Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na Vi s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart.>

Having spoken so much about Dota in this column (as you would expect) and having made it the subject of a Have You Played ? it occurs to me that I’ve never really done a post aimed at newcomers thinking of trying out the game. Until now!

There are plenty of beginners’ guides out there but Dota 2 itself now contains a bunch of tutorial missions and quests. With that in mind I’ve spent the last Dote Night of 2014 having a good old poke about in the tutorial missions and seeing how well I think they explain the game.

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Dota 2’s Shifting Snows patch notes have just been released offering a number of hero tweaks, game balance changes and – if you’re feeling grumpy about the lack of Frostivus this year – the snowy winter map makeover.

Having a skim through what Shifting Snows (or 6.83 to give it its less poetic title) has to offer a few things stood out on first pass, particularly with regard to Pudge, Lifestealer and Sniper.

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Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na Vi s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart.>

Last week YouPorn finally announced the name of the Dota 2 team they’re sponsoring. It’s Team YP now but was formerly known as Play2Win. I had never heard of them.

YouPorn have been snuffling about the Dota 2 scene for a while now and there has been a whole bunch of speculation as to who might add the YP logo to their branded jerseys. I want to run through why I think this is a bad move for pro-gaming, regardless of who ended up with the deal.

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Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na Vi s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart.>

Yesterday Valve announced the beta for its Steam broadcasting service. It predictably prompted a slew of headlines which instantly put the service in competition with Twitch, another game-focused streaming service.

It might well become a competitor to Twitch at some point but at the moment they’re very different prospects. I thought I’d spend this week’s Dote Night digging into the current situation a little more, not because it’s Dota specific but because Twitch is how I consume the majority of my Dota 2 pro matches so the potential impact is worth keeping an eye on. Should be back to game-focused shenanigans next week!

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Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na Vi s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart.>

Towards the end of November most games journalists are preparing their retrospectives for the year that will have been. They’re also keeping a wary eye on the release schedule in case an excellent game derails those pencilled-in Game Of The Year ideas. I spent six months of this year working as an eSports reporter so most of the games I focused on had been around for years. Freshness would come from patches and updates, new characters, weird showmatch modes, twists in the metagame and team roster changes. It’s a huge amount to absorb so new releases took a back seat. I played Dota or CS:GO, learned about LoL and picked my way through the basics of World of Tanks.

As a result, 2014 for me was more about progress in existing games than seeking out the new. That’s why I ended up going back to a Tumblr I started when I was still pretty new to Dota 2. It was to get a sense of that progess of the distance between nubnub Pip and the Pip who now plays on a team in a games industry competition in which we’re actually doing okay!

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

It was only a matter of time before I added Dota 2 to this list, I’m just surprised it took this long.

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Valve has now confirmed the details for its Dota 2 Nemesis Assassin event, which introduces new hero Oracle and spotlights Phantom Assassin.

The event introduces an extra element to some of the game modes, if a player owns a particular item set (The Manifold Paradox Arcana), where Phantom Assassin (PA) is tasked with killing a particular enemy hero from a list of potential targets. If she succeeds, her whole team is eligible for a trophy and if the target kills her first, the opposing team is eligible for the bonus.

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Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na Vi s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart.>

The current big news in the Dota 2 community is the kerfuffle surrounding the Foreseer’s Contract. A short comic heralded the event on Friday and served as an introduction to the newest hero on the roster, Oracle (you can find him in the test client at time of writing but not in the regular game).

Why does the coming update make players – myself included – so concerned?

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Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na Vi s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart.>

This column usually focuses on Dota 2 exclusively but today I’m looking at the experience of going to live eSports events so it’ll dip into League of Legends territory. I’m not sorry!

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Artist Arthur Buxton has just released a beta version of his Colourstory app. Buxton’s work tends to focus on breaking down complex images into their constituent colours and creating pie charts or colour strips from the results. With the app you can generate these stylised palettes yourself by uploading pictures for the software to analyse. Obviously my go-to test material was Dota 2 screenshots.

One of the things I found fascinating about Buxton’s earlier projects were how recognisable certain images could be even when abstracted into colour bands. Van Gogh’s Starry Starry Night and his Sunflowers were the ones which stuck in my mind. With that in mind, for Dota I picked headshots for heroes I think look similar in terms of their colouring and ran them through to see how accurate I was.

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