Much exciting Dota 2 [official site] occurred during the night, and now not only do we have our last eight teams left fighting at The International 2016, but we know two of the guaranteed top three finishers.
SPOILERS AND HEART-STOPPING COMEBACKS AHEAD!
All right folks, you know the drill. The forums of Dota 2 s official website have been hacked, compromising details from almost 2 million user accounts, including usernames, emails and passwords. A database of 1,923,972 records has been exposed, according to Leaked Source, a search engine that lets internet users see if their details have been leaked. So get those keyboards ready, it’s time for a password change!
Dota 2 s International 2016 is almost halfway done, and good grief, what a digital sportstorm it s been so far. Champions have been slain, underdogs have dominated, and panels have turned into hand puppets for completely unstated reasons. Here s everything you need to know (besides a puppet explanation) ahead of today’s upper bracket semi-finals.
Obviously HERE BE SPOILERS:
For The International 2016 I watched a game of Dota 2 [official site] entirely from the Roshan pit in virtual reality.
Dota 2’s VR hub is all about offering viewers new ways in which to spectate matches, new ways to present information, and new vantage points from which to observe professional players’ comings and goings. You can sit in a darkened area watching a massive VR screen if you want, but you can also teleport yourself into the actual map and shrink yourself to life-size proportions as you follow pro-players about.
Well, I wanted to see what it was like to be Roshan, or at least Roshan’s lodger never moving outside the pit that the huge monster inhabits on the map and entirely dependent on distant sounds to make sense of what’s actually going on. Oh, and also seeing what a team attempting to fight Roshan looks like close-up, when suddenly a violent house-party of spells and punching breaks out and Roshan has to uh go away for a while to recover.
Here’s what happened:
You might have noticed all your friends’ avatars and profile pictures turning into comic book drawings or impressionistic paintings over the last few weeks. That’s because of Prisma, a photo editing app for iOS and Android that let’s you apply a couple of dozen filters to images you feed it. The app goes further than simply messing with the hue like Instagram does, using a process similar to Google Deep Dream to warp and twist photographs – without shoving fucked up dogs in every corner.
I spent last night feeding it game screenshots, to find out what No Man’s Sky, Half-Life 2, SimCity and more would look like if their artists abandoned realism.
Every Monday, Brendan heads to the frontlines of early access and writes about his heroic battles there. This week, he repeatedly fires upon his own team in multiplayer shooter Day of Infamy.>
In an age of Overwatches and hyper-CoDs it s easy to forget that every first-person shooter was once set inside a single trench of World War II. Returning to this battlefield might seem like a terrible idea to some who ve served their time in the hellish artillery bombardments of yesteryear. But I never played Day of Defeat, the Half-Life mod upon which this new WWII outing is based. So fumbling with grenades in the mud and snow of the Western front is something I was happy to do. I even tried my hand at commanding the other men. Which obviously resulted in everyone being disintegrated into thousands of tiny pieces.
I write a lot about esports/professional gaming and, as such, I’ve witnessed a lot of discussion of the years of various tournament formats – their strengths, weaknesses and, obv, what the company should be doing instead according to that particular commenter at that particular moment in time.
So I thought I’d ask you, as people who might watch professional gaming or play in your own tournaments: Which tournament formats do you prefer and why?
The International 2016 is here! Valve s own Dota 2 [official site] uber-tournament is underway in Seattle, with sixteen teams wizard-fighting for a share of the frankly ludicrous $19,860,000 (and rising) prize pool.
Even ignoring the cash this is very much “the big one” where competitive Dota 2 is concerned victory at TI6 will earn the kind of prestige that even the previous Frankfurt, Shanghai and Manila Majors can t confer.
The group stages have already concluded, and on Monday 8th August the proceedings move to the main stage at long-time TI hosting grounds Key Arena, concluding with the grand finals on Saturday 13th August. Since the group stages only determine which teams are assigned to the double-elimination format s upper and lower brackets, all sixteen teams are still in with a shot here s who they are, and who to keep an eye on!
I’m no expert when it comes to firing accurately in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but I’ve been playing with the series’ AK-47s and M4A4s for long enough that it feels like my fingers know their fire rates and kickbacks instinctively. I could now test that theory by seeing whether I can tell the difference after a recent update changed accuracy recovery rates for those two weapons plus the M4A1-S.
With Valve cracking down on sites which use Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 cosmetic skins and items for gambling, two major sites have announced they plan to continue by going legit. Ish. CSGOLounge and Dota2Lounge say they’ve decided to get a license to run esports betting legally, though they’re still insistent that they don’t need one. As ever, is an issue of whether gambling with skins as currency properly counts. The sites are also blocking bets from countries which don’t allow betting on esports, which include the USA and our own green and pleasant land.