2 is a complicated game. Everybody knows that. It's so complicated that nobody understands it completely, and that's why we surround ourselves with experts who are able to pierce through Dota's thick fog of mechanical noise to deliver sound commentary and guidance. Today, I am your guide. Tens of minutes have been invested in bringing you the following Dota secrets: cold scientific facts that they don't want you to know.

FACT #1: Wards exist in a state of quantum uncertainty.

You will note that Dota 2 does not keep track of the amount of gold each player has spent on support items wards, smoke, courier upgrades and so on. This is not an error. It is impossible for the game to record this information because support items do not exist in the way that you or I readily understand.

Like Schr dinger's cat, wards only exist when they are observed by the rest of the team. Until this happens they are both bought and unbought, placed and unplaced. As a support player you may believe that you have bought and placed wards, but this is not the case until your carry, offlaner or mid agrees that you have done so.

This scenario is complicated by several factors. Every skillshot your team misses reduces the number of wards that you have effectively bought. Every time your carry is killed, your wards cease to exist: you never placed them, they had no warning, and everything everything! is your fault.

If an allied Mirana misses enough point blank Sacred Arrows, for example, then it is actually possible to reduce the number of observed wards on the map below zero. Not only did you not ward in the way that this particular player would like, you have not warded in the entire game. In fact you have warded so little that perhaps you are reducing the number of wards in other people's games right now.

"GG support no brain" Mirana might say, as another Sacred Arrow sails past an immobilised enemy three feet away. "Report rubick."

Just as the world seemed complete and unchangeable to the peanut-brained tyrannosaur, Mirana's belief in your failure will be unshakable long past the point where the game is lost. You could protest, but science is on her side: you might think you bought wards, but if you had bought wards, I wouldn't suck so much, now, would I.

FACT #2: Every time you use the 'report' function for anything other than its stated purpose, a child's ice cream melts onto a life support machine which, short-circuiting, electrocutes a puppy.

This one sounds like a bit of a stretch at first so I'm going to walk you through it. Let's say that you're in a game and it's going badly. In particular, one of your teammates a stranger is having a rough time. Let's say they randomed Broodmother, demanded mid, and have fed ten kills to Death Prophet in less than twelve minutes. They are pushing right up against their respawn timer. It is actually quite difficult, mathematically, to fail as hard as they are failing.

You don't know them, and you don't know their circumstances. They could be ill, or tired, or simply having a bad day. What you do know is that they suck; that they are, to wit, a noob. You probably suck as well, of course, but the matter at hand concerns Broodmother.

"Lol gg reprot brood" you tap into global chat, like a dickhead.

You open the scoreboard, click Broodmother, and select report. You glance at the options available to you and note that in actual fact having a bad game isn't grounds for official complaint. You ignore this and choose 'Communication Abuse'. You opt to leave a message for Valve: "ban feeder nub pls."

You are setting a remarkable process into motion. First, an automated system will analyse your report and the match from which it originates to discern whether or not it is valid. Having determined that you are being a dickhead, the report is passed on to the AI that controls Valve's network of 'Overwatch' satellites. These orbital platforms normally facilitate the day-to-day running of the company predicting global trends, locating talented modders, tracking dissidents, and so on but a false report triggers several dormant subroutines.

The Overwatch network will then begin searching the globe for a very specific scenario. It will look for an infant with an ice cream, a deathbed, and a small dog. The search can take days, weeks, months, but Overwatch is patient. Having located its mark it will then deploy an array of sun-directing mirrors and lenses. A faint beam of warm sunlight is directed earthwards, at the sprinkled summit of a child's much-anticipated treat.

Melting! Falling! Zap, beep, woof! Silence.

Grief.

And all of this is your fault; all of this happened because you couldn't keep your shit together. Good job, player.

You might be wondering why Valve would install this functionality in this first place. You might argue that they have better things to do. To which I say: hey, man. They're an open company. If somebody wants to wheel their wheelie-desk over to Overwatch Control and install themselves some child-traumatising spacerays, then who are you to stop them? Stop being such a middle-manager. Jesus.

FACT #3: Regular Dagon usage drains ambient fun from the universe.

Fun is a zero sum game. They won't teach you that in school, but it's true. If you're having fun, somebody else isn't. Fun is, much like Hungry Hungry Hippos or capitalism, about stealing everybody else's marbles and hiding them where the 99% will never find them.

There are a couple of ways this applies to Dota 2. Carrying is the most obvious. Players who auto-lock mid for themselves have something of the Goldman Sachs intern about them, too; I can imagine them using the word 'rainmaker' without irony. But that's not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about Dagon. A Dagon is more than a magic wand that incinerates people. A Dagon is a declaration. A Dagon says "this game is about me. This game is a fun-funnel, and the fun-funnel is in my mouth, and I am going to have all of the fun, and there will be none for you, peasant."

FACT #3.5: The sound effect for Dagon is actually a sample of Donald Trump's toup being blown off.

Here's the setup. You're half an hour into a game and your team is doing well. You're Io or
Necrophos or somebody and you're sitting on a pile of assist gold. You think to yourself: what do we need? You could pick up a Pipe of Insight, or a Veil, but it's kind of late for that. Your mouse cursor hovers over the Necronomicon. This would be a solid choice. When you're listening to your better angels you are a team player, and that extra pushing power, that bonus damage, that truesight: yes, you think. We could make use of a Necronomicon.

We. We we we. Why never 'me'? Why never 'I'? This is when you decide to take matters into your own hands. It's at this point that you make a stand for you. You queue up a Dagon and step confidently into the goddamn winner's bracket.

You'll feel great. You'll punish an Armlet-toggling Slardar with your hair-trigger 'fuck you' button and yell something like "beep boop buh-zap, motherfucker!" I know I have. What you can't know at this moment is that the life you have chosen will catch up with you. This feeling of power can't last. All the fun you're having is actively and exponentially draining creation's supply of goodness and joy. Every innocent Keeper of the Light that you pop is a sacrifice on the altar of your hungering id.

You blaze through the midgame like a streak of light the colour of hot blood. You are a ruiner; you create ruins. You sound like the crack of God's belt. You're the goddamn Laser King. But this story does not have a happy ending. You start stealing farm to make that next 1250G recipe. You do shameful things in the jungle. You bottom out alone in the Rosh pit, cursing whoever decided that you couldn't double-tap the hotkey to turn your Dagon on yourself.

You are responsible for accelerating the Fun-Death of the Universe. I'm no mathematician, but if there was a formula for calculating the impact of a Dagon on a Dota 2 match I'm pretty sure it'd look something like this:



Where n is fun, x is the level of your Dagon, and y is Keeper of the Light's pathetic old man tears.

FACT #4: Everything you believe in is a falsehood. Order, pattern, number, sense and hope are lies you tell yourself to give meaning to a meaningless existence. You are a speck, a mote of nothingness, clinging desperately to the notion that you have a purpose. There is no purpose. Reality itself hates you, and you are doomed.

This is more or less the principle behind solo ranked matchmaking.

Every week, the PC Gamer team pick their most and least favourite happenings from the last seven days. Here you'll find the week's soaring highs and stagnant lows, picked from the news, the games we've played, the culture at large. The only thing that's guaranteed is there'll be no neutral opinions.

On this page, you'll find a profusion of positivity; on the next, a glut of gloom.

THE HIGHS
 
Samuel Roberts: I loved what I played of Alien Isolation this week. It's pretty cool that a game experimenting with emergent AI just happens to be based on a sci-fi franchise that has a recent spotty history when it comes to...well, look, the easiest way of putting this is, Colonial Marines was a pile of arse. This is so far from any other Alien game stylistically and benefits from Creative Assembly's laser focus on the values of the original Alien. Tom's experiences contrasted nicely with my own, so I'm now fairly confident in Isolation's potential replay value based on what I've seen so far.

Evan Lahti: Guys, Clockwork Empires could be special. I posted my hands-on with the indie, Dwarf Fortress-inspired, Lovecraftian colony-builder earlier this week, and as the rest of the press have begun to see the game at GDC they've been echoing our praise and interest. That includes our pals at RPS, who described it as "really exciting stuff."

We've seen a surge in popularity in games that generate emergent, personal stories in the past few years, and I have a feeling that Clockwork is going to be the next big one on that list. Gaslamp Games' eccentricity is infectious whenever I talk to them, and it's wonderful to see how that's extending to the design of their game--you can build barber shops on the frontier (and barbers operate as low-level doctors when none are available, apparently), and phrenologist will be a middle-class occupation for your colonists that's used to identify their character traits. Gaslamp's willingness to be themselves--that is, weird--is encouraging.



Tim Clark: An easy one for me: Sam and I getting to play Hyper Light Drifter for the first time. Most of the session was spent accusing each other of sausage-thumbed incompetence as our survival runs in the horde mode were cut short by sudden death, but when it came to the end of the hands-on it was a genuine wrench to hand the controllers back. Although developer Heart Machine isn't showing Hyper Light Drifter's main RPG elements yet, spending time with the gloriously whipcrack combat system, which is a frantic mess of slash 'n' dash moves fleshed out with a diverse suite of secondary abilities, has left me feeling entirely confident about the feel of the final game. And given its already startlingly cool looks, the hype for Hyper Light Drifter is only set to grow.

Tyler Wilde: That's cool, you all sat in rooms looking at screens with things happening on them. I mean, that's PC gaming for the most part. Totally understandable that you would do that, but here's a story from my week: I'm sitting in a room it's clean, nicely decorated. Someone's apartment, maybe. I turn my head and see another player sitting nearby. He turns his head toward me he's looking at me, right now, through his own Oculus Rift. What do I look like? It occurs to me that I don't know. I look down and my virtual chest shifts slightly. I seem to be wearing a hoodie like his. I see my hands, gripping a controller and frighteningly paralyzed. But what if I weren't paralyzed? What if I could get up and walk over to the strange, silent man sitting next to me? What if his mouth opened and he spoke? Later in the day, would this feel like any other memory of a place I'd been and a person I met?

I'm actually starting to worry about virtual reality, guys not that it won't be good, but that it will be too good. The Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 isn't there yet, but it's a lot better than DK1, and the consumer version is supposed to be another leap. And then there's five years from now, and 10 years from now. Are we heading toward the thing sci-fi writers have been warning us about all this time? Maybe. And maybe if we are, I want it to happen anyway. Long live the new flesh.



Chris Thursten: Given that I've been sat in a big empty office with Phil while the rest of you have adventures at GDC, the highlight of my week has been the release of Valve's Dota 2 documentary, Free To Play. I'd seen it a few times before - I watched an early cut at Valve in May last year, then saw the near-final thing at The International in August - but watching the community get to experience it has been a lot of fun. It's an accomplished exploration of what makes competitive gaming so exciting, and its positivity about the scene has brought about a great sense of positivity within the scene, which makes for a nice change of pace. I wrote about it in more detail as part of this week's Three Lane Highway column. I'd love to see more developers take their communities seriously in the way that Valve evidently do.

Phil Savage: It's been a week of cool tech, exciting previews, and being sat in a big empty office with Chris. And yet, the thing that excited me the most? New payment models for game engines. This could be a sign that I need to take a long, hard look at how I get my thrills, but let me explain what I hope Epic and Crytek's subscription models will mean. Unity has revolutionised the indie industry, partly because of its (relative) ease-of-use for those starting out in 3D development. But it's also the de-facto choice for AAA veterans moving to the indie space. Now, as increasingly more of these smaller studios appear, they'll have the option of an affordable version of tools they're already familiar with. Hopefully it's another step towards a future in which lines between indie and AAA are increasingly blurred, and a studio's budget is no longer it's defining characteristic.





THE LOWS
 
Tim Clark: As a serious Left 4 Deadhead, I was a little disappointed to find I didn't entirely love my hands-on with Evolve here at GDC. It ought to work. The idea of four-player extraterrestrial big game hunting, with another person controlling the monster, feels rich with promise. The weapon set and abilities all make sense, and the art design is fine, if a little cookie cutter sci-fi. (The current monster, called the Goliath, reminded me most of '90s creature features like The Relic.) And yet There's something about having to chase around after an enormous beast with an equally monolithic health bar that feels unsatisfying. Perhaps that's no surprise: chipping energy away from tank characters or bosses is rarely satisfying in itself, and the core trap and track mechanic doesn't seem intrinsically fun enough to compensate. There's a logic to Turtle Rock's assertion that a human-controlled antagonist ought to trump an AI, but equally isn't that exactly the idea they set at out to disprove with the canny adaptive AI of Left 4 Dead, which had 'The Director' to drop in threats at the perfect moment?

Evan Lahti: Steam Controller. It made a rough first impression. It's also a bit concerning that Valve isn't showing a wider set of games with the controller, despite saying in the announcement that Valve had "fooled those older games into thinking they're being played with a keyboard and mouse." GDC was a perfect opportunity to showcase the flexibility of the controller on a wider set of the Steam library, but instead we got a point-and-click game, Portal 2, and a side-scrolling action game.



Cory Banks: I wouldn't say I was wildly excited about Goat Simulator when it was first announced. I don't particularly want to be a goat, and I'm not dying to be a goat farmer (though maybe I'd be great at it. Food for thought). But when I found out that Goat Simulator is little more than a joke physics game, I was pretty let down. The cool thing about our recent trend of mundane simulation games Euro Truck Simulator 2, for instance is that they highlight the complexity and challenge in tasks that we often take for granted in the real world. Once I found out that Goat Sim is a game where you toss goats, I started imagining how interesting a real Goat Simulator could be: maintaining farm land, balancing operational costs with revenue brought in from goat milking operations, deciding to start a petting zoo so Benny The Goat can entertain children in the town.

So maybe it doesn't sound fun on paper, but there's more game there than an Angry Birds clone. And it's not like hauling cargo across Germany was the most fun game pitch ever, either. But it worked. Taking a jokey concept and turning it into a full, complex game would have been quite a feat.

Tyler Wilde: Despite the $350 dollars I'm about to blow on an Oculus Rift DK2, I'm a little disappointed to hear that when CCP's VR dogfighting game EVE Valkyrie is released alongside the consumer model, it will be exclusive to the Oculus Rift on PC. The Rift may be the biggest VR headset right now, but there will be competitors (not counting Sony's Project Morpheus, though I expect someone will make PC drivers pretty quickly). I hope the industry agrees on some standards so that VR games can be made to work with as many VR headsets as possible, and I hope this Rift exclusivity doesn't continue past launch. I don't want to choose VR hardware for the games that work with it.



Chris Thursten: Honestly, this has been a pretty good week. I've not been especially enraged or disappointed by anything. In part, this is because I have been sat in a big empty office with Phil. My low point for this week is less a specific announcement, then, and more the general state of a particular game.

BioWare announced a form of player housing for Star Wars: The Old Republic this week - and it looks great. I got a huge amount out of SWToR during my time with it, and I'd love to see it succeed. Yet I'm all too aware of the way its haphazard transition to free-to-play drove players away and broke the back of a community I liked being part of. As much as I'm tempted to return, the way the game has been picked apart for monetisable bobbins makes it a world that I'm no longer really comfortable occupying. There's a parallel dimension where player housing is being announced after a long series of successful, story-extending expansions - the kind of thing the game desperately needed. I'd like to live in that dimension. Sadly, I don't.

Phil Savage: I'm starting to suspect there's a secret industry raffle, deciding the fate of beloved gaming franchises. "Sorry Dungeon Keeper, you're becoming a maligned mess of mobile microtransactions." "Congratulations Baldur's Gate, you'll get a competent series of Enhanced Editions, and a spiritual successor on Kickstarter." This week, it was RollerCoaster Tycoon's turn, and, on the basis of the mobile game's trailer, it's not a ride I'm planning to take. Atari also announced a "PC experience", but it's not just their refusal to use the word "game" that has me worried. Looking at the revenue report of a company recovering from bankruptcy, it's clear that their interests are in the "Mobile" and "Online" space. Given that, I doubt we'll be getting the sort of sequel that fans have been waiting nearly a decade for.

This article was written in late August 2013 and originally published in issue 258 of PC Gamer UK. I've been thinking about my experience at The International 2013 since watching Valve's Dota 2 documentary, Free To Play. As a companion piece to today's Three Lane Highway column, then, we thought we'd make the following available online.

It takes the five members of Alliance ten minutes to move around Benaroya Hall s curved mezzanine to the off-limits corridor that leads to their private balcony. They are surrounded at every step by fans, pushing up against windows and leaning over tables to sign T-shirts and mousemats. Their manager, Kelly, alternates between apologetic determination and abrupt for-the-camera enthusiasm as she attempts to shepherd five sudden celebrities into a single doorway.

A lot of players that get a lot of fame tend to become assholes, to be honest, Alliance captain Jonathan Loda Berg tells me later. I was a little bit like that when I was younger. It was something that I put a lot of thought into when we made the team I said look, if this is going to work it s important that everyone stays down-to-earth. I think it s also a cultural thing. Swedish players are a bit different we don t really take ourselves so seriously.

It is Saturday, August 10, the penultimate day of The International 2013. The Seattle-based Dota 2 tournament boasts the largest prize pool in competitive gaming, and Alliance have just secured their place in the grand final. They are the favourites to win. They have played ten best-of-threes since the group stages and won nine of them 2-0.

A few hours ago the Swedes beat Natus Vincere (Na Vi) in the upper bracket final, sending the Ukrainian-Estonian-German team to face Malaysia s Orange E-Sports at the top of the lower bracket. The three remaining teams in the tournament are guaranteed, at this point, $287,438, $632,364, and $1,437,191 respectively. Between $10,000 and $20,000 is considered a major prize in competitive Dota. When Alliance won Season 5 of China s G-1 Champions League, they pocketed $40,200. The seventh and eighth-place finishers at The International take more than that.

None of the players I meet seem concerned about the money. The answer I am always given is that it s simply not why they re here.

There is no physical template for a Dota professional. That can t be said for tennis stars or NASCAR drivers or hundred-metre sprinters, all of whom are separated from the audiences they entertain by equipment as well as by innate and acquired physical supremacy. In traditional sport, the wall between exceptional players and the rest of us is tangible. It is made of time, talent, money and muscle.

In e-sports the talent is invisible and the fame that results from it settles differently on every player s shoulders. The professionals milling around in the lobby of Benaroya Hall play the same game as everyone else, but they are shaped by it in a way that is specific to them. Specific, even, to their generation. The youngest player at The International is 17, the oldest 29. There is no precedent in sport or elsewhere for what they do for a living, how long it should last or what it ultimately means.

In the private communal areas where players congregate they divide themselves by language, nationality, and a highschoolish network of friendships. Every player in the room is talented and hyper-competitive but they collectively fit no other template. There are jokers and serious young men who talk in low voices about the business . There are troublemakers who drink until 4am and the players for whom competitive Dota was one branch on a path that also included traditional sport. It comes back to the competition. The International is the most important measure of a team s performance in a given year, and for each player it s an opportunity to be the best in the world at something.

So no, they ll say. The money doesn t matter.

The lower bracket final begins at noon on August 11. Orange are the last remaining Asian team and have dismantled two of the most talented Chinese outfits, TongFu and Team DK. Dota is huge in South-East Asia, but China traditionally overshadows the SEA scene on the world stage until
The International 2013. Orange Captain Chai Mushi Yee Fung is the most versatile player in the tournament, playing 18 different heroes over the course of a week. It s the kind of talent that earns deep respect from the audience, and it does not go unnoticed. In September, Mushi will announce that he is moving to China.

The first game runs long, but Orange are the playmakers. Mushi s Queen of Pain is dominant, his glass-cannon mobility matched by Weaver, Nature s Prophet and Nyx Assassin with Naga Siren as a safety net. They take the first game, but settle into a slower, safer rhythm for the second. Na Vi pick up the Siren and Weaver for themselves, and, back in their comfort zone, end the game in less than 25 minutes.

The deciding match lasts more than double that. Long games of Dota are often resolved by single plays, usually crucial teamfight victories or successful attempts on Roshan, a powerful computer-controlled creep that drops an item, the Aegis of the Immortal, which grants a player a chance to respawn instantly in the field. Orange opt for the latter, but the moment Roshan falls a single miss-click by Lee kYxY Kong Yang destroys the Aegis rather than claiming it. The line goes that it was the most expensive single click in competitive Dota, and afterwards kYxY is visibly devastated. He posts a Facebook update from his phone.

Sorry.



Na Vi are loved by the crowd. It s hard not to love them, or at least not loving them feels like lapsing into the role of a stodgy police commissioner demanding his maverick star detective s badge and gun. They play loose, creative Dota and respect no law. Sometimes they win through staggering imagination and skill and sometimes they seem to surf a wave of luck and bravado. Either way, they win games.

Their captain, Clement Puppey Ivanov, always appears to be about to smirk. He s known for his strategies and it is safe to assume at any given time that he is planning something. He is a constant presence in the lobby and at the signing table. In-game he takes a commanding support role assisted by Kuro KuroKy Salehi Takhasomi with Gleb Funn1k Lipatnikov in the offlane.

If Puppey is always on the edge of a smirk, then Danylo Dendi Ishutin is perpetually about to smile himself inside out. Dendi and Puppey are questioned together before the grand final by Valve s backstage interviewer: Puppey answers questions in deadpan as Dendi leans closer and closer towards him, staring unblinkingly into the camera, responding to every query with the word good.

The team carry is Oleksandr XBOCT Dashkevych. On paper, his job is to farm gold and experience in the opening stages of a match in order to give his team a powerful advantage later on. The first time I meet him he claims to be from Paris and also to be adult film actress Sasha Grey: you get the impression that there s somewhere else he d rather be, and in-game this manifests as aggression above and beyond what is expected of his role.

It was Na Vi that sent TongFu to the loser s bracket. They did it by using a trick called fountain hooking a combination of powers that sends an enemy flying into a friendly safe zone where they are destroyed. It was hard not to feel for TongFu. They played well, but were forced to respond to tricks that are alien to the professional scene. But that s what Na Vi do. They win games, and are loved.

In Benaroya Hall that love takes the form of a pair of pounding monosyllables: Nah vee! Nah vee! The only other teams that receive the same support are Dignitas and TeamLiquid, Americans and the de facto home side and in their case, the chant is USA! USA! Na Vi are what the crowd would want from an American team: they are confident, independent, and comfortably exceptional. Something of the generational quality of e-sports is expressed in the sound of a thousand Americans bellowing their support for young people whose parents grew up in the former Soviet Union.

Alliance wear slate-grey winter jackets with patches on their shoulders that make them look like ski instructors or an indie band that happens to be sponsored by a company that makes expensive mice. Loda pulls a short ponytail back through a trucker s cap and has grown out his stubble, presumably to indicate his veterancy. He has been part of the scene for almost a decade, and I ask him if he worries about his reaction times as he gets older. I ve just been waiting for the day when I feel like I m starting to get worse, he says. But this year I feel like I m actually improving. I guess when I go downhill I will stop, and I will look to do something else but I will always want to be involved in the scene. Loda is 25.

Alliance have been playing together for a year, with Loda as their carry. He has been friends with Joakim Akke Akterhall since high school, and the partnership between the two is as old as European professional Dota. Akke and Jerry EGM Lundqvist form Alliance s supporting foundations, providing the early-game advantage that enables the team s remaining two players, Gustav S4 Magnusson and Henrik AdmiralBulldog Ahnberg, to establish map control.

S4 is the youngest player on Alliance and plays solo mid. The area between the two towers in the centre of the map is narrower than anywhere else, and the early laning phase is conducted with knife-fight pressure. It s a young man s game. I used to play solo mid and when I got older I started to have too much respect for people, Loda says. As a solo mid, you can t have too much respect. You have to be fucking confident. You have to want to outclass them.

AdmiralBulldog is regarded as one of the best Lone Druid players in the world. The hero is accompanied by a bear that uses its own set of items. Playing him well means acquiring a vast amount of gold, often in tricky situations, while effectively managing two distinct characters at once.

Alliance s style of Dota is sometimes described as conservative, but it s better understood in terms of efficiency and built-in redundancies. Their backup plans have backup plans. If Bulldog s lane collapses, EGM and Akke will buy him time to farm up elsewhere. If Loda, EGM and Akke are under pressure, Bulldog will knock down towers until the enemy is forced to respond. Alliance have the ability to both vanish off the map and be everywhere at once, and they are unflappable. If Na Vi are freestyle kickboxers, then Alliance are patient masters of Judo. The way they approach training reflects this.

Some Dota players are not honest with themselves, Loda says, calmly. When they lose games they point out each others mistakes so they won t be the weakest link. I think it s very important to show that everyone is human and Dota is a game where everyone makes mistakes, every single game. If you just realise that you will be not be so afraid. You ll focus on the big picture.

The grand final is a best-of-five, and it begins with a mistake. The talk in the lobby is that Puppey has been holding something back. That something turns out to be a bizarre draft of heroes that gambles heavily on winning the game immediately.

It s a disaster, and Alliance take them apart in 15 minutes. There is visible discomfort in the Na Vi booth, and the crowd is subdued.

Na Vi s comeback is resolute. Both teams respect each others star players enough to ban their signature heroes instead of generally-feared characters like Batrider and Io. This means, unusually, that these heroes are played in every game Na Vi would rather deal with them than face Bulldog s bear, and Alliance feel the same way about XBOCT s Lifestealer. In game two, Dendi takes Batrider to midlane while KuroKy supports as Io, and Alliance are outmanoeuvred. The game ends a Na Vi victory after 20 minutes.

Alliance try a riskier draft for the third. They get Bulldog his Lone Druid and pick up a tournament-first Ogre Magi, a character with a powerful buff that indicates a plan to double-down on the pushing power of the bear. They are not so much outdrafted as outplayed. The momentum granted by Na Vi s quick win in the second game gives each player the impetus to play their hearts out in the third. Alliance tap out with 47 minutes on the clock. The crowd s response is simple: Nah vee! Nah vee!



It occurs to me that Alliance are suffering for having a name that is harder to chant. Those soundproof booths can block out the commentary team, but they can t block out a thousand stamping feet or those simple, pounding monosyllables. Nah vee! Nah vee!

Alliance are a different team in game four. S4 takes Night Stalker, a hero who is rarely seen in competitive Dota but who fares well against Puck a strong midlaner that both S4 and Dendi have an affinity for.

Puck is a showman s hero, a grinning dragonling that can teleport, phase out of existence, pin groups of enemies down, silence them and escape to do it all again. The return of Alliance s confidence is visible. They play like Na Vi, for a game, and for the first time an International grand final reaches a 2-2 stalemate. Benaroya Hall seems to contract around the teams on stage. Over half a million people are watching online.

Na Vi start strong in game five. Dendi plays Templar Assassin, the hero that holds the record for the most kills in a professional game his record. Puppey is on Enigma, arguably his best hero, and XBOCT s Alchemist has been a core part of every Na Vi victory in the final. KuroKy s Rubick helped to win them game three and he resumes that role. Funn1k takes Batrider this time, almost for luck. The teams crash together in teamfight after teamfight, but Na Vi have the edge.

Alliance have Io and Chaos Knight on EGM and Loda, a combination that is feared for its mobility. Bulldog is Nature s Prophet like Io, a hero that can teleport and Akke plays Crystal Maiden, a fragile support that helps secure early kills. S4 picks Puck, as if to prove a point.

It comes down to a killer push by Na Vi. S4 tries to evade getting picked off by Funn1k but can t survive alone; XBOCT, Dendi and Puppey storm down mid and go straight for the barracks. They rush up the stairs into the base and take the third tower. S4 buys back into the game, but Na Vi are unopposed: because Alliance are gone.

Na Vi s killing blow sails in, and is met with air.

Bulldog teleports to top lane and starts knocking down towers. EGM and Loda head south to do the same thing. The Swedes trigger the backup plan to their backup plan, abandoning their own core and a key hero, in Puck to expose Na Vi s ancient in a single move. S4 keeps them occupied until the point that they need to teleport back to defend. Then, he stops them.

As Na Vi bunch up to port back, S4 leaps in and uses his ultimate to pin them down. The psychological impact is immediate. Na Vi stagger and Alliance takes two sets of barracks. Orange s kYxY spent $350,000 on a single click. S4 earns $800,000 with another.

A last-ditch attempt at Roshan is Na Vi s best hope at staying in the game, but they can t risk making themselves vulnerable. Alliance reform and charge for the throne.

Competitive Dota is a game of numbers, skill, ego and trust. Games are won and lost on momentum, on great tectonic power shifts that beyond a certain point are irreversible. Alliance have just reminded the world that it is also a game about defending an ancient.

They know they ve won. Bulldog seems to be controlling his character by slapping the table and yelling. Na Vi s ancient explodes, and game five ends. In one booth, there is a lot of jumping and hugging. In the other, Na Vi remove their headphones.

Loda picks up the Aegis of Champions from its stand and lifts it into the air. He s shouting over the crowd, but from the back of the hall it s hard to tell what he s saying. It s something simple and monosyllabic, and it sounds a little like Loda! Loda! It would be un-Swedish of him to bellow his own name, but this would also be the time.

Photography by Philippa Warr.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes earnest, sometimes silly column about Dota 2. Previously a Tumblr blog, it now runs every week on PC Gamer.

Being in the crowd during The International 2013 grand finals was more or less the highlight of my career. It was certainly one of the most powerful experiences I've had in connection with a videogame. When Alliance won and green confetti streamed from the ceiling and the Dota 2 theme started to play and the crowd were on their feet I understood something about sport that I'd never really understood before. It was one of those rare moments when you are aware that you are experiencing something important even as you experience it. The adrenaline didn't give out until deep into the early hours of the following morning.

The message of that moment was "this is legitimate". I had no doubt in my mind that the the contest meant everything to Alliance, Na'Vi, and all of the other competitors. I believed in the absolute goodwill of the audience, the enthusiasm of the commentary teams, and the excitement of the game's developers (something you don't get to see often enough).

I felt justified in the thousand-plus hours I've put into a single game. I forgot about every time I'd been sworn at, harassed or abused in team chat. I forgot about the scene's occasional indulgence in locker-room pettiness. I was able to ignore, for a moment, the more serious issues with racism, sexism and xenophobia that dog every competitive gaming community. It was a brilliant, singular statement of the positive power of competition and passion. I wish I could bottle that experience up and give it to somebody else.

Valve's Free To Play documentary is a product of the same feeling. Released yesterday, it covers the first International tournament back in 2011, the first time that Dota 2 and many of its biggest personalities were exposed to a large audience. It follows three players - Fear, hyhy, and Dendi - as their teams progress through the competition, interspersed with interviews with their families and friends. Each story is structured to provide an emotional context for the matches being played. Rather than go deep on the mechanics of Dota 2, it focuses on what winning and losing means to the people who play the game.

It is stridently positive about the game, the players, e-sports, all of it. It's this that has it flagged as an 'extended commercial' by the Washington Post. I think there's some truth to this argument, but it stems from a belief that videogames are a commercial product first and a hobby or sport second. This is a generational perspective, then, and therefore it's somewhat undercut by the movie's unrelenting endorsement of the passions of young people. Free To Play ends, after all, with a montage where Dota 2 personalities enthusiastically forecast the death of the old order. In so far as it is a commercial for that sentiment, I can get behind it.

There's something a little naive about Free To Play, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. The documentary elides any of the problems experienced by players that do not stem in some way from generational conflict. It uses fairly unsophisticated emotional cues to lend weight to particular matches. Fear is compared to Rocky Balboa at one point, and sports movies inform a great deal about the film's structure. It is both naive and powerful in the same way that the Rocky movies are naive and powerful. These are simple stories, but they mean something to a large number of people because there is truth in them.

I saw some of that truth at The International 2013, and in my excitement I became a little naive, too. I believe that Free To Play is an expression of Valve's desire to bottle up the best of what e-sports can be and deliver it to a bigger audience. There's nothing disingenuous about that goal, and a tremendous amount of work has gone into making it a reality.

I'm glad Valve decided to make a film, and not just because it presents a game I love in a way that my parents might understand. I'm pleased because Free To Play is an expression of the values of its filmmakers and therefore, more broadly, an expression of the values of Dota 2's developers. It presents e-sports as something to be taken seriously but emphasises in turn the seriousness, talent, and dedication of the players themselves. It encourages professionalism - something that e-sports has a hit-and-miss track record with - by not only presenting it as a virtue, but by implicitly stating that it's this quality that makes certain players worthy of the all-star treatment by Valve. This is coming from a company that is typically reluctant to tell anybody how to act, and although I respect the spirit of that philosophy I can't help but be relieved to see it fray at the edges.

If you follow the scene closely, Free To Play could not have been released at a better time. Early March has seen a run of e-sports dramas and a sudden injection of unbridled positivity is what we needed. It's been fun to watch the Dota 2 subreddit deal with the movie's sentimentality, something that the community would normally treat with acid suspicion. I hope that the film has an impact - and I hope that Valve keep making statements like it. A few weeks after TI3 I was back to being called an f-word, a c-word and an n-word by kids on the internet, and I don't doubt that given a week or two the community will be back to demanding the summary executions of this pro player or that caster.

The positive response to the film shows that this doesn't always need to be the case, and I hope that Valve understand the power they have to shape the tone of the discussion that surrounds the game. I wish that being a Dota 2 player felt like being at The International all of the time, but I don't think that player surveys and automated punishment systems are capable of making that a reality. Nor do I think that participating directly in the scene constitutes a breach of Valve's corporate philosophy. The message I'd like Valve to take away from Free To Play is this: that yesterday's stories are powerful, but the way Valve chooses to frame them has a tremendous influence over the types of stories we'll see tomorrow. Don't stop here.

If you'd like to read more about my experience at The International 2013, I wrote a feature about it which is now available online.

Free To Play, Valve's Dota 2 e-sports documentary, comes out later today. And while you could watch it from the relative comfort of your Steam library, wouldn't it make more sense to see it in a setting more synonymous with e-sports? By which I mean on Twitch, next to a chat box that's spamming emoticons.

Luckily, you have that option. Valve and Twitch are collaborating on an online viewing party that's set to go live in a few hours. It will start at 9am PDT or 4pm GMT, and be shown running throughout the day. Because timezones are confusing, there's also a countdown timer ticking down to when that party gets started.

Free To Play follows three professional Dota 2 players - Benedict "HyHy" Lim, Clinton "Fear" Loomis, and Danil "Dendi" Ishutin - as they compete for the million dollar prize of Valve's first International tournament. Last year, Chris got an early look at the film, and you can read his impressions ahead of seeing it for yourself.

Later, Twitch will also be hosting the playback of a Q&A that took place between Dendi, Fear and the documentary team during yesterday's premier screening in San Francisco.

Welcome to a new weekly feature in which we cup the week that was and ask it to cough gently. Here you ll find the PC Gamer team reflecting on the best and worst moments of the past seven days. On this page you ll find the good stuff. After which, it is quite literally all downhill

THE HIGHS

Tim Clark: Having thus far avoided becoming a Hearthstoner is that a thing? Can I make it a thing? the news that Blizzard s card battler has abruptly come out of beta means now feels like the right time to commit. If only because there are likely to be plenty of equally dewy-eyed marks on the servers to test my clumsy deck building on. The mix of deep strategy with the randomness of rare card acquisition means it already feels dangerously likely to pull my OCD levers/ravage my bank account. Damn you Blizzard. Damn you all to goblin Vegas hell.

Andy Kelly: I ve been using the Oculus Rift a lot this week, and a highlight has been exploring familiar places from film and TV. In Jerry s Place I wandered around Seinfeld s apartment from the classic sitcom. In another I looked around the boiler room from Spirited Away s bathhouse. This needs to be a whole genre. There s something incredibly surreal, and brilliant, about being in places you know so well from the screen. If someone makes an explorable Twin Peaks, I ll never take the Rift off.

Tom Senior: My highlight of the week has been watching Andy explore the future. We're on adjacent desks, and I can tell you that the future involves a lot of waving and sudden exclamations of "shit!". Earlier today he was manipulating glittering clouds with is hands using the Leap Motion controller. This week he braved the drizzle of Euro Truck Simulator in virtual reality, and hosted a stream of curious colleagues from various magazines at his desk. Based on careful observation, there seems to be a point whenever anyone tries the Rift for the first time when, pursuing some virtual item only they can see, they stare at their groin and declare "WOW". The future is brilliant. Andy will bring you more revelations from 2015 and beyond every week in The Rift Report, and this week we've published a series of articles on the future of PC gaming, which is looking very bright indeed, and quite weird.

Samuel Roberts: The BAFTA games ceremony was a nice affair, despite so few PC games actually winning an award. It was more about the spread of nominees, for me, seeing Gunpoint and The Stanley Parable receiving equal attention to a project as colossal as GTA V. That sort of mainstream publicity for these games is never a bad thing.

Phil Savage: It's the last full week of Guild Wars 2's Living World: a more than year-long saga of fortnightly content releases. It's not always been brilliant with many of the earlier releases padding out their content with rare drops and repetitive churn but the game's been left much stronger than it started. It's clear that ArenaNet now have a better understanding of the type of scenarios that make for an engaging and social challenge. Their last four releases have taken the game's traditional world events, and expanded them out to fill entire zones. The Living World ends on some of the most exciting experiences I've had with the game. All that said, if I never see another steampunk pirate it will be too soon.

Chris Thursten: Discovering Titanfall's capture the flag mode has been the highlight of my week. It's the best way to play the game, and I'm baffled that it hasn't received much attention prior to release. Actually, I'm not baffled. CTF is sometimes considered to be a bit old fashioned and unsexy, and I think that's terribly wrong. CTF is very sexy. It's sexy because it creates strategic space for titans and freerunning to be used in considered ways. It's sexy because it demands teamwork. This should be the way Titanfall is played competitively, and I'd love to see it attract an eSports following. It's just a shame that the game's lack of community features will make that less likely to happen.





THE LOWS

Phil Savage: As iconic lines go, standby for Titanfall took on a bittersweet edge this week. Thanks to the staggered regional launch, most of the world was left waiting on Respawn's fantastic men 'n' mechs shooter. Tying game releases to a specific day of the week is an increasingly archaic practice. We live in a fully connected world; we play games on a platform that leads the way in digital distribution, but, for some reason, we're still being arbitrarily held back based on whatever country we happen to physically exist in. At least, in this case, there were no spoilers to dodge, but that isn't really the point. A game's release is an event and gamers love to run away to join the circus that surrounds it. It's less fun having to queue for that circus, while you watch everyone inside enjoy their, er... clown robots? That metaphor could have been better.

Chris Thursten: I thought it was a bit of a shame that the BAFTA awards focused so much on triple-A games. Institutional award shows lag behind the times in every medium, but it doesn't feel like games necessarily need to be part of that trend. It's to the credit of Papers, Please and Gone Home that they managed to crack through the panel's preference for The Last of Us and GTA V, but I feel like the industry still struggles to delineate 'quality' and 'production values'. Also, Grand Theft Auto winning the multiplayer award? Really? #robbed #scandal #justicefordota

Tom Senior: Dark Souls 2's launch made me sad this week, because we're going to have to wait more than a month to join in. Right now console players are busy exploring the new world, dying to new bosses and piecing together the sequel's ambiguous lore. The collective act of discovery when players dive into a new game is valuable. Day-one players are buying into the fantasy of being a pioneer, breaking ground and uncovering secrets. Even though the PC version is getting a few fancy extras, like high-res textures, it's a shame to miss out on the goldrush. By the time we arrive, Drangleic and its vicious inhabitants will have been carefully analysed and categorised by those that have gone before.

Samuel Roberts: GOG.com abandoning its short-lived plan for regional pricing was a bizarre event. I primarily buy games from GOG because of how competitive the pricing is and the lack of a barmy regional UK uptick that demands I pay more for committing the terrible crime (and it is terrible) of being British. The whole thing was a bit silly, and GOG s melodramatic apology ends a mini-saga that didn t need to happen at all.

Andy Kelly: Peter Molyneux and his studio responded to criticism that their god game, Godus, is comprised almost entirely of clicking by replacing clicking with dragging. He describes the control change as smooth and delicious as he carves into the landscape. That s fine and dragging is certainly less RSI-inducing than clicking but the game s problems run deeper than that. I want Godus to be good, and I have a soft spot for Molyneux, but this focus on the new controls seems to be a distraction from a game with much bigger problems. Prove me wrong, Pete.

Tim Clark: Easily the biggest bummer of the week has been The Witcher III s not wholly unexpected delay. The combination of vertiginous ambition, as will be revealed in our forthcoming cover feature, with a vague release date (beware of any game which just lists the year you re already in) meant it always felt likely to slip. February 2015 it is then, although the nagging worry remains that CD Projekt may have decided to take inspiration from George R.R. Martin s lackadaisical approach to deadlines. Workshy geniuses, eh?

Are you ready for some Doter? That's just one of the questions posed by Rucks, the narrator from Bastion. He's an old-timey sort of fella, and ain't got no truck with these kids' short-As. If you'd like your wizard killing narrated by his smooth, folksy tones, you can now grab the recently released Bastion Announcer Pack for Doter Dota 2.

As with other announcement packs, it replaces the voice of both the announcer and the mega-kill announcer with the Bastion's elderly guardian. You can see (and hear) the full round-up of his proclamations over at the Dota 2 wiki. He's got some pretty sharp words for anybody caught cussing.

The pack is currently available at 3.24 for the next 20 hours. After that, it'll default to the regular price of 6.49. It follows a series of other external game announcement packs, including Half-Life 2's Dr. Kleiner, Portal's GLaDOS, and - oddly enough - the extremely British AI from Defense Grid. In the future, a Stanley Parable narrator pack is also planned.

In addition to commentating on Dota's forests of fantasy, Rucks' voice actor Logan Cunningham is also working on Transistor, the next game from Bastion developers Supergiant Games. You can read Cass's preview of that game here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes earnest, sometimes silly column about Dota 2. Previously a Tumblr blog, it now runs every week on PC Gamer.

Introducing somebody to Dota 2 is hard, and gets harder as your own skills improve. I was lucky to start playing with a group of people who all had exactly the same amount of prior experience - zero - and who were relaxed enough in each other's company to dodge the bickering and gamesmanship that skill imbalances can provoke. Most of the time.

I've seen the other side too. It's difficult to introduce somebody new to a group of knowledgeable players in a way that doesn't potentially ruin the game for everybody. Matchmaking will try to balance the average skill level of each team, but it's too hit and miss - and Dota is too complex - to guarantee actual parity. If you're trying to teach a friend to play, you're probably going to lose a bunch of games. Nobody likes to lose, and few newcomers are likely to be happy about the fact that they're (a) creating issues for their friends and (b) getting seven shades kicked out of them.

This problem has been on my mind. The last couple of patches made sweeping changes to how Dota 2 functions, and while the most dramatic upsets are felt at the professional level they have also had an impact on how new players are best introduced to the game. It is now, I'd argue, easier to win a game with a newbie in your team than has been for a long time - but to do so, certain attitudes need to change.

When I was starting out, being new meant playing support. There are a bunch of reasons for this. Warding and stacking are relatively easily-taught techniques that provide a general benefit to the team. Reliable stuns and easy-to-land teamfight ultis allow new players to be useful even if they're only capable of mashing all of the buttons and hoping for the the best. Nudging somebody into the support role also allows more senior players to reserve mid and carry for themselves, and this is sometimes symptomatic of a trend towards perceiving support as a subservient role. It's wrong, but it happens.

Problems arise when this creates an underclass of players who never get to play anything but support. If they take to the role and enjoy it, great - but there's an equal danger that somebody's entire experience of Dota will be warding the runes and bashing out stuns. These are players who won't be encouraged to master last-hitting, learn about stats, or to buy items that aren't arcane boots, pipe, and mekansm. This line of thinking is grounded in the idea that games will necessarily run long - that the game will be decided on a teamfight at the thirty minute mark when carries have had time to farm. The message it sends to your newbie friends is "don't touch anything and I'll win this for you in half an hour."

These are the players who will struggle most in the current meta. As IceFrog has worked to speed up the early game, on-point support play is becoming more and more important in intermediate pub matches. That means smoke ganks and early rotations. It means understanding fog of war, being able to anticipate enemy laning decisions, and knowing how to execute strategies with minimal farm. It means knowing what a push strat is, and how to see it coming. It's becoming less and less useful for a support to get their wards down and babysit the safelane, and as such it's no longer a good way for somebody to learn Dota - if it ever was.

Similarly, experienced players who lock the safelane carry role for themselves are missing out on what is arguably the most enjoyable phase of the game. Farming and rat Dota still win games, but just as many are won - and won more entertainingly - by teams that can pull off a gamechanging strat in the first five minutes. Na'Vi ran an offensive quadlane this week, for heaven's sake. I'm not saying you should try it in your next pub match, but you should be trying to figure out why it worked.

For these reasons, I'm starting to see the safelane carry role as the best way for somebody new to be introduced to the game. Rather than recruiting your inexperienced friends as ward mules, think about putting them in a position where you don't need them to secure the early game for you. What's more, the role provides a grounding in crucial skills: last hitting and finding farm, awareness of enemy rotations, and adaptive item builds. Whereas most new support players eventually find themselves needing to unlearn their early passivity, new carry players pick up skills that will remain relevant whatever role they subsequently settle on. In order for this to work, however, their experienced friends need to give up their claim to Void, Sven, Luna, Gyrocopter et al.

If you have a friend who is looking to get into Dota, then, try placing them on the safelane as a farming hero. Then, focus on executing strategies that give your team the advantage by the ten minute mark. Make it as easy as possible for your newbie friend to do well, and they'll have more fun - and you'll be playing more modern Dota into the bargain. Everybody wins! Except fifty percent of the time. Fifty percent of the time, you'll probably still lose.

Illustrations by Marsh Davies

All week long, we're peering ahead to what the future holds for the PC gaming industry. Not just the hardware and software in our rigs, but how and where we use them, and how they impact the games we play. Here's part two of our five-part series; stay tuned all week for more from the future of PC gaming.

The future of PC gaming is online. So is the present, actually Twitch livestreams and massive League of Legends tournaments are already integral pieces of the PC gaming community. As the audiences for livestreams and eSports surge over the next few years, our broadband infrastructure's going to be hard-pressed to keep up. Here's our look at what the future holds for online gaming: bigger and better eSports, the culture of livestreaming, and the slow spread of fiber Internet that could hold us back from our gigabit dreams.
Esports: Making hardcore games accessible
By Rob Zacny

Open up Twitch at any time of day or night, and the odds are good that you'll find a competitive gaming stream from somewhere in the world. An insomniac or early-riser might greet the day with an evening StarCraft or League of Legends broadcast from Korea. Take a break from a dull workday, and you might find a Dota 2 tournament in Eastern Europe or a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive match taking place in Sweden or Germany. You can watch the latest matches in Riot's League of Legends Championship Series with dinner, where the best players in Europe and the United States are showcased with production values that rival or surpass some TV broadcasts of more traditional sports.

Esports are global in a way that few traditional sports are. They transcend national borders, language barriers, and markets. They are also defined by their allegiance to hardcore PC gaming. While mainstream gaming was becoming increasingly focused on mass-market blockbusters, eSports celebrated deeper experiences that rewarded skill, commitment, and cooperation. Thanks to eSports, PC gamers around the world can play demanding RTS games, MOBAs, and shooters with a community of millions.



That has had tremendously exciting implications for PC gaming. There was a time, just five or six years ago, when it seemed like high-skill ceilings were about to be permanently lowered in favor of accessibility and mass market appeal. You didn't have to be a professional gamer to be depressed about the disappearance of fast-based twitch shooters in favor of slower, ostensibly more realistic military shooters, or the shrinking RTS genre.

This is always the anxiety behind dumbing-down complaints: some of us want more. You don't have to play games where you spend hours studying build orders, working on tactics, and coordinating with friends. But it's nice to have the option to forge that kind of relationship with a game, where you don't just skim the surface, but dive so deep that you understand how the pieces fit together.

Esports have proved there's a huge audience for that, and one that will reward developers who don't compromise in the name of accessibility. Look no further than the growing success of Dota 2, with its legendarily steep learning curve. Dota 2, like many eSports-focused games, is not a game that rewards its players over a period of months, but years.

That's a big ask for a lot of players, but eSports lower the barrier to entry by showcasing these games at their best, and demystifying what it is that makes them special. Even if you never play a ranked match or compete in a local LAN tournament, you can appreciate and engage with the most advanced gameplay in the world.

And players have responded around the world, proving that high-skill, competitive games have a bright future and a tremendous audience that's hungry for them. But it is a PC-based audience. The PC is the lingua franca of eSports, the only thing that unites these huge, disparate international audiences.



That means PC gaming is likely going to remain the home for these kinds of experiences, and we're going to get more of them. In the last year, Wargaming.net has launched major eSports initiatives to showcase what's possible in World of Tanks. Wargame: European Escalation has been spotlighted by Europe's Electronic Sports League. Between GDC and E3 last year, it sometimes seemed like every developer was trying to keep an eye toward the eSports potential of their upcoming games.

It doesn't really matter whether a game turns into a major eSport on par with CS: GO or Dota 2. Nor does it matter if eSports ever become so massive that they are broadcast in primetime on a cable sports network.

What matters is that eSports celebrate, preserve, and promote some of PC gaming's greatest traditions. In gaming landscape rife with Quicktime Events and meaningless scavenger hunts, eSports show that greatness awaits those who are patient enough to work for it. They ensure that the PC will remain a remain a place where players can earn achievements that don't need a badge or an icon. Esports can and should open up the hardcore to the masses, and the PC is the perfect place for that.
Smile! The game you're playing is live
By Cory Banks

Unless you suffer from debilitating performance anxiety, chances are good that you ve tried livestreaming. Thanks to services such as Twitch and apps like the free Open Broadcasting Software, it s super easy to capture gameplay video or stream your playthrough live on the Internet. Which means the future of PC gaming is a comment room full of viewers, mocking your Hearthstone deck.



Humiliation aside, this near-instant access to people playing games, live right now, means that a game s watchability a word I just made up is just as important as its playability. Esports is the prime example: the importance of a user interface that not only conveys info to the player, but the 300 people watching that player jungle in League of Legends, cannot be overstated. But even non-competitive games will embrace streaming in the future, with brighter colors and cleaner UIs. It s just smart business: YouTubers playing your game is the greatest kind of marketing, and there s no better way to discover or learn a game than to watch someone play it.

Livestreaming will also allow us to enjoy games when we simply can t play them, an important factor as our community matures and responsibilities grow. With a family and a full-time job, you might not have the spare 400 hours to conquer in Europa Universalis IV. That s okay: other streamers will have content ready for you to watch on demand. It s yet another way PC gaming will become more social, in the living room, in eSports, and in front of the camera.
Faster, fiber! Spread! Spread!
By Wes Fenlon

As we venture into the future of PC gaming, with games gobbling up 30 gigabytes in a single download, we need a brave new broadband service to lead us to the land of plenty. A service that casts off the heavy chains of bandwidth caps and delivers Steam games unto us at the rate of a gigabit per second. A service with a name that inspires hope, and awe, and salvation. It shall be known as...fiber.

Fiber Internet will shepherd us into this new age of high speed bliss. At least, fiber will lead a chosen, geographically privileged few to affordable gigabit (1024 megabit) connections. 2014 and 2015 will be big years for fiber rollout in the US, but Google Fiber and Verizon FiOS two of the best-known fiber services are, combined, only available in two dozen US cities.

The city count is increasing, but slowly. Google Fiber is launching in Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah in 2014, and AT&T has already launched a competing fiber service in Austin.



Some cities, like Chattanooga, Tennessee, have taken matters into their own hands by building public-owned fiber networks. Gigabit Internet costs $70 per month in Chattanooga. If you're not in the mood to cry, don't compare the price-per-megabit to what you're currently paying your ISP.

More cities plan to follow Chattanooga's lead. If those plans bear out, select gamers will have access to incredible download speeds without dealing with Big Cable.

The future doesn't look as bright for the rest of us. A January 2014 court decision overturned the FCC's net neutrality regulations, theoretically making it possible for companies like Comcast and Verizon to prioritize traffic on their networks. This could have a very real effect on PC gamers. Comcast could charge bandwidth-heavy services like Twitch a premium for reliable access to gamers--in other words, an Internet fastlane.

There's more bad news. Netflix's monthly ISP reports indicate that US service providers deliver an average throughput of less than 2 mbps during prime hours. Most online games even big ones like Battlefield 4 require deceptively little bandwidth, and a steady 2 mbps should keep the bullets flying lag-free. But streaming and cloud gaming demand more bandwidth and rock-solid reliability.

Twitch requires a bitrate of 1.8 - 2.5 mbps, higher than the average throughput Netflix reported for US providers. Nvidia GRID, Nvidia's take on cloud gaming (think OnLive), recommends a 10 mbps connection.

One more downer: Comcast is bringing back the bandwidth cap in seven states, testing the waters with a 300 gigabyte monthly limit. A weekend of heavy Steam downloading and constant streaming could easily blow through that limit.

We need fiber to meet the rising demands of livestreaming and cloud gaming. It's the future of broadband in the United States, and it's expanding, slow and sure. As sci-fi author William Gibson would say, the future simply isn't evenly distributed yet.

Welcome to Three Lane Highway, Chris' new weekly column about Dota 2.

Sand King is - like Lich, Axe, and, I like to think, Phoenix - a gentleman's hero. Characters with a lot of early and midgame potential are key to setting the pace of the match, and if your team is snowballing off the back of a few crucial early kills then it's likely that someone like Sand King was involved. Opting to play Sand King is a declaration that you are a team player; that you will buy wards and smoke; that first blood will be secured with a reliable two second stun and the sound - distant, like thunder - of somebody listening to Darude.

Sand King is a gentleman's hero. He's also a giant talking scorpion who sounds like somebody strapped a subwoofer to Vincent Price, but you take what you can get.

What does someone's favourite hero say about their preferences, values, or outlook? What does it mean that Sand King is Gabe Newell's personal pick? Moreover, what does all of this mean for Valve? I submit to you: it means something. It means stuff. It certainly doesn't mean nothing. The premise of this inaugural Dota 2 column has unshakable foundations. If you disagree, that's fine, good for you. Here is a review of a processor.

Let's get started, then. I am going to do this as a list, because (a) somebody told me that you loved lists and (b) I am lazy.

His lore
Sand King is the avatar of a magic, sentient desert. He isn't simply the king of sand - he is sand, trapped inside armour that happens to look a bit like a scorpion. His is a singular identity expressed by a much broader collective consciousness. To my mind this is a little like Gabe's relationship with Valve, and, more broadly, like Valve's relationship with the Steam community.

The concept of 'GabeN' is nothing more or less than the expression of the gaming community's sometimes ironic, sometimes earnest need for leadership - leadership that Valve traditionally withholds. Valve will always stress that they work to empower others, to solve short term problems, and to respond to the vast amounts of data they gather from the Steam community. They are a company without job titles, and they claim no titles for themselves.

But the vast majority of human beings like and respect leadership - they want people to thank or blame, not philosophies. Hence GabeN, deliverer of cheap games and withholder of Half-Life 3. The sturdy but capricious ruler of PC gaming, a kingdom that is in reality comprised of innumerable, infinitesimally small and diffuse parts. A king, as it were, of sand.

His attributes
Sand King is a melee support hero and his primary attribute is strength. This places him in a class of character that also includes Earthshaker, Undying, Treant Protector and Omniknight. Strength supports are a little more gold-dependent than their intelligence counterparts due to their low mana and reliance on distance-closing items like Blink Dagger.

This suggests that even as Gabe is working to buy wards, smoke and courier upgrades for his team he must also be careful to find gold for himself. Risks are fine - even encouraged, when it comes to securing first blood - but these risks must be grounded in solid principles. Overextending for its own sake, dying and losing money is a disaster for Sand King. A good support wants to maximise efficiency for everybody. This means both moving constantly and moving reliably, and not everybody is able to balance the two. This mirrors Valve's own attitude to risk, particularly when it comes to tinkering with Steam. Wow, did it get hot in here? These analogies are on fire.

Strength heroes are the sturdiest characters in Dota 2 because they gain both hitpoints and damage with every point in their primary attribute. These are the two stats that really count, at the end of the day, because if you're dead it doesn't matter how big your mana pool is. Gabe's choice of a strength hero indicates that he believes that ideas, companies and people should be able to withstand attrition at a fundamental level. Dreaming big is great, but it needs to be backed up by proven durability.

The trade-off, however, is that tiny mana reserve. Gabe has powerful spells, but he has to use them at exactly the right time or not use them at all. A strength support hero is a continual presence, but action must be taken decisively. This is probably the best explanation for why Half-Life 3 is taking so long: Valve have run out of mana, they've been buying all the wards, and they haven't had time to save up for arcane boots. If you cared, you'd pool them some clarities.

His skills
Sand King is versatile, but the way his skills mesh with one another won't necessarily be apparent to a new player. Let's break them down one by one.

Burrowstrike is classic Valve. It's both a disable, a nuke, and - potentially - an escape, packing tonnes of utility for a modest mana cost. It is more or less effective depending on the skill of the user, but is fundamentally reliable in a way that makes it powerful in the hands of anybody. It can be the spearpoint of an assault or a way of following up on somebody else's initiation; a platform for capitalising on others' success or a means to experiment with new strategies. Burrowstrike is, in short, the Team Fortress 2 of Dota abilities.

Sand Storm is what happens if you use the word 'vision' or 'plan' in an interview with a senior Valve employee. A whirling shroud of avant-garde thinking appears, concealing the man or woman at its centre. Somebody will use the word 'feedback', and almost certainly also the word 'creators'. Then, 'network'. Well-meaning journalists, in this scenario, take anywhere from 25 to 100 damage per second. There's someone in there somewhere, you might think, as your naive writerly dreams erode and crumble. Why didn't I bring sentry wards?

Caustic Finale is an oddity. Some don't invest in it at all, because causing creeps to explode on death is a great way to screw up lane equilibrium. Use it right, however, and that 220 bonus damage at level four can be enough to turn a teamfight. Its inconsistency reflects Valve's work to empower Steam users: sometimes, they explode with creativity! Other times, they explode in a shower of ASCII dicks.

Epicenter. Two seconds of channeling followed by an earthquake that slows movement and attack speed and deals huge damage in a massive radius. You can't ignore it, and you can't escape it. It is a Steam Sale, a new game announcement, and a seasonal Dota event rolled into one. Pulled off perfectly, a good Epicenter shakes the enemy team apart and showers Valve's partners in assist gold. Let's all take a moment to think about serious business people tumbling around their boardrooms while a man bellows 'wombo combo', because that is a fun thing to think about. The problem with Epicenter is that is highly vulnerable to cancellation during the channeling phase. Here's looking at you, Ricochet 2.

It also requires Gabe to pick up a Blink Dagger, but that's no big deal. What's another knife?

Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes earnest, sometimes silly column about Dota 2. Originally a Tumblr blog, it's now part of PC Gamer proper.