An awful-looking game called Climber recently vanished from Steam after several Dota 2 players reported they'd been scammed by Climber users pawning lookalike items.

The scam revolved around a Dota 2 item called the Dragonclaw Hook. The genuine Dragonclaw Hook is an immortal-rarity item for the hero Pudge. It was briefly available in early 2013 and can no longer be obtained outside of the Steam Community Market, where it can fetch upwards of $800. 

However, the Dragonclaw Hook these players were offered was a carefully crafted fake. According to a screenshot posted on Reddit by angelof1991, Climber's counterfeit hook used the same image and description as the genuine article: 

According to a screenshot from mage203, Climber even used Dota 2's logo in the Steam Community Market: 

Climber's Steam Database entry corroborates these screenshots. The game's recent activity shows it was scrubbed from the storefront less than 24 hours after the Dota 2 logo was added to its page, and the fake Dragonclaw Hook is buried in its item definitions. 

A cached version of Climber's Steam page shows it launched in Early Access on May 18, 2018 for $1. Its Steam description calls it "a game in which you need to go as far as possible," and it looks like a Max Dirt Bike-style game made in Microsoft Paint. 

Climber's developer and publisher, respectively KIRILL_KILLER34 and The Team A, have one other game on Steam. It's called Space Vomit, and it looks just as atrocious as Climber. According to its Steam reviews, it's a shoddy $1 game that instantly gets you thousands of Steam achievements. Interestingly, Space Vomit also uses the same Early Access blurb as Climber, with a scant few words changed. Here's a side-by-side comparison: 

Climber and all of its items have vanished from Steam, but at the time of writing, Space Vomit is still available, though it isn't on the Community Market. It's unclear whether the scammers merely skipped town after getting caught or if Valve intervened. Earlier today, Valve removed a game from Steam after its developer, Okalo Union, was accused of creating fake Team Fortress 2 items. However, like KIRILL_KILLER34 and The Team A, Okalo Union's Steam account is still live at the time of writing. 

Notably, this whole mess comes weeks after Valve announced that it will no longer police what's on Steam unless it's illegal or "straight-up trolling." And with no moderation apparently in place to weed out games like Climbers, it is likely that more scams like this will crop up in the foreseeable future, so check your trades carefully.

Earlier this month, pro Dota 2 player Peter “PPD” Dager announced a surprising new venture: he’s forming a Dota league. Dubbed North American Dota Challengers League, the organization shifts the focus away from the upcoming International Dota 2 Championships, if only for a moment. And while third-party leagues already exist in the Dota scene, the NADCL hones in on an aspect that most others don’t.

The NADCL is a semi-professional league for North American players. It’s been created by Dager, his family, and fellow players who aim to showcase up-and-coming unsponsored players and teams. This type of semi-pro league is filling a huge hole in the current Dota landscape. Nothing like it exists in North America, aside from community efforts for amateur players. Why, when creating a path to the pros seems like an important piece of a healthy esports scene? The answer lies in the format of the Dota Pro Circuit.

The Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) is the main, Valve-sponsored professional league for Dota 2. It consists of Major and Minor Championships, each of which are classified by their prize pool size. As of 2017, these pools also define the number of “Pro Circuit points” teams earn for their final tournament placements. Points determine overall team standings throughout the season, with the top 8 teams immediately qualifying for the International.

Points and prize money alike are heavily skewed towards winners. This makes sense—those who win should be rewarded. But this also removes the focus on smaller teams, creating a sort of survivorship bias. Big-name teams have their practice time subsidized by their sponsors. This gives them an edge over smaller, unsponsored teams, who can’t afford to drop their day job and practice Dota. They’ll likely place lower, meaning less prize money and a slimmer shot at the International. Thus, the easiest way to highlight young, new talent is to hold an event that’s not connected to Valve’s circuit. 

That’s exactly why Dager is starting the NADCL. It’s clear he knows the game well: he’s the current captain of OpTic Gaming’s Dota 2 team, and has just qualified for The International himself. He was also the captain for Evil Geniuses when they won the International in 2015, and was later their CEO for about a year. He often pokes fun at the DPC’s current format, so he clearly has thoughts on what a tournament should look like. With the swift announcement of the NADCL and the subsequent Reddit discussion, he’s created his chance to show off that knowledge. 

How the Challengers League will work

Currently, the Challengers League is set to include an open number of qualifying rounds filled with aspiring semi-pro teams. These will be whittled down to eight teams who will compete in a group stage opening round. Afterward, the top four will commence in a best-of-three, single-elimination tourney.

“I’m hoping we will create and sustain a healthy league for Dota players, which will give them opportunities to progress towards a professional Dota career,” Dager says. “The tournament’s planning has just begun, but [when it comes to structure and format] I have spoken to all of the professional North American Dota teams, as well as many aspiring Dota professionals in both the NA and EU regions.”

With the NADCL’s creation, Dager aims to provide the stage and financial stability to let rising players pursue professional Dota careers. The hope is that players can afford to practice more and find potential sponsors, helping them graduate to the pro circuit later on.

It helps that the NADCL’s rewards won’t be as starkly divided between winners as losers as they are in the pros. “The NADCL will have a flatter prize pool structure [than the DPC],” Dager explains. “[The flattened pool] will encourage participation, [while still rewarding] players for winning each and every game to incentivize an ethical competition.”

Some third-party professional Dota tournaments exist separate from the DPC, almost as side event scrimmages with prize pools. It makes sense that if Valve won’t create a semi-professional league, those same third-parties could branch into this territory. In fact, semi-pro organizations like the NADCL have already cropped up in other regional scenes. China currently runs the Dota 2 Professional League, while the EU has endeavors like the ProDota Cup.

“The DPL that runs in China was a huge inspiration for this project,” Dager says. “I saw the success teams were having there and thought, ‘Why is that just not a thing here?’ We will be starting with far less teams, but I think they had a nice format, and will emulate it to some degree.”

How Overwatch and LoL do it

The DPC and its disconnected relationship with third-party leagues may sound foreign to fans of other esports. League of Legends and Overwatch, for example, have semi-pro leagues founded by their developers, and both tie naturally into their respective circuits. League’s main professional venue is the League Championship Series, while its semi-pro circuit is the League of Legends Challenger Series. 

At the start of each season, a tournament is held where the top 3 teams from last season’s Challenger Series face off against bottom 3 teams in the Championship Series. The losers of these matches go to the Challengers Series, no matter how they entered into the tourney. Winners go to the Championship Series bracket. By switching the highest Challenger teams with the lowest Championship teams, this acts as a path for hopeful League players to transition into professional play. Here, success can guarantee advancement.

Meanwhile, Overwatch has Open Divisions—an entry-level professional climate available to all Overwatch players ranked Master or higher in regular competitive play. From there, players can join a team and compete in the semi-professional Overwatch Contenders program.

Contenders don’t switch spots with current teams, like those in League’s Challenger Series. Instead, the program is meant to get players before eyes of established franchises. It’s a way to entice pro teams to pick up rising stars.

Dager's Dota Challengers League takes Overwatch’s approach to up-and-coming talent: put them in front of sponsors, and let them strut their stuff. But Overwatch’s teams are pre-existing, franchised entities based in cities, similar to a traditional sports team. This means that the teams themselves pay to compete in Overwatch’s pro scene, as a sort of closed circuit controlled by Blizzard. Even League of Legends is experimenting with team franchising. Teams in the DPC are owned and sponsored, but they’re not franchised. They don’t pay large sums into a closed circuit to help fund DPC tournaments. 

Searching for sponsorship

Valve sponsors its own matches, using third-party tournament organizers to produce the event. Teams can be either directly invited by the organizer, or they can play qualifying rounds to place into the event. This open atmosphere reaches into The International, whose prize pool is community-funded, while its roster is also determined through invitations and qualifying rounds. In theory, any team can win the International. They don’t need a franchise to pay their way in.

But teams do seek sponsors, in hopes that their practice time will be paid for. With enough experience, they can gain event invites or qualifier wins. “I’m not sure any unsponsored team has ever won a Major or Minor, let alone [the International],” Dager said. “The truth is that being sponsored helps enable them to win. They cannot do it on their own.”

Unless Valve makes some major changes to the DPC, these semi-pro leagues will continue to shine spotlights on teams from afar, letting them practice and find sponsors. The NADCL may not be a first for esports, or even a first for the Dota scene, but it’s a first for aspiring Dota players in North America, and a step towards solidarity across the globe. 

“We are hoping that we can set a benchmark for others to become more involved in their sport to make it successful,” Dager explains. “Dota, on one hand, is completely funded by the generosity of the community, which is very unusual. It delivers the world’s richest esports prize pool. [That] is a unique connection in sports, and the professional scene is the Dota showcase for the rest of the world. I think that needs to continue, and I think we as a community have to step up to the plate. NADCL hopes to be a part of [that future.]”

Stay on the lookout for the North American Dota Challengers League in October, after the first Minor Championship of the DPC 2018-2019 season.

Dota 2 players in the Netherlands will enjoy a little leg up on their counterparts in other nations, thanks to a newly-added ability to see what's inside loot boxes before they purchase them. A Dota 2 Treasury screenshot posted by a redditor named Larhf contains a notation stating, "Treasures in your region show their contents before opening them." 

The change presumably comes in response to the country's crackdown on loot boxes, which recently left Dutch CS:GO players unable to open loot cases at all. But the power to see into the future is not without some downsides. 

Players can no longer buy multiple boxes simultaneously, for one thing, and the loot inside is tied to your account, not the individual box, so selling them (which you can't do anyway, because the market remains disabled), trading them, or resetting your game won't have an impact: What you see inside is what you'll get the next time you open that type of chest, no matter when you do it. And the underlying randomized system hasn't been changed, so your odds of getting a high-rarity item are still not great—meaning that you'll still almost certainly have to spring for multiple boxes to get something you actually want. 

The benefit, as Larhf explained, is that instead of buying a truckload of boxes and busting them open in a frenzied orgy of microtransactional horror, players will (hopefully) only purchase as much as they need to get something cool. That's not going to put the brakes on compulsive box-buyers, because the gambling element is still present: You know what's in the current chest but not what's in the next, and it'll cost you $2 (or whatever) to find out. 

But it is apparently enough to satisfy Dutch gambling regulations. And yes, you could VPN yourself to a different country to take advantage of an unregulated market, but that's against Steam's terms of service, and again, that apparently satisfies the legal requirements. 

Assuming the new system doesn't run into some unforeseen speedbump, it could prove viable for other games as well, particularly CS:GO, which is an obvious candidate for this kind of compromise solution. I've emailed Valve for more information about the change, and will update when it's available. 

Last month, we wrote about how OpenAI's Dota 2 bots are totally on some I, Robot shit as they aim to "beat a team of top professionals" at The International. Back then, the collective known as the OpenAI Five were working to set of tight restrictions. Now, a host of the "most significant" conditions have been removed. And it's getting exciting. 

It's worth noting here that I know next to nothing about Dota 2. I'm now going to unashamedly pass off PCG dep ed/MOBA expert Pip's thoughts and advice on the following as my own.  

So, it appears OpenAI has now reintroduced Roshan—the river-dwelling NPC monster which bisects the map—as fair game. Killing him grants victors significant bonuses, therefore an important part of any match is knowing when your enemy is trying to kill him—or judging when best to attempt it yourself. OpenAI now reckons the OpenAI Five are smart enough to handle these considerations on the fly. 

Likewise, wards have been reinstated. Wards expand players' ground vision—which would have previously given human players a leg-up over their AI counterparts—and are therefore tied to Roshan, as knowing when your enemies are targeting the river baddie is crucial mid-battle.   

"Because our training system Rapid is very general, we were able to teach OpenAI Five many complex skills since June simply by integrating new features and randomizations," explains OpenAI in a blog post. "Many people pointed out that wards and Roshan were particularly important to include—and now we’ve done so. We’ve also increased the hero pool to 18 heroes. Many commenters thought these improvements would take another year. We’ll see how well these new game mechanics work on August 5th."

OpenAI says that while the bots' strength comes more from teamwork and coordination than reflexes, it has managed to up the reaction time of the Five from 80ms to 200ms—a reaction time closer to human level. 

As OpenAI notes above, this next match—the 'OpenAI Five Benchmark match'—takes place on August 5, ahead of the Five's final showdown at The International 2018. 

"The OpenAI Five Benchmark match will be held 12:30pm Pacific Time on August 5th in San Francisco," adds OpenAI. "The human team will include Blitz, Cap, Fogged, and Merlini, some of whom are former professionals." 

NB—Thanks, Pip!

It's a familiar experience: you spend a bunch of money on a dazzling PC, then four years later it's somehow just hovering above minimum specs for that new FPS you've had your eye on. You check your bank account. An upgrade is just about within reach, sort of. You put your holiday plans on hold, because this game can't wait damn it. 

This weekend, we ask: which game made you upgrade your PC? Here are our answers, but more importantly, we'd like to read your comments below. 

Philippa Warr: Dota 2

I put off buying a desktop PC for as long as possible, making use of a bootcamped Macbook to play games including Dota 2. It was a well-documented disaster. I had to run Skype through my phone to use voice chat with friends, which meant I couldn't have sound on from my laptop, so I spent months of Dota not playing with any of the sound cues which are essential. I was also often playing while sitting on a bed, using a Where The Wild Things Are gift box to rest my mouse on. Oh, and the button you use to ping the map in Dota is right next to the button which, on my bootcamped setup, crashed the game. 

When I finally got a desktop PC the first game I installed was Dota 2, and gosh was it an eye-opening experience! I didn't exactly buy the PC to play Dota, it was more that the Dota problems exemplified the limitations of the setup when trying to do anything related to this hobby, and the non-bootcamped side of things was struggling to keep up anyway. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I definitely definitely didn't drop cash on a whole new PC to throw tiny casks at people as a wizard.

Samuel Roberts: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault

As an adult, I've upgraded a rubbish PC to play Alien: Isolation, because playing that at double the framerate of PS4 owners was incredibly important to me back in 2014 just after I joined PC Gamer. As a kid, though, hardware upgrades were infrequent, and basically came when my dad could afford to buy a secondhand PC off of one of his colleagues. After I told him all about trying Medal of Honor at my friend's house and how I'd never played anything that cinematic before, he managed to magic up a PC that could run it (albeit not brilliantly). World War 2 games were made for him.

This kicked off my second era of PC gaming as a kid. I picked up Mafia, Jedi Knight 2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and more, games which all ended up having a pretty profound effect on my tastes to come. The lesson, for any kids reading whose parents are holding out on an upgrade, is to convince them that they're missing out on a game that was made specifically for their interests. 

Wes Fenlon: C&C: Tiberian Sun

The first game I remember being heartbroken I couldn't play was Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. Our home PC had a 133 MHz Pentium; the game needed a 166 MHz. Eventually I got my very own PC, a much slower hand-me-down 486 that I'd use to play LucasArts adventure games and the like. 

Fast forward to 2006 and I had an HP laptop in college, with an ATI GPU inside. The hardware wasn't upgradeable, but I remember having issues with outputting a video signal to my brand new, hot shit LCD TV, and I wanted the best possible performance, so I turned to some old voodoo: Omega drivers. Back then, there were actually custom graphics card drivers that promised to improve performance and give you more features. I vaguely remember them being a complete pain in the ass, and they probably never made my games run better. But the Omega drivers did support more resolutions and helped me output a signal to my TV, so at the end of the day it was a win. And I felt elite. 

Jarred Walton: Wing Commander

I see how it is: let's trot out questions just to make Jarred feel incredibly old! Well, let me tell you about my first PC.

It was a 286 12MHz with 2MB RAM, 40MB hard drive, both 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppy drives, with an Adlib sound card and some generic VGA adapter. I saved up money all summer during 1990 to buy this PC, as before this I was switching between using my dad's PC when I was at his house, and playing games on an incredibly slow Commodore 128 at my mom's place. I knew the C-64/C-128 scene was dying, and I wanted to get a proper PC when I took the plunge. I had also learned all sorts of arcane rituals necessary to free up as much of the base 640K memory as possible (config.sys and autoexec.bat hacking were skills I acquired in my gaming pursuit). $2,200 later, I was the owner of this awesome PC, which was already quite outdated when I bought it, but I simply couldn't afford a 386. (Those were the Core i9 of the day, at something like $800 just for the chip.)

Everything went great for a couple of months, and then Wing Commander launched. The back of the box proclaimed "Every image on this box was taken from the game," which looked awesome, but my poor 286 could barely run the game and it looked nothing like the box art and was sluggish as hell. Commence me weeping and wailing and pining for a 386. Thankfully, my dad pulled some strings, managed to sell my 286 for more than I paid for it ($2,500), and I had earned some more money since the initial purchase. I took the $2,500, added $500 of my own, and upgraded to a 386 16MHz, with 4MB RAM, an 80MB hard drive, a Sound Blaster card, an SVGA card, and for added awesomeness I splurged on a Roland CM32-L (MT32 compatible) MIDI sound module ($550 just for the CM32-L).

And let me tell you, it was all worth it! The graphics still didn't look like the box art, but the game ran much better, and the full MIDI orchestral score was miles above any other games I had played. I still have fond memories listening to MP3 versionsof the Roland MIDI files. Anyway, don't complain to me about the cost of gaming PCs today. I spent $3,000 as a 16-year-old for what was still several steps down from a top-of-the-line system. And if you want to build a great gaming PC for a third of that, you can. PC gaming has never been more accessible, and the vagaries of himem.sys and emm386.sys are thankfully far in the past. You kids never had it so good. Now where's my cane?

Andy Chalk: Doom

I'd had a 286 for a few years when Doom came out, and by and large I was quite happy with it. So when I read that Doom required a 386, I headed up to the city, where there was a big computer store—and I tried to negotiate. "What's really the difference between a 286 and a 386?" I asked. "It's just a little faster, right? I can still run this game on it, right? It'll just be a little slower, right?" But no, it was not right (and the guy was kind of a dick about it, too), and so I was faced with a choice that was really no choice at all. I scrounged and saved and begged and borrowed and put off college for a few more years, and eventually I bought myself a Fujikama 386SX/25.

I don't remember much about it, but it ran Doom, and basically my life, for the next couple of years. Took me a year just to pay the damn thing off. It was totally worth it. 

Chris Livingston: Oblivion

I could tell myself I needed a new PC anyway, and would have bought one for reasons other than gaming, but I'm pretty sure The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had a lot to do with it. I'd fallen head over heels for Oblivion back in 2006, and was perfectly happy playing it on whatever slow-ass PC I had at the time (sorry I can't recall the specifics of the actual hardware). It still nagged at me that it just didn't look like the screenshots I was seeing and naturally the first thing I did when I got my new PC (I can't remember the specs of it, either) was load up Oblivion. The difference was astounding to me, like night and day. "Oh, wow, I can see Imperial City even when I'm not standing with my nose pressed up against it. Oh, wow, there is actually detail on my weapons and armor. Oh, wow, trees look like trees instead of like they've been cut out of construction paper."

It's probably for the best that I can't find screenshots from that PC because they'd probably look laughably unimpressive today, but at the time it was like my new computer let me step into an entirely new world.

The history of Dota is the history of ideas being poured into a giant bucket full of wizards. From Aeon of Strife to the wild herds of tower defence games that roamed the plains of the Warcraft III custom map scene, Dota has always been a mongrel thing. In that sense it's appropriate that Steam's former chart-topper should spend the summer paying tribute to the genre that toppled it. Packed in with this year's International Battle Pass is Underhollow, a team-based take on battle royale were teams race to claim a cheese from the denizens of a collapsing underground maze.

Underhollow isn't pure battle royale, however. Its dungeon structure and focus on killing monsters gives it some of the qualities of a MMO raid, and the battles that take place when teams meet are pure MOBA. Think of a Dota teamfight taking place inside a WoW boss chamber on PUBG's map and you're most of the way there.

Its links to the battle pass reward system aside, there's little about Underhollow that couldn't have been done by a determined map maker in Dota 2's community arcade. That said, it's all the better for Valve's resources and craftsmanship—particularly when it comes to the map and monsters monsters, which feature some of Valve's first new art for the game in months.

The monsters are an all-round highlight, actually. Far from being just camps to farm for gold and experience, each room in Underhollow features a randomly-assigned encounter in one of three difficulty tiers, including boss fights. There are MMO-style tank-and-spank fights, 'the floor is lava' encounters, bullet hell wizards, invisible ghosts, and giant Wraith Kings that have to all be slain at the same time to prevent them from respawning.

Figuring out each encounter is the first step, and understanding how to leverage Dota 2's vast pool of heroes to exploit them is the next. Luna's ability to bounce her glaive between lots of different foes is good in most rooms; the fact that she can't switch it off is potentially a nightmare in the room where you have to focus on hitting a big vase rather than any of the trolls standing next to it. Laudably, Valve have made the entire roster of heroes available in Underhollow and been relatively free with how monsters interact with them. They could have stacked bosses up with immunities and forced a particular playstyle, but they haven't and I think the mode is better for it.

It's less balanced as a consequence, however, and while anything can work—this is Dota, after all—there are certain heroes who really love this structure. Axe, for example, thrives in multi-target encounters and is one of the rare heroes who actually becomes more dangerous when a teamfight takes place in a room that's still full of monsters. Zeus' ability to nuke every single hero on the map at the same time is a big force multiplier in Underhollow, where it can sometimes randomly ruin another team's boss battle at the push of a button.

This runs the risk of turning the hero drafting step into the most important moment of the game, with many of my early matches turning into a game of 'PICK AXE'. As an Axe lifer, it's nice to see him get his moment—especially at the expense of perennial pub menace Pudge, who simply isn't very useful in the confines of the dungeon. But this degree of one-sidedness is only forgivable because Underhollow is a throwaway mode to play over the summer. If it became a bigger part of the game—and there's a case to be made for that happening—then you'd want to see something resembling balance, and that'd probably mean a cut-down hero roster.

The biggest issue, however, is stability. Underhollow reliably crashes for a number of players at the beginning of a match, forcing them to reconnect—this happens without fail, every single time you play, to at least a couple of people. Players working to meet their weekly battle points cap will quickly get used to micromanaging their disconnected teammates while they wait for them to load back into the match. There's not much else to say about this other than 'it's bad' and 'Valve should fix it'.

This unreliable performance, coupled with a drive to farm battle pass points, can make Underhollow feel a little disposable—particularly when you're playing with strangers. It's really easy to throw a game away, and do so quickly, and as a consequence you're always at the mercy of your teammates. If all three of you are on the same page, great. If not, it usually means a few rooms of grinding followed by death to the first team you encounter, a trip back to the main menu, and another roll of the matchmaking dice.

This feeling that Underhollow is ultimately a throwaway experience—compounded by the bugs, the imbalance, and its seasonal nature—are a shame because there's something worth exploring here: a worthy extrapolation of traditional Dota. Were it just a little bit more polished, this might have justified the cost of the Battle Pass by itself.

Bonus Underhollow PSA!

Dota 2 is full of ways to be that guy, from spamming pings to premature GGs. In Underhollow, you can identify that guy really easily: it's the person who picks up all of the loot from a dungeon chest straight away, and then sells it without checking to see if their teammates need anything.

Don't be that guy, kids!

OpenAI, the independent research institute that was co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015, will send its Dota 2 bots to The International 2018. There, the AI team will take on a professional team in a 5v5 match. And it plans to win. 

Known as OpenAI Five, the bot team has taught itself the nuts and bolts of Valve's free-to-play MOBA by playing 180 years' worth of games against itself every day. OpenAI says this process requires 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores—and is a scaled up version of the "much-simpler" variant that toppled pro player Danil "Dendi" Ishutin in 1v1 at last year's TI. 

"Our team of five neural networks, OpenAI Five, has started to defeat amateur human teams at Dota 2," says OpenAI. "While today we play with restrictions, we aim to beat a team of top professionals at The International in August subject only to a limited set of heroes. We may not succeed: Dota 2 is one of the most popular and complex esports games in the world, with creative and motivated professionals who train year-round to earn part of Dota’s annual $40M prize pool."  

This blog post explores the myriad challenges and obstacles the OpenAI team faces while brining OpenAI Five up to speed—not least Dota 2's complex rules. Read the post in full via the link above, and watch the following short which examines some of the learned behaviours the bots have picked up along the way below. 

These include teamfighting, value prediction and, rather amusingly, ganking. Here's that:

And here's Dendi's 1v1 defeat to an AI opponent at The International 2017, which kicks off around the 7.30 mark. The pre-match testing segment is worth watching too if you've time—I was particularly tickled by the chap who says "the not being able to kill it part is so annoying" in reference to the AI's skills.

Valve has disqualified a Dota 2 team from its upcoming The International 2018 for using a programmable gaming mouse. In doing so, Thunder Predator used an "unfair advantage", so says contest organiser FACEIT, during the South America qualifiers, which prevents them progressing to August's $15 million competition.  

As reported by Motherboard, Thunder Predator's AtuuN is said to have selected Meepo—a Geomancer, who is billed as "one of the hardest carries in the game to play effectively due to his heavy reliance on micromanagement." Meepo can create clones of himself, and when each clone teleports, they deal damage in the surrounding area. And while this cloning method can be a powerful means of offence, said micromanagement means each clone must be instructed individually. 

Under pressure—like, say, during a tournament—this routine isn't easy. 

Motherboard links to this YouTube clip of AtuuN effortlessly directing Meepo clones around the map during the third game. This caught the attention of the Dota 2 subreddit, who in turn accused AtuuN of leveraging a software macro—a process that lets players roll complex button combos into fewer/single clicks. 

Combat logs (see above) showed that AtuuN teleported Meepo clones at the exact same time. This process would normally take players several seconds—they'd otherwise need to instruct each Meepo individually—but Thunder Predator denied using macros. It did, however, concede that a programmable mouse may be at fault—a Razer Synapse 3.   

"The player of our squadron ‘Atún’ has a Razer Synapse mouse, which, like any professional player, has put its own manual configuration to be able to have a better use of Hardware in benefit of its efficient performance in each of the games played with this hero (Meepo)," says Thunder Predator (via Google Translate) on its official Facebook page. "In this way, we highlight the fact that no type of hack has been used."

FACEIT, on the other hand, felt differently.

Thunder Predator suggests it's been hard done by. "That is why through this announcement," the Facebook post continues (again, via Google Translate), "we denounce this accusation, affirming that at no time, our player ‘Atún’ use any type of hack or particular program that facilitated his game mode before the match, yesterday, with the SG team." 

In April, a study of loot boxes by the Netherlands Gaming Authority concluded four out of ten videogames considered fell foul of the country's gambling laws. And while specific games were not named at the time, the regulator body warned that "enforcement action" would be taken against any games that failed to meet legal requirements by June 20. 

That's today, of course, and it now appears loot boxes in both Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 have been deemed illegal. As reported by tweakers.net (via Reddit), players of both games were met today with a message from Valve detailing the sanctions. 

As posted by Reddit user hollandje, here's the message in full:

Dear Counter-Strike: Global Offensive customers,

In May, we received two letters from the Dutch Kansspelautoriteit, stating that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 contain ‘loot boxes’ that violate the Dutch Betting and Gaming Act. The Kansspelautoriteit accusation is different from how other countries think about loot boxes, so we hired Dutch legal counsel, looked at the recent Study into Loot Boxes published by the Kansspelautoriteit, and learned more about Dutch law. We still don’t understand or agree with the Kansspelautoriteit’s legal conclusion, and we’ve responded to explain more about CS:GO and Dota 2.

In the meantime, we have a threat from the Kansspelautoriteit to prosecute Valve if we don’t implement a remedy by June 20. The letters don’t tell us how to do that, but the Study into Loot Boxes does contain one rather simplistic statement:

"Loot boxes contravene the law if the in-game goods from the loot boxes are transferable. Loot boxes do not contravene the law if the in-game goods from the loot boxes are not transferable."

So for now our only practical alternative is to disable trading and Steam Marketplace transfers for CS:GO and Dota 2 items for Dutch customers. We apologize to you for this inconvenience. We hope that, after more engagement with the Kansspelautoriteit, they may refine their legal demands and we can find a solution that is less inconvenient.

This move follows Belgium's loot box injunctions, whose Gambling Commission also ruled against loot boxes in Overwatch, FIFA 18, and CS:GO in April. A deadline was not set in this instance, however it will be interesting to see how Belgian authorities proceed in light of the above.

The Underhollow, the Dota 2 battle royale with cheese mode that was announced in May, is now live. The new mode is available exclusively to owners of the 2018 International Battle Pass, a multi-level offering for Dota fans that also includes new modes, sprays, a Cavern Crawl, and other rewards. 

The Underhollow pits eight teams of three players each against one other in a great quest for Roshefort, the rarest of all cheese located in the caverns beneath Roshan's lair. But the other cheese-chasing teams are just the start of your problems: Roshan himself is also that sharp, savory flavor, and his rambunctious roaming is causing the tunnels to collapse, slowly constricting the playing area. 

The last team standing will earn a hefty bounty of Battle Points, which can also be claimed (in smaller amounts) by taking out opposing players and discovering treasures or cheese. (Which isn't to say that a good cheese isn't a treasure, but you know what I mean.) 

The level 1 Dota 2 International Battle Pass goes for $10, while the level 75 is $37. You can also purchases levels separately if you want to upgrade your pass to take advantage of higher reward tiers. Full details are available at dota2.com.