Anyone who plays online multiplayer games is familiar with players using anonymity to misbehave: abusive, whining, foul-mouthed trolls sucking the joy out of every game, free of repercussions. Some games issue bans, some games implement a mute button, but few games ever seem to solve the issue.

Valve's Dota 2 team, though, is trying something a little different. In a detailed blog post, the team lays out the hows and whys of their new communication ban system, which makes players with established "patterns of behavior over time" unable to communicate via in-game text or chat.

The team focused on this problem after analyzing some data on why players quit the game. They found that most players who quit are not, in fact, simply sore losers.

"he outcome of matches doesn’t correlate at all to the likelihood of quitting... But one thing that did stand out in the data was the amount of negative communication between players. Put simply, you are more likely to quit if there is abusive chat going on in your games."

The results?

"Since the ban system has been implemented, there’s been a 35% drop in negative communication interactions.
Less than the 1% of the active player base (players who have played Dota 2 in the last month) are currently banned.
60% of players who receive bans go on to modify their behavior and don’t receive further bans.
Total reports are down more than 30%, even after accounting for the reduction in the number permitted per week."

Pretty stellar results so far, and it's still early. The core concept is as fascinating as it is common sense: banning players reduces the player base, and a smaller player base hurts the overall game community. By permanently muting abusive players, the game base continues to grow and players who cross the line have a chance to continue playing and, hopefully, reform their ways.

Image via Joystiq.com.

Photo by Stephen Brashear/Invision for XBOX/AP Images

Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal this morning didn’t present any immediate or obvious implications for Our Dear Hobby. Conspicuously few games were shown during the debut of a new video game console, and no games were demonstrated live. Microsoft mostly spoke about the new utilities (Skype!), partnerships (NFL!), and living room takeover (Kinect!) we’ll expect from the Xbox One when it releases this year. From a technical perspective, 8 GB of RAM is the only concrete hardware spec Microsoft dropped.

Our response around the office to the presentation was an uncynical but collective shrug. The modest amount of information Microsoft let out gives us little to react to as PC gamers, as Microsoft spent so little of the precious hour that it held the attention of the internet showing us what kinds of gaming experiences we could expect to have on its new system. Those will be revealed next month at what should be a memorable E3.

Still, we’re interested in thinking about how Microsoft’s decisions could have a direct or indirect impact on PC gaming, something that has happened before. Microsoft used the talents of Age of Empires creator Ensemble Studios to produce a console-exclusive RTS (Halo Wars) and a cancelled Halo MMO. The MechWarrior license lingered in limbo until recently, in our opinion, because Microsoft wasn't sure if it could make a profitable mech game on Xbox. Microsoft’s attempt at extending Xbox to the Windows platform birthed the disastrous Games For Windows LIVE, a service so frustrating that it was newsworthy when developers told us they weren't using it.

Based on what we know and a little bit of crystal ball-gazing, here’s three possible ways PC gaming could be affected by the release of the Xbox One.

Exclusive games
 


Microsoft announced that the Xbox One will get 15 exclusive games in its first year, including eight new franchises. One of those exclusives may be a new Remedy game, Quantum Break, which appears to cross-over with a live-action show.

There’s hope, however, that some of these exclusives will sneak onto PC. Over the past console generation, marketers have made the term “exclusive” synonymous with “timed exclusive,” acknowledging the distinction only at the last possible moment. Remedy's Alan Wake, for instance, was eventually ported to PC.

A majority of Xbox 360 games announced as exclusives, however, remain firmly stuck on the platform. We’ve never seen a Forza game or a Gears of War after the first, and Microsoft Game Studios seems to have given up entirely on Halo ports.

The good news is that many of the Xbox 360 exclusives were Kinect titles best suited for the living room anyway, and others, such as Rare’s Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, weren’t games we ever expected to be developed for PC in the first place. Let’s hope it stays that way.

The best-known developers owned by Microsoft are 343 Industries (Halo), Turn 10 (Forza), Lionhead (Fable), and Rare (Banjo-Kazooie). Expect exclusives from them—we already know a new Forza is coming—and a few from its third-party developers, such as Crackdown creators Ruffian Games. Ideally, the games we expect to be multiplatform, such as the first game from Respawn, will stay that way. We'll have a much better picture come E3 next month.

Growth of streaming, new Steam features
 


A casual survey of the web pretty clearly pegs PC gamers as the leading producers of gameplay videos and livestreams, but console gamers may soon catch up. Both Sony and Microsoft now promise that their new consoles will make it easy to capture and share gameplay video, a task which formerly required capture hardware. If streaming is a part of that plan, it could be good news for services like Twitch.tv, which we'd expect to be flooded with new members as the console crowd joins the show.

If that happens, we can also assume that more players will start watching streams, possibly growing eSports awareness and viewership and acting as a catalyst for overall improvements to streaming. That's our loose, foggy prediction, but we do expect some concrete effects—Steam will likely start responding to the features of the Xbox One and PS4, especially with Steam box on its way to directly compete for living rooms. At the very least, integrated video capture and sharing seem very likely. At the most, Steam becomes the same kind of media center Microsoft showed off today, offering much more than games.

Valve has already dabbled in film by offering Indie Game: The Movie for sale on Steam, and recently added non-game software to its catalog. Its most recent major updates have been about expanding community features and giving us more to do in Steam, both in and out of our games. What's next? Our gut feeling is that it'll be significant.

More free-to-play PC games, and they won’t be MOBAs
 


Microsoft didn’t drop the phrase “free-to-play” once during its reveal of Xbox One, but we’d be baffled if free-to-play games don't become a prominent new category on the system. And we’d be more surprised if some of those hypothetical, F2P Xbox One games didn't make their way to PC.

We expect the success of free-to-play as a business model on PC and mobile (in 2011, free-to-play earned more revenue than paid games in the App Store) to create a gold rush within the industry. Plenty of developers have to be eager to become the Riot Games of the console world, to gain a foothold through early adoption rather than reacting to the potential success of the business model on Xbox One.

On the safe assumption that mouse and keyboard won’t be native to the Xbox One, the free-to-play games that propagate on Microsoft’s system will probably be multiplayer action games and low-budget, indie experiments that can be played with a controller: shooters, platformers, puzzle games, action-RPGs, and MMOs. Most of those are portable to PC. Microsoft has already dabbled with F2P a bit with Ascend: New Gods, an unreleased action-RPG, as well as with advertising-supported free games. Our pals at OXM speculated that a free-to-play Fable MMO could be in the works.

This feels like an incredibly safe prediction to us. One or more free-to-play games being part of the Xbox One launch lineup would be a feather in Microsoft’s cap—it’d be a way for early adopters to justify their (probably fairly) expensive purchase, and a novelty to console owners who’ve never played something like League of Legends or PlanetSide 2.

On Saturday more people were playing Dota 2 at the same time than there are residents of St. Louis.

Valve's multiplayer phenomenon surpassed its previous record for concurrent players on Saturday, reaching 329,977 simultaneous users. The stars may have simply aligned to produce an usual amount of free time for PC gamers, but it's more likely that there were piles of people logging into Dota 2 to watch the West Qualifier for The International 3 through the client itself.

Whether or not this makes Dota 2 the most-played game on PC remains unclear. An April report measured from a variety of unnamed sources (but including ancient utilities like Xfire) put Dota 2 above League of Legends. Riot Games claimed in response that a single server shard for LoL exceeded 500,000 simultaneous players at its daily peak. Both sets of data are unverifiable and incomplete, but our gut tells us that League of Legends' longer history (two years more than Dota 2) would give it a higher population worldwide.

Dota 2's weekend spike in concurrent players—which we always encourage you to think of as an indicator of a game's population rather than an exact representation—also comes on the heels of the Interactive Compendium.

If you don't have beta participation turned on in your Steam settings, go do that so you can start collecting trading cards, earning XP, and leveling up. Yup, Steam just got gamified.

The games participating in the Trading Cards beta are Don't Starve, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2, and Half-Life 2, and "up to half the card set" for each can be earned by playing them. The other half of each set is "earned through your collecting prowess," which presumably means trading with Steam users who got different drops.

Once you collect a complete set, you'll be able to craft a game badge which will appear on your profile and unlock "marketable items like emoticons, profile backgrounds, and coupons." Badges can be leveled up by collecting the required trading cards again, and all badges—including any you already have—now give you XP which contributes to your "Steam Level." Leveling up has its own benefits, awarding you "non-tradable items like profile showcases, extra friends list slots, and more."

Now that playing games on Steam is a game, are you bothered that someone out there is already beating you? If so, the PC Gamer Steam group may be a good place to start looking for trades.

Join the Steam Trading Cards group on Steam to score a beta invite so you can start collecting trading cards, earning XP, and leveling up—yup, Steam just got gamified.

The games participating in the Trading Cards beta are Don't Starve, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2, and Half-Life 2, and up to half of the new virtual trading cards for each can be earned by playing them. The other half of each set is earned "through your collecting prowess," which presumably means trading with Steam users who got different drops.

Once you collect a complete set, you'll be able to craft a game badge which will appear on your profile and unlock "marketable items like emoticons, profile backgrounds, and coupons." Badges can be leveled up by collecting the required trading cards again, and all badges—including any you already have—now give you XP which contributes to your "Steam Level." Leveling up has its own benefits, awarding you "non-tradable items like profile showcases, extra friends list slots, and more."

Now that playing games on Steam is a game, are you bothered that someone out there is already beating you? If so, the PC Gamer Steam group may be a good place to start looking for trades.

After the Dota 2 community blasted through the second stretch goal for the International's prize-pot-boosting Interactive Compendium, Valve have gone back to the bonus board to remap their targets. New stretch goals have added to the virtual document, filling in the previously colossal gap between Smeevil's mount at $1.85 mil, and the new Immortal item at $2.6 million.

The Compendium acts as the ultimate record, companion, guide and boasting tool for the International tournament, allowing you to predict outcomes, and gain items, while filling in and expanding as the competition progresses. It also feeds back into the tournament - with $2.50 from every sale being added to the International's original $1.6 million prize fund.

With the prize pot now at nearly $1.96 million, here are the remaining stretch goals, with the newly created bonuses in bold:


$2,000,000 – A custom HUD skin for all Compendium owners
$2,200,000 – A Taunt item with a brand new animation for all Compendium owners
$2,400,000 – Vote on participants in an 8 player Solo Championship (1 vs 1) at The International
$2,600,000 - An Immortal item for all Compendium owners
$3,200,000 – Choose the next hero released


A more evenly distributed list then, but one that comes with an even larger final goal: a vote on the "next" hero to be added. Of course, here the goal's timing comes in to play. If the vote isn't held until the International kicks off, there's a strong chance that Abaddon and Legion Commander will already have found their way into the game - the vote instead deciding the next release from the remaining seven heroes.

As for the tournament, the West Qualifiers are set to continue today from 1pm BST, with the start of the Group B stage. You can watch the tournament live from the GDStudio qualifier page.

Valve's clever Dota 2 Interactive Compendium has found its way onto enough Steam accounts to unlock the second stretch goal for owners of the virtual eSports sticker book. Sales of the item have raised the prize pool for this year's International tour to over $1.9 million, up $300,000 from the original pre-Compendium total. In celebration, International courier Smeevil is getting an upgrade - a selection of mounts to save his poor, wearied feet as he ferries your items across the lanes.

"Our original plan was for the International 2013 Courier to be able to ride a small set of mounts," Valve write, "and now the art team knows the community demands more." They've released some concept art, hinting at Smeevil's prospective conquests:



Previously, owners of the Compendium were granted a 125% Battle Booster for completing the first stretch goal: a prize pool of $1.7 million. While they had originally planned for one more target - a new Immortal item to be awarded should the pot hit a lofty $2.6 million - they've now decided to add some more steps along the way. "Given how much faster the community is reaching the stretch goals we set up, we’ve decided to add some more, based on the many conversations we’ve seen the community having around the compendium. In particular, the big gap between the 2nd and 3rd is something we’re addressing."

The Compendium acts as the International's ultimate interactive companion, giving fans the chance to bet on every aspect of the tournament, and filling in match details as they happen. Find out more here.

I think I prefer my books dead, on the whole - I'd rather not be chastised for my reading speed, or have to make small talk with a tome while I'm busy scanning its innards - but if Valve are backing them, I expect every book will be 'alive' by the end of the year. Ah - I have, of course, made a rather grievous error. 'Living' in the context of Dota 2's virtual International Interactive Compendium means 'you can click around in it to play games, vote in polls and generally interact with/support the MOBA's upcoming International tournament'. Sounds rather nifty. Sales of The Compendium - which will be added to the Dota Store later today - will also help increase the tourney's $1.6m prize pool, with 25% of all revenue generated by the book being thrown in the already morbidly obese kitty.

If you have a ticket to the international tournament, kindly Uncle Valve are going to give you the Compendium for free. Otherwise you'll have to fork out an unspecified amount - the holy book hasn't materialised in the store yet. Valve had this to say about the endeavour:

"Each year we spend some of the planning time for The International trying to figure out ways to improve the connection between fans and the players in the tournament. We know that the majority of our viewers will be watching the tournament unfold over the internet, so we'd like to make it easier for an online fan to dig deeper into the event, the teams, and the players.

"In addition to wanting more detail, we know fans also love to compete with each other at predicting tournament results. This year we're taking our first shot at addressing all of the these concepts, with an additional step that we hope will result in the tournament itself getting bigger and better as a direct result of fan enthusiasm."

As for The International tournament itself, well that takes place over five days, kicking off in Seattle on the 7th of August. You'll find more info here.

Thanks to Eurogamer.

Graham, Chris and Marsh discuss Starseed Pilgrim, Monaco, and the impact of Dota 2 on our collective humanity. Plus the hot questions of the day: can you make a shooter without combat? What does Marsh dance to in the morning? Is Chris secretly an a**hole?

As I say at the beginning of the recording, there were some hardware problems with my microphone setup that cause intermittent issues later in the episode. The cable in question has been punished.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes,download the MP3 directly, or listen on YouTube. To ask us questions, follow the PC Gamer Twitter account - we'll put the call out prior to recording. You can also follow us as individuals:

Graham - @Gonnas
Chris - @CThursten
Marsh - @marshdavies
Show notes

A commencement speech given by author David Foster Wallce at Kenyon College, Ohio. Somehow we have decided that this is relevent to computer games where you make wizards push lanes.
Gamasutra report on Riot's League of Legends player behaviour experiments.
Cassandra Khaw's Monaco review.
Andy Kelly's Videogame Toilets tumblr.
'The Moon' from the Duck Tales soundtrack, the song that will play at Marsh's funeral.
'Betus Blues' from Super Meat Boy, or what it sounds like inside Chris' head when someone asks a question about MMOs.
Chipzel's Super Hexagon soundtrack and Souleye's VVVVVV score, Graham's preferred lullaby.
Smooth McGroove's acapella rendition of the Street Fighter II Guile Theme, or what it sounds like when PC Gamer UK conquer a deadline.
A forum thread with screenshots of the PCG vs. RPS Planetside 2 scrap, including that time I got my gunship stuck upside down.
To answer MaxUrsa's question about wireless headphones, Dave James scores Corsair's Vengeance 2000 set 88% in the upcoming PCG 253 Tech Supertest.
Alteraction's MASQ, the open-ended adventure soap opera that Graham recommends.
A horse dressed up as a lion: apropos of nothing, I just wanted to reward you for reading all these show notes.

Valve has announced the third annual The International tournament, the most prestigious competition in competitive Dota 2. The competition returns to Seattle's Benaroya Hall August 6-11, where the 16 top Dota 2 teams in the world will compete to be named world champions. A prize pool has not yet been formally announced, but considering both previous iterations of The International posted pots in excess of $1 million, we think it's safe to say that it won't be chump change.

The bracket will consist of 13 invited teams and three who make it through a preliminary qualifier. The only invited team announced so far is last year's champions, Invictus Gaming (iG) of China. There will be two qualifier events: East and West, taking place at the end of May. The winning team from each qualifier will be guaranteed a spot in The International 3. The runners up will compete against each other for a final, Wild Card spot on the eve of The International 3.

If you're looking for some Dota 2 e-sports to watch in the mean time, there are some exciting games going in in the Chinese G-1 Champions League Season 5, featuring both Western and Eastern teams, with a $40,000 top prize.