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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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.>

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the Dota 2 community this past week you’ve probably seen the number 322 popping up repeatedly. “But why is everyone so interested in a Crystal Palace bus route?” you probably asked yourself. Alas, it’s not a reference to the transport systems of South London. It’s because of a series of match-fixing incidents which have been uncovered in South East Asia and which involve the teams Arrow Gaming, MSI and Mineski.

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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.>

There’s a sensation I think a lot of people who play multiplayer games with friends will recognise. It’s that moment of realisation that the skill and interest levels of your friendship group have started to diverge.

There were a large number of people who arrived at Dota 2′s doors a couple of years ago in a flurry of excitement. This was back when the game was in beta. Every now and again Steam would joyfully announce you had new items in your inventory and you would rush to check them out. It would always be five new keys for Dota 2. Honestly, that game was basically the digital game distribution platform version of Tribbles.

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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 is something I wrote early this year and posted on my own blog. It was about the way in which depression affected how I played Dota 2. I don’t tend to write about my private life beyond daft anecdotes so it felt a little unsettling but a lot of people got in touch to share their own experiences. I get the impression that it has been a helpful thing to have posted as, generally, depression is not something that’s particularly easy to talk about. With that in mind I’m posting a slightly updated version here so that it can be part of Dote Night and so that, if it is at all helpful for anyone, they can find it easily.

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Whoa. Hey there. Sorry, I’m just coming round following the Saxxy Awards on Wednesday. I don’t even remember Thursday. There I was, seated between Morrissey and Prince, then I have a vague memory of Mozzer whipping out a hip flask that smelt like paint stripper and… nothing. It’s a blank. I don’t even know who won. I awoke in a cemetery this morning.

The Saxxies, of course, are the annual fan-voted awards for short films made in Valve’s Source Filmmaker. They’re short flicks about TF2, Portal 2, and Dota 2, but with the care Valve puts into developing characters and recording odd edge-case lines of dialogue, folks can be jolly creative.

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