Dota 2 still plays second fiddle to League of Legends, but its star continues to ascend: at the weekend, 1,075,464 Steam users were logged into the game at the same time, easily doubling the next most popular Steam game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. That's the highest concurrent figure in Steam history, but it's still no serious challenger to League of Legends, which has attracted well over 5 million. 

The spike in players was no doubt prompted by the New Bloom update, which introduced a new game mode in the form of the Year Beast Brawl, as well as a new hero and community-made gear, among other things. Oh, and if you noticed Dota 2 update frequently yesterday, it's because of a few hotfixes made during the Bloom. 

There have also been some price adjustments to Ability Point packs, with previous purchasers compensated. Check out the full details here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2 and related games.

It's update week! For Smite in particular—season two went live on Wednesday, fundamentally overhauling the Conquest map and introducing a broad sweep of balance changes equivalent to a major Dota 2 patch. I've played Smite exactly twice since then because Crystal Maiden has a puppy now. Conquest revamp, puppy. Conquest revamp. Puppy. Look at the puppy! Look at it.

It's entirely too early to tell whether I'll one day regret having spent 18 on a magical cape that comes with a dog. I suspect that the answer is 'no' when it should probably be 'yes', but that's how it goes. I'm almost two thousand hours into this particular series of questionable life decisions. One day I'll end up spending even more. Imagine if the Crystal Maiden arcana extended Freezing Field's duration to three minutes and thirty-nine seconds and replaced the channeling animation with the entirety of 'Let It Go' from Frozen. I don't know how much I'd pay for that. A lot, I suppose. I wonder how much my kidneys are worth.

I'm not in a position to offer comment on the New Bloom event itself yet because of the way it is structured—the new mode is only accessable at random times, with warning given an hour in advance. I suspect that Valve has structured it this way to ensure that people in my position play it exactly twice—once when it appears by chance, and once after spending an entire day waiting. I have a job and commitments: I need to plan my Dota time in advance, and that is directly incompatible with the structure of this year's New Bloom. I imagine there are reasons for it being this way, but from my isolated place in the crowd they seem like they might be dumb reasons.

That being the case, I'm going to discuss something else. Specifically, I'm going to explain why this support-centric update adds to a long list of reasons why Silencer can go fuck himself.

Phew. It feels good to finally say that, you know? Over the last couple of years I've worked through most of my personal problems with certain heroes. I used to loathe Nature's Prophet, and Pudge, and Faceless Void—I had a very specific sense of the types of people who would play those characters. Nonetheless, I'm aware of how silly and immature it is to make assumptions about somebody's personality based on the types of characters that they like to play, and I appreciate the way that all of these characters ultimately make the game more interesting. I'd even extend that to Sniper. Sure! He's an irritating shit sometimes, but there's a kind of tragic comedy to his impact on the lategame if he gets out of control.

At the end of this long period of personal development, only Silencer remains as the hero I truly and personally dislike. He's a prick and I hate him and here is why.

I love Winter Wyvern. I love how Valve have reimagined her, and I love how silly and showy her abilities can be. Like Omniknight, she's only ever going to be a very situational counter-pick—but like Omniknight, her impact on a fight can be visible and exciting. Her skills come with plenty of potential for clutch saves and dazzling plays. In my last game with her, I discovered that she acts as a hilarious foil to Chaos Knight and Io. Watching them teleport in only to force CK to murder his glowing blue life partner in cold blood is a precious gift that doesn't get old. Other highlights: the moment your carry realises just how good Cold Embrace is. When you realise that she can do 1700 damage split between the entire enemy team at level 7. She's dependent on the circumstances being perfect, but man—what an interesting set of new ideas to add to the game.

Most heroes are like this, one way or another. I've written something similar about Axe in the past. Dota is about systems colliding in new and unexpected ways. It is fundamentally about stuff happening.

Silencer is about stuff not happening. He is a brutal counter to Winter Wyvern and any other hero that subsists on spells at the bottom of the farm priority pyramid. Expect him to be one of the major factors curtailing Winter Wyvern and Crystal Maiden's brief surges in popularity, because by design he shuts down exactly what makes these characters interesting.

This is a design issue, not a balance problem. The character has plenty of weaknesses—but, like Faceless Void, they're the kinds of weaknesses that pub players typically struggle to exploit. He's one of the kings of the potato bracket because he requires your team to do the exact things that pub teams are typically terrible at doing: building BKBs, disengaging properly, and timing engagements to coincide with ultimate cooldowns.

Unlike other powerful heroes, Silencer isn't exciting to deal with: he's just depressing. There's no spectacle or impact to his skill set. Think about how extravagant a Refresher Orb feels on other heroes. Think about the pushing power of a double Chaotic Offering—'full boy band mode'—or the way double Thundergod's Wrath feels like the actual wrath of heaven. Compare that with two Aghs-upgraded Global Silences—twelve full seconds of nothing happening, watching your health and mana slowly tick away.

He stops spellcasting. He drains mana. He steals intelligence. He disarms. He stops spellcasting again, for everyone, everywhere. Unlike every other character in the game, Silencer is designed to reduce the number of interesting interactions that take place. Replace him with literally any other hero in a line-up and the game becomes more fun for everybody. He's the only character whose complete removal I would applaud.

Just look at him. Look how unhappy he appears, in a game full of vivacious and lively characters. He's the awful guy at the party that everybody wishes hadn't come. He's the commenter that shows up to derail the discussion. He's the mob that floods your Twitter replies and doesn't know when to stop. He makes conflict less fun. He makes everything less fun. If there is ever a Silencer arcana, it should involve a fedora and change all of his voice lines so that they begin 'WELL, ACTUALLY...'

This should be a new golden age for support players. We've got a dog now and we can force carries to kill their friends. Except we can't, because there he is in every game. They've just locked in three punchy melee carries? It's Winter Wyvern time! Here they come, pushing down mid. You anticipate the teamfight to come. It's your time to shine. You're in the trees, your force staff ready, your finger over 'R'. Then -

SILENCE.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

My sympathies go out to anyone who has paid megabucks for Blades of Voth Domosh, Fiery Soul of the Slayer, or really any other Arcana. You see, as part of the New Bloom update, Crystal Maiden is getting a wolf puppy. As such, she now has the uncontested best cosmetic in all of Dota 2.

Check out this cute motherflipper:

Look at that dopey face!

Aurora: Wolf Pup of Icewrack joins Crystal Maiden when she equips the Frost Avalanche Arcana. Arcana, if you don't know, is Dota-speak for a special cosmetic that brings new animations and effects to its wearer. It's also not cheap: $35/ 23 for  this latest one, albeit with a slight discount if its pre-ordered.

That is unquestionably a lot of money, but also, the little guy chases his tale when CM teleports. Sure, it's a non-combat pet, but god damn it's adorable. 

Oh yeah, the New Bloom update. It's not just wolf pups. New hero Winter Wyvern has been revealed. She's a big frost dragon, and her ult freezes an enemy and forces their allies to attack them.

In addition, the New Bloom map is back, item drops have been made more frequent, new community-made gear has appeared, and an item recycling system lets you dump unwanted stuff for a chance at a hero item set.

You can find a full rundown of New Bloom's changes over at the Dota 2 microsite. New Bloom isn't live just yet, but you can try it out in the Dota 2 test client.

It's New Bloom time in Dota-land. What does that mean, specifically? In lore terms, something about the Year Beast. In Valve terms, it's a time of comics, trailers and cryptic teasers.

Today's New Bloom preamble is a comic starring bubbly ice-nuisance Crystal Maiden. It tells of an encounter with Winter Wyvern—who is sure to be this update's new hero—and of the acquisition of a powerful new cloak.

That cloak was also glimpsed in yesterday's New Bloom trailer. It seems as if Rylai has a new Arcana item on the way.

What of the Year Beast? Last year, players fought it. This year, the trailer suggests, we'll get to tame it. We'll see what that involves when the update is released later this week.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2.

Last night I lost a game of Captain's Mode to a team that randomed two of their heroes. Their captain was AFK. Our captain wasn't AFK—he was, well, me—and I figured that I could easily counterpick a team that was lumbered with a Lina and an Elder Titan that they didn't plan to play. The draft didn't matter much, as it happened. They outplayed us from the moment the laning phase ended, fighting better, rotating better and generally closing us out of the game before we could bring our non-randomly-generated plan to bear.

There are two meagre reasons why this was not entirely an unbearable experience. The first is the single message their team transmitted in English over the course of the game: a lonely 'sick my duck', perhaps an Outkast reference, perhaps simply a wonderful typo. The other is that it was a relatively straightforward loss. These have seemed harder to come by, lately: I don't know about you, but for me and mine 6.83 has been the era of the throw.

It's simply easier to lose control of a lead than it used to be. It only takes a single teamfight to completely reverse the momentum of a game. Sometimes, it's less than that—the pick-off kill that means your next engagement ends disastrously, the sneaky Roshan attempt that you forget to check for. I don't feel like we've been losing more games than we generally do, but I definitely feel like we've thrown away more advantages.

It's no longer safe to snowball, and early leads need to be treated with a mixture of respect and caution—both by the team that's ahead and the team that's behind. The rewards for storming ahead in the early game aren't what they used to be, and transitioning into the kind of lead that actually ends the game takes skill and careful mitigation of risk. It's this latter element that I've been thinking about a lot recently. Dota 2 is a game of numbers, chance, percentages: most throws begin the moment you forget that.

Two weeks ago I talked about how a team that is in an advantageous position needs to identify their 'victory switch'—the set of collective strategic and psychological shifts that allow them to properly end a game. As part of that shift, it's increasingly important to define your team's relationship with the game's unpredictable elements.

A few weeks ago I read this guide to Hearthstone's Arena mode by VivaFringe. I don't play a lot of Hearthstone, but what drew me to it was this line:

When you re ahead, try to minimize variance. When you re behind, try to maximize it.

What VivaFringe refers to as 'variance' could also be described as chaos or unpredictability. In Hearthstone, this is fairly easy to locate: there are a lot of random elements, from the behaviours of individual cards to the card-drawing process itself. 'Randomness' in Dota 2 is a little subtler. It means more than just Phantom Assassin's chance to crit or Chaos Knight's chance to get a four-second stun. It means everything your team can't directly control, from the positioning of enemy wards to the chance that the support you've spotted wandering alone is actually bait for a smoke gank.

Here's a scenario that demonstrates the type of variance that I'm talking about. One of your team's core heroes is mobile, good at taking down single targets, and has had a good start—Storm Spirit, maybe. Your advantage going into the midgame has been built on the back of lots of individual plays. From an even start, your team has more gold and experience because risks were taken—and paid off.

Let's say that Storm Spirit has a 80% chance of succeeding at any given solo kill attempt. That's an arbitrary percentage: it's intended to express the idea that a player with a lead will normally do well, but that something can always go wrong. When all else is equal, it is absolutely worth taking that 80% chance of success. As the game progresses, however, the one-in-five chance of failure means more. In the lategame, the 20% you can't control could mean ceding a huge gold and experience bounty to an enemy carry, a lengthy respawn, an expensive buyback, or any number of other penalties. Eventually, Storm Spirit's solo gambits will present a bigger opportunity to your opponent than they do to your own team, because your opponent has a meagre (but not impossible) chance to win big from them.

When you're ahead, then, you need to stop gambling. The odds haven't changed, but the scale of the reward has. Stop seeing it as an 80% chance to bump your K/D/A, and start seeing it as a 20% chance to lose the entire game. Secure your lead by 'minimising variance'. Prompt teamfights. Take other objectives. Transition in sync with the changing mathematical landscape of the game.

This is often the opposite of what a snowballing player wants to do, and the inverse is true of players who are on the defensive. Simply being behind suggests that conservative play is the only way to win: you lost out in the early game, so there's no way you're going to gamble with what you've got left. Well, that line of thinking goes both ways. As the enemy pulls ahead in gold and experience, you can do more with each kill you manage to get. The one consistent element of unpredictable situations in Dota 2 is that they are dangerous. People make mistakes. People die. This is the last thing you want if you're winning, but exactly what you want if you're behind.

'Maximise variance' in this regard by making plays that feel unsafe. Go for that smoke gank. Contest Roshan. Push a tower and force the other team to come meet you, then run away. Sometimes they will respond perfectly and you'll lose anyway, but that's unlikely. By taking chances you increase the chance that they'll slip up, and when they lose a vital core hero for a full ninety seconds without buyback you'll have just won your way back into the game.

To put it another way: only winners can throw a game. There's a choice you need to make, when you've built up that comfortable lead, to hold on to it. And when you're losing the best thing you can do isn't hole up in your base or repeatedly farm the two jungle camps left to you: it's to strike out and invite the other team to take a risk. Think about every time you've thrown a game because you wanted one more kill, or to show off, or to end the game because you need to make dinner—then encourage that mindset in them. Not the dinner thing, I guess. But if you want, try typing 'brb 1min need to eat delicious pizza' in all-chat. It can't hurt. Beats 'sick my duck', anyway.

If you remain unconvinced, please enjoy this brief four-minute musical essay on the importance of being mindful of the numbers powering every Dota 2 match you play.

10% luck. 20% skill. 15% concentrated power of will. 5% pleasure. 50% slam. 100% reason to remember the jam.

This is as close to a perfect mathematical summation of Dota 2 as you will ever get.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Why have Dota 2 and League of Legends become the most popular PC games of the generation? Wes and Chris take a moment during their visit to the Smite World Championship to try and answer what it is about MOBAs that's elevated them above FPSes, RTSes, and RPGs as the most-played games in the world.

The PC Gamer Show appears every Friday. Hit us with PC gaming questions for us to answer at the end of next week's episode in the comments!

We asked some of the top minds in four of today's top e-sports about the state of their games.

Dota 2

Will "Blitz" Lee is a professional Dota 2 player, streamer, and sometime caster. You might know him for his Storm Spirit, for his work on the International 2014 newbie stream, or for his role as waifu to Purge's husbando. Formerly of Team Zephyr, he crossed the elusive 7K MMR barrier in January.

What was the highpoint of 2014 for Dota 2?

I'd say the TI matches between DK and EG. All the matches these teams played between one another were highly innovative and close, demonstrating the best of the west, and the fan favorites of the east.

How would you describe the health of the Dota scene?

Fairly strong, I think the active user base is growing, but I hear unrest from competitive players. It feels with how much TI is worth, all other tournaments are just sideshows along the way. There needs to be some way to incite interest again, maybe making tournaments worth seeding points or something.

If you could ask Valve to make one change, what would it be?

Be more transparent with how TI invites are sent, and how tournaments are weighted. Are ones earlier in the year worth less? etc.

In terms of Dota, what do you think was the funniest thing that happened last year?

That I hit 7k before Arteezy.

What is the biggest challenge that the competitive Dota scene faces in 2015?

Probably figuring out how to grow the tournament scene without relying on massive prize pools. It seems the tournaments that pay out 50k+ which is really good money have been left behind or interest is waning for them. I'm not sure how to solve this issue though, just random thoughts.

Who are the players or teams that you think will make the biggest impact this year?

Iceiceice is probably the x factor for VG, think Secret will do well but that isn't really a surprise.

What heroes are you personally enjoying right now?

Storm, Phantom Lancer, Sniper, Lina, all seem really fun and active around the map.

What do you think are the key components of a good Dota stream?

Humor, being able to make fun of yourself/take a joke, being informative, and not letting the chat get to you. Interaction with your stream is also huge, being able to make a personal connection with everyone helps bring people back.

Which Twitch meme makes you secretly smile?

"I sexually identify as an attack helicopter."

Where do you expect the next big innovation or upset in the Dota scene to come from?

Probably a team like Hellraisers or the Koreans, I feel team's like Phoenix/Rave/HR just sort of do whatever fits them without paying attention too much to whatever is popular in other regions.

How would you describe the current state of Korean Dota? Where is it headed in 2015?

Strong, Phoenix and Rave make good cases for being invited from the SEA region, and both can upset top teams, in 2015 I think one Korean team will make it into the main event, but if they make a splash remains to be seen. Maybe one more year till they get top 10 worthy, but with the work ethic it s possible.

CS:GO

Tomi lurppis Kovanen is a writer at HLTV.org and former competitive CS 1.6 player from 2004-2013. Since then, he has been casting and hosting CS:GO tournaments.

What was the highpoint of 2014 for CS:GO?

I believe the highpoint of 2014 for CS:GO was when NiP won ESL One Cologne. The way it happened probably made it the best storyline of the entire year—you really couldn t have scripted it much better. To top that off, CS:GO as a game broke all the previous records (viewership, players, etc.) during that same event, though they were again shattered later on in 2014.

How would you describe the health of the CS:GO scene?

CS:GO is doing tremendously well. There is no question that Counter-Strike as a whole has never been doing better. It seems—though it would be great if Valve could clarify—that we re set to have three or so majors a year now, which allows the rest of the circuit to be built around it. As far as I can tell we re going to have top notch Counter-Strike all-year round in 2015. It s a great time to be a fan of the game.

If you could ask Valve to make one change, what would it be?

In my opinion, and I have written about this in more detail roughly a month ago, the only real issue with CS:GO as of right now is that it is an incredibly counter-terrorist sided game. In my article I have outlined some ideas to make the game more balanced, but if I had to choose just one, it would be fixing the smokes so they d maybe last a second or two less, would be slightly smaller (think 10-20%) and, most importantly, they wouldn t glitch for the player trying to go through them.

In terms of CS:GO, what do you think was the funniest thing that happened last year?

I found it legitimately hilarious when Fifflaren essentially replaced me as the analyst at DreamHack events after retiring from NiP. Contrary to popular opinion there are no hard feelings between us and he actually is my favorite caster to watch.

What is the biggest challenge that the competitive CS:GO scene faces in 2015?

I actually believe the scene is getting slightly oversaturated in terms of tournaments and online leagues, and we are already seeing some top level teams withdraw from many events with a good amount of prize money up for grabs.

Who are the players or teams you think will make the biggest impact this year?

Though  kennyS already is the world s best player individually in my opinion, his team s struggles in 2014 didn t allow for him to have the kind of impact you would expect. I think that will change in 2015 as he continues improving and the team around him will get better.

What weapon or knife skins are you running right now? Is there anything in the Chroma update that you d really like to get?

In terms of skins my taste is far too conservative for the average user, I tend to like skins without any odd graphical features. I like the Night knives, as opposed to the shiny Chroma ones, for example.

What do you think are the key components of a good CS:GO stream?

Since my personal appetite for streams is so inconsistent with that of the public, I will answer for what I believe makes for a popular stream. You need positive personalities who can kill some time while waiting for matches, preferably some players as guest analysts sometimes, and you need to be consistent in streaming. As for my personal preference, to me it s very important that CS:GO itself looks default I dislike custom crosshairs, odd-colored HUDs, etc.

What Twitch chat meme makes you secretly smile?

My friend allu, who currently plays for Finnish 3DMAX, has a ridiculous looking meme of a face I made around eight years ago. It s pretty funny.

Where do you expect the next big innovation in CS:GO to come from?

Well it wouldn t be very innovative if I called it out right now, would it? One thing is for sure—it will not come from Valve, who have never been very innovative when it comes to the game. Hopefully a governing body of some kind could be put together by some people to help better organize the tournament circuit. That would be good for the scene.

Is item betting helping or hurting CS:GO?

To be honest I have never bought the argument for how betting could potentially be hurting CS:GO. There is so much evidence in terms of viewership growth that betting is great for CS:GO that this really should not be a discussion. It is easy to blame DDoSing only on betting, but it was already taking place in the CS 1.6 days when betting didn t really exist. Some people just want to see the world burn.

If you could pick the competitive map pool, what would be in it?

Out of the maps that are currently available, I would keep de_cache, de_dust2, de_inferno, de_mirage and de_overpass. I would then bring back de_train instead of de_nuke—which is basically never played—and replace de_cobblestone with de_season. I would also look into bringing on de_tuscan, maybe instead of de_mirage, if that becomes popular—and gets finished—at some point.

League of Legends

Christopher "MonteCristo" Mykles is a caster for the Korean OnGameNet Champions league. He was also previously a coach for team Counter Logic Gaming in the NA LCS, and is frequently brought on to cast international tournaments.

What was the highpoint of 2014 for LoL?

I look back fondly on the series between KT Arrows and Samsung Blue in the  Champions Summer finals. Not only did this best of five deliver high quality gameplay, but also some of the most exciting and gut-wrenching games of the year. This was undoubtedly the high point of LoL in 2014.

How would you describe the health of the LoL scene?

Viewership for League continues to grow on average for broadcasts around the world, so it seems to still be going strong. Riot's changes to balance at the end of 2014 and the new Rift should keep the game fresh and strategically interesting as 2015 unfolds.

If you could ask Riot to make one change, what would it be?

I think the main aspect of competitive play currently lacking resides in the limited amount of international competition in the current format. Cross-regional competition provides the most exciting matches for fans and helps fuel rivalries that otherwise remain untapped in a region-locked system.

In terms of LoL, what do you think was the funniest thing that happened last year?

As an analyst there are many moments of comedy gold, but the hope that springs eternal for Western teams from fans at Worlds perpetually provides amusement.

What is the biggest challenge that the competitive LoL scene faces in 2015?

Given Riot's stellar production and ambitious multi-country Worlds circuit in 2014, I believe that the most formidable challenge lies in somehow topping Riot's production from last year.

Who are the players or teams you think will make the biggest impact this year?

The obvious choice given performance and rosters look like SK Telecom, Najin, and OMG. Faker seeking his second World Championship should form the core of storylines in 2015, though it is nearly impossible to predict a winner at this early stage.

What Champions are you using personally right now, and how are they performing?

I don't play the game much. I watch film.

What do you think are the key components of a good LoL stream?

I do not watch player streams but instead prefer professional matches. For me, a pro game relies on quality casting rather than production wizardry.

What Twitch chat meme makes you secretly smile?

ognTSM ROTATIONS ognTSM gets me every time.

Where do you expect the next big innovation in LoL to come from?

Until they are dethroned in a convincing manner, Korean teams will reign supreme in terms of innovation and quality of play.

What are the consequences and benefits of Riot expanding their e-sports broadcast to the Eastern Hemisphere?

Given Riot's stellar production quality, their expansion into more leagues likely benefits the majority of fans. The consolidation of English broadcasts onto a single channel will likely boost viewership for all leagues and therefore increase sponsorship opportunities for individual regions.

How would you compare the current state of Korean LoL to how it was last year, now that you're a couple weeks into the spring split?

Balance seems great so far, with many more interesting facets of the game unexplored to date. The new jungle remains relatively untapped and itemization options continue to expand.

Hearthstone

Dan "Frodan" Chou is the voice of Hearthstone, with his easy charm and laconic wit heard casting back to back tournaments around the clock. He s also the man with the unenviable job of keeping Reynad s salt at optimal levels, as manager of team Tempo Storm. We asked him about the state of play in the Hearthstone scene.

What was the highpoint of 2014 for Hearthstone?

From the fan side, the biggest part of 2014 had to be the release of Hearthstone and the Naxxramas adventure. It was exciting to see how Blizzard would take their first step into expanding beyond the core set which is key to keeping the player base active. From the competitive side, the high point was the World Championship. It was the first time that I got to see a legitimate crowd of 2000 people showing up for the event, getting hyped, cheering for their favorite player, and going nuts.

How would you describe the health of the Hearthstone scene right now?

Hearthstone is in a great spot. It is baffling to think about what this game can do once it releases on mobile phones and gets consistent content out there. Dozens of other game developers and communities would kill to be in a similar position to where it is now relative to e-sports and Twitch.

If you could ask Blizzard to make one change to the game, what would it be?

Content! It's important to keep the game fresh. I also would like more social aspects of Hearthstone to develop. Clans, chat channels, tournaments, spectator mode. They all have one thing in common—interacting with other players!

In terms of Hearthstone, what do you think was the funniest thing that happened last year?

Funniest moment had to be sharing the couch with Ben Brode. His laugh is a real life version of Patch Adams.

What is the biggest challenge that the competitive Hearthstone scene faces in 2015?

The biggest challenge is spreading the wealth of fandom and storylines. We need more people with different kinds of backgrounds and personalities to cheer for. I believe there are a strong batch of Hearthstone players that are undiscovered, great at the game, and fun to follow.

Who are the players or teams you think will make the biggest impact this year?

If I may be biased for a second, I really do believe Tempo Storm will turn heads this year again. Last year, we hit a few rocky patches, but the team has really taken off as we are starting to turn out incredible high quality content on our website  tempostorm.com for all skill levels (beginner to legend). Archon also has strong potential with Amaz at the helm and I wish them the best of luck.

What sort of deck are you using personally right now, and how is it performing?

My favorite deck to play right now is Fatigue Mage. I love the feeling of desperation when a player has literally run out of options and are completely hopeless. When they hover over their Hero Power and realize they will die faster than they can kill me, my heart skips a beat.

What do you think are the key components of a good Hearthstone stream?

A great Hearthstone stream involves a good mix of personality, information, and interaction. Some streamers have natural charisma. Some are good looking. Some have fun gimmicks like cosplay, showmatches against other streamers, etc. The whole point is that one isn't better than the other, but there are all kinds of streams to enjoy. I personally love watching Reynad for the laughs, Dog for the education, and Trump to calm me down for a nap.

What Twitch chat meme makes you secretly smile?

Too many, but my favorite involve all of the variations of Kripp's excuses. Too good. This guy's interview questions are CRAZY! He needed precisely those 13 questions to ask me. I answer the question perfectly.

Where do you expect the next big innovation in Hearthstone to come from?

It's hard to say. This is primarily what teams are for—to help refine and practice decks in secret. Hearthstone's primary innovations come from unknown players who inspire the well known innovators. Kolento and Firebat for example often have people behind the scenes helping them with their wacky decks. True innovators like StrifeCro and Reynad will definitely keep coming up with their own material.

What s your opinion on BM ing in pro matches? Do we need more?

I don't think we need more of it, but I think it's great to showboat a little. There's a difference, however, in trying to be mean-spirited versus having fun. I think its a fun element where it sets up natural storylines: see Savjz vs Realz in ESGN fight night!! :D

Do you think Goblins vs Gnomes has had the desired effect in terms of increasing deck diversity at tournaments?

Absolutely. Contrary to popular belief, Hearthstone has an incredible amount of diversity at the moment. There are so many ways to play classes that its hard to keep track of them. You have to be highly advanced in order to tell from one or two cards and even then, you can still make mistakes. People who moan about the unpredictability are often the people who care the most about winning and not having fun. They will have their time in the sun once the metagame is figured out.

Which card deserves to be nerfed most: Dr. Boom, Mech Warper, or Wisp?

I don't want them to nerf Wisp or my budget Dr. Boom will be useless on EU!

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2 and related games. Art this week is Clash of Heroes by Kunkka.

I started playing Dota 2 because somebody needed to. It was that simple, at first: here was a new and popular game in an ascendant genre, and nobody in the PC Gamer office played it. We looked for writers online but found nobody suitable. The problem wasn't just confined to our walls. Many of my colleagues in the UK reported something similar, and the solution we found was to collectively set about fixing this gap in our knowledge. I stuck with the game long past the point where I knew enough to cover it for the magazine and website—this column is the product of that prolonged engagement.

The origin of my hobby was a desire to learn what a 'Dota' was and why people liked it. I more or less did so, and I've developed that understanding over time since then. Sometimes in fairly convoluted directions, as regular readers of this column will know. Lately I've realised that my understanding of the genre is entirely coloured by having learned Dota 2 first. Now that I'm experimenting with other games, I've come to the conclusion that Dota 2's particular business model is fundamental to my experience with the game, and to many of the conclusions I've reached about it since. So fundamental, in fact, that I've come to think of Dota 2 as occupying a subgenre by itself.

Recently I've been playing Smite, which I wrote about last week, and Heroes of the Storm. I've had access to HotS since the earliest days of the technical alpha, and played it intermittently at every stage of its development to date. I like it but don't love it: I appreciate its value to people looking for a light and accessible way into the genre, but having been swimming in the deep end for so long I don't see myself investing a considerable amount of time into it.

In its closed beta incarnation, however, I've become more aware of how alien I find the game's business model. As Blizzard refine the account-wide unlock systems and progression mechanics that surround the core game, I'm more conscious of the levels I don't have, the modes I don't have access to, the characters I need to grind for or buy; the amount of content that I can't quite get at. In a way, I'm surprised at how surprised I am. I understand, on paper, that all of this is a staple of the genre, and that the expectations of many players have been set by League of Legends—for whom all of this is fine. I never played League, however. I started with Dota 2. And I find this way of structuring the game deeply offputting.

When I finally understood what Dota was, I understood it in terms of steady personal growth along two skill axes: personal skill and, relevant to this article, knowledge. The game was a vast open resource, a complicated web of characters, skills, items and contradictions, something I traced a different course through every time I played. Understanding every character seemed paramount, so I played every character. I picked a path through the roster based on gaps in my knowledge, rather than personal preference or success rate. This is how I ended up as such a generalist player, with no particular role or hero that I'd say I was very good at. In some ways, I wish I had focused more closely on something specific. In others ways, it has helped—particularly when it comes to drafting.

Nonetheless, my experience of the genre was fundamentally grounded in the notion that it was a library that I had free access to. A mountain to climb, but with full freedom of movement. It's only now, playing Heroes of the Storm, that I realise how important that feeling was to my continued investment.

In Heroes, characters are unlocked with in-game gold or real cash. They cost different amounts and new characters tend to cost more. You can complete daily quests to earn extra gold, but you're still looking at a substantial grind to unlock everything. Beyond that, each character must be leveled up through play to gain access to the full range of passive traits—Heroes' equivalent to Dota 2's items.

Imagine if Valve adopted the same model for Dota 2. Let's say that the full hero pool was still technically free, but you needed to unlock new characters with in-game experience. Let's say that after you unlocked Juggernaut, you were restricted to a 'newbie-friendly' set of items—Phase Boots, Vladimir's Offering, Desolator. After three games you unlock the right to build Power Treads, Aghanim's Scepter, and Mjollnir. This would likely make for a more manageable experience for new players. It would, however, turn Dota 2 into a different type of game.

Not a worse game, necessarily! This is not a qualitative judgement, but a question of design. Bumping into Heroes' paywall—seeing a hero I don't understand, wanting to test it against other players and being unable to do so—has made me starkly aware of how philosophically different these games can be from one another. Heroes of the Storm sets out to be entertainment, and it is entertaining in a way that an MMO is entertaining. You level up and get new stuff. You always have something tangible to work towards. You are encouraged to invest deep in a single character, a favourite, and worry about the others only if it suits you.

This is anathema to how Dota 2 is best learned. In the Dota 2 community, serious novices set off on the A-Z challenge and decry pub players who lock Pudge every game. Breadth is valued, graft is valued, because the game is work. And it's not work that returns an easy reward, either—getting better at the game is noted by an incremental bump to your winrate, not with a whole new character to play.

It was utterly vital to me, in these circumstances, that Smite offered a 'pay once' option—a generous way to circumvent its god-purchasing system with a single 30 purchase that unlocked everything, forever. If Hi-Rez didn't provide that option, I don't think I'd be playing the game. Because it has this option, Smite occupies a weird position between both sub-genres. When you download it, it's a game in the League of Legends tradition. If you buy the Ultimate God Pack, it becomes Dota 2.

I've long argued that comparing these games is unhelpful. What I'm considering, now, is whether it'd be more useful to think of Dota 2 and League of Legends as occupying different conceptual spaces entirely. That argument would go: Dota 2 is characterised by an overwhelming plurality of things to learn. League is defined by a process of personalisation and selection, both in terms of character choice and in terms of MMO-style progression through the summoner system. These two divergent threads only recombine at the very highest level of play. For everybody else, these may as well be different genres. Neither is better, necessarily, but the division highlights the deep influence that business models have on the types of games we receive.

I've always been uncomfortable with 'MOBA', as a descriptor. It's clumsy, non-specific. It never felt right for Dota 2, whose proposition has always been slightly different to that of its relations—at least for me. I wonder if this is how we redefine our terms, then: Dota 2 simply isn't a MOBA. In a MOBA, you level up your account and unlock new characters for gold or cash; you pick your favourites and participate in an ecosystem of who-owns-what. Dota 2 is, well, Dota. It's propelled by different business interests—driving investment in Steam—and offers a different experience. It's the messy open source equivalent to League's proprietary software. It's Unix to League's MacOS. You could start comparing those things, if you want, but approximately fifty percent of the internet would rise up in arms against you.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2. And Smite. It's about Smite now too, apparently. The amazing fan art above is by Reddit user Pitran.

I've played Dota 2 almost exclusively since July 2012. For a long time it was the only game of its type that I played, and I've spent an order of magnitude more time with it than any other game of, well, any other type. I wouldn't be surprised if the time I've spent learning to wizard exceeds the time I've invested in games generally over the last two years. I held, for a long time, that you couldn't play more than one of these games seriously. I still believe that. Over the last few weeks, however, I've made a concerted effort to learn another—Smite. It's taught me a few things about the genre as a whole, and made me question a few further things that I held to be true about Dota 2.

Here's one new idea: surrender mechanics directly benefit support players. Back in July of last year, I wrote this article about why Dota 2 doesn't, shouldn't give its players a surrender button. I haven't entirely changed my mind about that. I still believe that the 'white flag' option makes these games less interesting overall. The Dota 2 experiences you remember are the late-game upsets, the incredible comebacks. Surrendering truncates the game, closes off possibilities, places hard limits on all of that fascinating complexity. In the abstract, I maintain that if a player is in a position where they must surrender then something has gone wrong with the game's provision of comeback mechanics. What I now realise, however, is that the decision to surrender is, in and of itself, a phenomena worth examining. The possibility of surrender creates new dynamics that alter the way you perceive the story of a match.

Dota 2's lack of a surrender option means that regular matchmaking games always end when one team destroys the other team's base. They can end no other way. It takes carries with good items and smart play by core heroes to do this, and the run of patches following last year's International have attempted to do away with ten-minute death pushes by giving defenders more options. Not only do games run longer, but the most important characters, in the end, are almost always the ones at the top of the farm priority pyramid. Earthshaker might start the ball rolling, but Faceless Void gets to kick it into the goal.

The same is true of Smite, to an extent. The role of the support, in both games, is to control the first half of the match so that it is your carries, not the other guy's, who ultimately succeed. This is where the 'Soccer Mom Crystal Maiden' meme comes from, and why support players are generally so rare—the role requires you to give up a substantial portion of your claim to glory. I've been playing support exclusively since I started to learn Smite because almost nobody volunteers to do it. As in Dota, everybody wants to play a solo roaming hero or carry. They want to make the big, game-ending plays—not the subtle supportive ones.

Teams can surrender in Smite, however, and this alters the prospects of what a support player can achieve. The goal stops being 'how do I ensure we have the best possible lategame' and becomes, in part, 'how do I break their spirits to the extent that there is no lategame'.

I'll give you an example. I've been playing a lot of Ares, a durable support who lacks burst damage but whose ultimate ability can completely turn a teamfight. The spell is called No Escape. Chains fly from Ares towards enemy players in a radius as he leaps into the air. After a few seconds he crashes down, dragging every player chained towards a central point and stunning them. Dota fans: imagine the lovechild of Magnus' Reverse Polarity and Disruptor's Glimpse. New Smite players tend not to buy the crowd control-breaking items that would get them out of dodge, so in these low-level brackets No Escape can act as a game-ending psychological weapon.

Case in point: my last game. The scoreboard is relatively even twelve minutes in. Both teams are almost entirely comprised of junglers and high-damage solo mages. As support Ares, I'm the exception. One of our guys disconnected at the beginning of the game and didn't come back for a few minutes, ceding an early gold and experience lead to the other team that we're only just clawing back. They've grouped up to push down middle lane. I tap two key combinations into the Tribes-style audio command system.

[VD2] Defend middle lane!

[VVVR] Ultimate is ready!

I approach the clustered enemy team from behind, from the jungle. The third-person perspective makes shooter-style sneak attacks a possibility. My blink is on cooldown, but I'm among the enemy team before they have time to do much about it. No Escape connects with all five. During the leap I draw them forwards, closer to our tower. They're dragged into a Chronos nuke; into that impassable ring thing that Odin does; into Loki, who presses a bunch of buttons I guess. (I'm still learning the gods.) Full teamwipe, a five-to-zero victory. They surrender immediately afterwards.

I wasn't the character who picked up the multi-kill, but I, the support, was the character who ended the game. I'd dealt the killing blow to morale in a way that I couldn't aspire to do to the enemy's base.

While I still don't think that a surrender mechanic is ultimately right for Dota, its presence in Smite has demonstrated the role it can play in redistributing power among the team. It allows for demonstrable displays of authority among 'subordinate' player roles, and creates scenarios where victory emerges from something other than a mounting lead in farm or experience. These kinds of psychological early wins play a huge role in Dota 2, of course, but I think the greater emphasis on the power of late-game carries makes them less visible to players who aren't specifically looking for them.

'Momentum' is a word that comes up a lot while discussing the way that teams win games of Dota, and I've written before about the way that this can be thought of both in terms of game mechanics and team psychology. Wins tend to beget more wins, because you've gained a material and emotional advantage. 'Snowballing'. Recently, I've been thinking about this slightly differently. I think there comes a point in the game where your team is in a position to decisively flip the 'victory switch', to turn an advantage into a done thing. This means more than just following the trajectory your momentum has laid out for you—it means identifying an exact methodology for ending the game and then pulling it off. It means closing off uncertainty and confirming victory; if a team's surrender represents a collective willingness to lose, then flipping the victory switch means collectively voting to win.

In that Ares game, the 'switch' could be defined as the moment we planned and achieved a one-sided teamfight victory. In a game where the majority of players on both teams had found themselves taking inconclusive trades in the jungle, a single convincing five-on-five was needed to establish dominance. In a sense, our opponents were right to surrender when they did: that fight in mid demonstrated superior capability stemming from a better-rounded draft, and it is reasonable to assume that we'd be able to repeat that success throughout the game and ultimately win. It was the beginning of the end and therefore, in some ways, the end itself.

Teams throw away their leads when they fail to make their advantage appear insurmountable. In Smite, the version of this I've seen most often is the single-lane death push. The key objective in the game is a Titan which, unlike the Ancient, can fight back against an attacking team. It loses power with every lane of buildings that you eliminate, but players on a roll typically attempt to punch through a single lane and win the game the most direct way they can see. This is often a really good sign if it happens to you, because it demonstrates that your opponent is willing to take risks—they are keeping the possibility space of the match open even as they attempt to end it, giving you options rather than decisively flipping the switch that takes your options away.

In a Smite match like that, that 'switch' might constitute the destruction of a second lane of towers, another Phoenix, or the Fire Giant. In Dota 2 it might be a faked-out split push that baits enough teleports to open up Roshan, followed by a jungle invasion that catches the smoke gank designed to counter the push your opponent believes is coming. These strategies are rarely seen in mid-level pub matches because they require teams to stop, assess what it would take to undo their own advantage, and then act decisively to reduce the chance of that happening to near-zero. It requires a desire to end, not just finish fast.

Learning to play a game with a surrender option has helped me to get better at identifying these moments, because it gives you unique insight into the mind of the enemy team. A surrender call tells you the exact point at which you have successfully drained hope from the equation: where even they agree that the victory switch has been flipped, and flipped by you. Over the course of a couple of weeks you learn the various shapes that moment can take.

That it sometimes takes the form of a play by the guy who buys all of the wards is a bonus, all things considered.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2.

Way back when, I wrote something about how it wasn't very useful to think about Dota 2 as a single game. My argument was that players approach the game in such diverse ways that many are no longer adhering to the same rules as one another. This is the source of the game's most vicious arguments in solo pub play—between the two people who both want to go mid; between the carry that wants to play for the late game and his team who'd rather win; between the armchair generals and those who are playing—shock!—for fun.

I've retreated from solo ranked over the last six months. I simply don't enjoy it. 'Real' Dota 2, for me, takes place with a full team of five people and probably involves a drafting phase. That's not to say that there isn't tremendous skill involved in raising your solo MMR, but it's not a skill I'm particularly interested in. Nowadays, my focus has shifted to teamplay, macro-level strategy, and putting together a hero composition that works.

Somewhere along the way, I've learned a couple of valuable lessons about Captain's Mode—particularly if, like me, you and your friends occupy the middle part of the skill ladder. Needless to say, people at the top don't stand to learn much from a man who can't stop blinking into Disruptor ults. For everybody else, I hope you find this useful.

Meta isn't better

There's a corollary between playing Captain's Mode and aspiring to be a pro—it is, after all, the mode that most closely resembles professional play. It's tempting, in this environment, to assume that professional-style picks and bans are always the right picks and bans. That simply isn't the case.

The metagame is a product of, and specific to, the very highest level of play. 'Top tier' doesn't really mean 'powerful', it means 'powerful in the hands of the best players'. If I'm playing against a random stack in team ladder and their first bans are Brewmaster and Razor then I take that as a very good sign: in the majority of cases their captain is thinking about a game they've watched, not the game they're playing. If I see this from a team I actually know it's an even better sign, because targeted bans are always preferable at a level of play where players have limited hero pools.

In the middle of the pack, I'd argue that pace or teamfight-controlling heroes like Silencer, Faceless Void and Tidehunter make for bigger bans than the current top tier. These are heroes that can strongly entrench a lead, and in general mid-level players struggle most when playing from behind. When picking, always go for heroes that you're familiar with over heroes that pro teams are drafting—unless you want to practice them, and you're willing to lose.

Under pressure

This one might actually be applicable to pro players, but only in certain circumstances. Try to be conscious of the amount of pressure that you're under. You may not feel any, in a regular match, or you may be playing in an amateur tournament or in-house and feeling nervous. Be conscious if you are in any way off your game, because players that are not affected in some way by pressure are incredibly rare.

In game terms, nerves act as a straight debuff to everything you attempt to do. If you are a 4K player normally, you have to assume that you're going to be a 3K or 3.5K player under pressure. Draft with that in mind. I love Brewmaster, but there are days when I know my brain just isn't in the right space. In those circumstances, I should play Centaur Warrunner. The same goes for the whole team—if you're in game two of a best of three and you've lost the first game, playing safe with the draft isn't a bad idea. This principle is how my team has ended up two games from the grand final of the Rektreational games industry tournament despite doing awfully in the first game of almost every match: we think too hard about the first game, and then we pick lots of big circular spells in the second and third.

2 EZ

Credit to Blitz for this one: when assessing an enemy draft, or your own, don't just look for synergies and obvious combos. Look at how easy it is for your opponent to achieve what they want to achieve. If you see a Magnus, Sand King and Gyrocopter, you can see the kind of teamfight they want to have. But as dangerous as that seems, it relies on a number of things going their way. That Magnus needs to be able to land his ult. Their team needs the presence of mind for everybody else to be in position—and so on.

On the other hand, a team with a lot of reliable stuns has far more room to move because it means less if any one member of the team makes a mistake. Answer ambitious drafts by making the game easy for yourself with disables and AoE and you'll win matches that, on paper, you should lose. It's for this reason that I secretly love Wraith King as an early pick: you can cycle him through a couple of roles if needed, he has a reliable stun, he answers wombo combos relatively well and—most importantly—he seems to bait out complicated powerplays from the opposing captain. It's after you draft WK that you see people draw Wex Invokers or Diffusal Blade carries, and unless you're playing teams who are particularly individually skilled at those roles they've probably just backed themselves into a corner. Then you beat them up in that corner.

The unifying theme, here, is staying humble. Know what skill bracket you belong in, why you're there, and what you can practically hope to achieve in the match ahead. Bear in mind that you won't always be able to make the big plays that you want to and that, when it comes down to it, you're probably better off picking another character with a ranged stun than going for whatever it was that Team Secret ran last week.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.