It’s time to look at what $20 will actually get you in the landscape of “free” to play gaming. What does it actually mean? And what is that crisp, all-too-real twenty actually worth in various imaginary economies? In the first of an ongoing series we sent Cara off to do some shopping in DOTA 2. Just what could she get for twenty bucks?>

Daddy RPS said he’d give me this $20 note to shop with, but what happened was RPS was out of change that day and so RPS patted me on the head and said “Okay off you go, go and buy yourself something nice in a Free To Play and we will reimburse you.” Challenge Accepted. I gathered the Fashion Police, which largely resembled a troupe of models from Zoolander (Tom, Alice, Dan, Philippa and I all have razor sharp cheekbones) and we went shopping with Daddy’s money. Which I hope Daddy actually has or this may be some sort of elaborate prank…

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Update: Riot have poured cold water on DFC’s somewhat dubious report, asserting that they see over 500,000 concurrent LoL players in the US and Europe alone (as opposed to Dota 2′s 300,000 odd globally). Riot tell me that DFC “is in the process of pulling their press release promoting this report.” So LoL very much remains king of MOBA castle, whichever angle you look at it from.

An invite-only sequel to a free Warcraft mod is how the West was won. That’s the claim, anyway, but so long as Valve keeps its internal figures locked up there’s no entirely reliable way of knowing exactly who’s playing what in PC-land. League of Legends has, of late, been hailed the most-played PC game in the the Western World, but the DFC Intelligence PC Game Meter (via GamesIndustry) has used assorted surveys (primarily of Xfire’s apparent 23m users) and magick to determine that Valve’s Dota 2 has now overtaken it. A victory for Valve – except LoL is actually far, far bigger than that. (more…)

Even those who are less knowledgeable about MOBAs than they’d like to be but plan to rectify that as soon as humanly possible (IT’S ME, OK FINE JEEZ IT’S ME OH GOD I’M SUCH A MESS) know this much about DOTA 2: it’s the hard> one. Thus far, League of Legends has paved my road to vague competence with copious pointers, helping hands, and utterly heroic shoves in the right direction, but DOTA’s idea of a red carpet involves my blood. Lots of my blood. So Valve’s decided to change that. Well, a little, at least. The storefront, hardware, and fuuuuuture> creator that occasionally develops games has added an in-game tutorial to its arena battling opus. But this is just the beginning, and it wants your help.

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There are quite a few communities bustling away in the General Sociability forum, and some of those have produced of videos of their antics. I’ve embedded just a few of those below. There are many more, and I am sure others still I haven’t seen.

Are you> doing video stuff with the RPS community? Link your work/play in the comments! (more…)

Valve – little-known Washington-based developers of Richochet and Alien Swarm – have been working on another project for the past couple of years. It’s a remake of an obscure mod called “Defense Of The Ancients”. This unlikely sequel has been a surprise hit, with “computer gamers” from all over the world saying that it’s “quite good” and “maybe I’ll play just a bit more”. This rash streak of acceptance has recently culminated in a championship of some kind, mysteriously dubbed “The International 2012″.

Valve took their camcorders and video-phones along to capture the event – which took place in some kind of space center – as you can see below. (more…)

By my estimate, there are 327 billion videogame Halloween events, but they all tend to share a couple commonalities between them: 1) they do the bulk of their grim work before or on Halloween, and 2) many of them sorta aren’t very interesting. DOTA 2, though, has dumped out its pumpkin pale to reveal an entire new mode, complete with its own mysteeeeeerious> metagame. Meanwhile, it’s keeping the festivities going until… well, nobody’s really sure. That said, the new items expire on November 12th, so draw your own conclusions. For now, though, let us not worry about that. Instead, let’s turn our doting gazes on poor, malnourished ancient terror Roshan. He lurks beneath the break, million-year-old maw glistening with unquenchable candy lust. Awwww. I kind of want to give him a hug.

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Yesterday saw part one of our brief history of the games which followed in the lanes of DOTA. Part two looks at what happened next.> (more…)

After League of Legends and DOTA, Cara brings us her take on S2′s lane-pushing rival Heroes of Newerth.>

“I AM DRUNK,” [I am Jack's complete lack of surprise - Ed]> I announce on our Mumble voicechat server at ten thirty on a Friday night. “Let’s play Heroes of Newerth.”

“Ugh, I haven’t played it in years,” Airhorse grumbles, though he once paid for an account back when it wasn’t free to play. He has been trying to avoid playing it because it will be the world’s longest patch.

“Well I created a new account specially so I could give my character a joke name,” I say. (They make you pay $10 to change your name, erk.) “And FRAPS is running. So let’s go.” (more…)

Quinns has lost himself in Dota 2 as if it were a Minecraft cave system. Surfacing 90 hours later, we asked him what Dota 2 means. This is what he sent us.> (more…)

A Valve film crew spent the lead up to last year’s debut Dota 2 tournament, The International, following some of the participants as they prepared for the biggest e-sports tournament ever. The result: a documentary about how they managed to overcome the odds and make games their livelihood. You know, I think they deliberately chose those with a slightly tough background to make it interesting. It’s like Rocky, but with games. Now we all know the best Rocky is Rocky 3, because it has Mr T and Hulk Hogan. Rocky 3. Thu-ree. And what game are we all really waiting for? That’s right, Half-Life 3. So we can take from this that somewhere in the trailer for the Dota 2 is the reveal of HL3. Get pausing. (more…)