The Semifinals of the Copenhagen Major featured four titans of Counter-Strike; FaZe Clan versus Team Vitality and Natus Vincere versus G2 Esports.

And the Semifinalists delivered! Both matchups required all three maps to determine a winner, and when the dust settled FaZe Clan and Natus Vincere were left standing. They will go head-to-head in the Grand Finals of Counter-Strike 2’s first Major Championship.

Championship Sunday begins with the Showmatch, beginning at 18:15 CET. The Grand Finals begin at 20:00 CET.

As the Major comes to a close there’s still time to support your favorite teams and players. Tournament items are available in-game, with 50% of the proceeds going to the players, teams, and organizations participating in the PGL Copenhagen Major.

See you Sunday!

• Matchmade lobbies will no longer share the account information of any members until the lobby is accepted by all players.
  
• Fixed certain cases where Revenant's Brooch would still allow critical hits.

Rally round and come watch the Highlander Charity Cup! Stephen "Miggy" Chavez was a competitive TF2 player who passed away from Melanoma in 2017. Created to honor Miggy's memory, the Miggy's Gift foundation is a charity committed to the awareness and education of Melanoma skin cancer.

Featuring some of the best North American Competitive TF2 players, four captains will create a team of nine players each and duel it out in a four team double elimination bracket with $200 in keys on the line (with a potential prize pool increase).

Click here for more information! Tune in and support a great cause!

Important Links:

• Donation Link (Tiltify)
  
• Twitch
  
• YouTube
  
• Discord

The Elimination Stage of the PGL Copenhagen Major has concluded, leaving eight teams to compete for Counter-Strike 2’s first Major Championship.

Congratulations to Team Spirit and MOUZ who advanced unbeaten, finishing with a perfect 3-0 record. Eternal Fire, Cloud9, and Team Vitality each went 3-1, and Natus Vincere, G2 Esports, and FaZe Clan went the distance, needing all five matches to advance with 3-2 records.

Playoff matches begin Thursday, March 28th from Royal Arena in Copenhagen, Denmark. Predictions for the Pick’Em Challenge are due before the first Playoff match begins, so lock in your picks now!

And don’t forget, team and player stickers are available now, with 50% of the proceeds going to the players, teams, and organizations participating in the PGL Copenhagen Major.

Good luck and have fun!

An update has been released for Left 4 Dead 2:

- Fixed two exploits that could crash remote servers.
- Fixed missing lobby state messages.
- Fixed community server searches not always returning the full set of lowest-ping results.

We've just released Gameplay Patch 7.35d (Chen had it coming), and with it a new set of features.


Over the last year or so, we've taken a number of visible actions against users of third-party cheats. As we investigate each cheat, we're primarily focused on understanding what they're doing and how we can track and stop it. But while we're doing that, we also ask ourselves why some cheaters feel compelled to use these tools in the first place. The most common explanation is "to get an unfair advantage", which obviously runs counter to the desires of the Dota community and the sense of competitiveness and fairness at its heart. Even so, sometimes there are still things we can learn, and use to improve the Dota experience for everyone (or at least everyone who hasn't been banned for cheating).

Pre-game hero bans are an example of this. Many cheats last year focused on gaining an advantage during the ten-second hero ban phase at the start of each game. We stepped back to look at the original goals of this phase — letting players express a preference for what heroes they didn't want to play against, but without creating scenarios where players with small hero pools get permanently locked out — looked at some data, and asked if there was a way we could better serve these goals while solving other problems at the same time.


With today's update, we've removed the start-of-match ban phase and replaced it with ban preferences stored with your account. If you load the heroes tab, you can select the four heroes you don't want to see in your games. You're guaranteed when you join a matchmaking game that at least one of them will be banned. You can change your list of banned heroes whenever you want. (If you leave some ban slots empty, it's possible the empty slot will be selected as your "banned hero". In other words, there's no advantage to leaving slots empty.)

This new system addresses a number of problems the previous system had: you can't forget to ban; you don't have to learn that sometimes suggested bans are ignored by the game; you're not on a tight clock to make a stressful decision that, in the end, most players make the same way almost all the time. As an added bonus, it also makes targeted bans impossible, whether those bans are against known personalities or random players in a pub match for which you've looked up data.

Some game modes (ie., Captains Mode, Captains Draft, Ability Draft, Turbo) either didn't have a pre-game ban phase, or already had non-standard ban rules. These modes are unchanged.


Millions of Dota players interact with the matchmaker every day and every single one has different priorities when looking for a game. Some prefer to get into a match as quickly as possible, and are willing to accept a higher skill variance in the game to save some time. Others want every match to be perfectly balanced, and are willing to wait longer for the best chance at the closest game. Other players care less about the skill level of the other players, and much more about their personality and behavior in-game.

We've long wanted to build features to let players find matches that better align with their individual preferences. Early attempts ran into two main problems:

• First, while players are good at describing their preferences to other people, they aren't necessarily good at describing their preferences as inputs to a complex, global matchmaking algorithm ("I value skill variance 13% higher than the average Dota player!"). How can we create tools that let players express their preferences naturally and directly?
  
• Second, changes to the matchmaker affect all Dota players, so we tend toward caution. The matchmaker is always trying to strike a balance between individual player preferences and the health of Dota as a whole. (If matches of Dota are bad, whether because of wild skill gaps or poor player behavior, that's bad for Dota as a community. If every match is perfect, but takes three hours to form, that's bad, too.) New matchmaker features available to everyone at once risk breaking the matchmaker, and if we break the matchmaker, we break Dota. How can we ship new matchmaking features and learn how they work in practice while keeping risk to Dota as a whole low?

Within the new experimental umbrella of Dota Labs, and initially limited to Dota Plus, we're shipping a first pass of a feature that Dota players have been asking us for forever: When you find a match in Dota, Dota Plus will present some information about how the matchmaker evaluated the match, like an estimate of skill range and player behavior scores. You'll have a chance to accept that match or requeue to wait for a match that's better for you and your current preferences.

We were careful when building this feature to make sure that any information we included would enable players to express individual preferences about what kinds of matches they prefer, but not grant a competitive advantage of any kind. The new dialog can tell you that the skill variance of players in a match is high or low, but not whether you and your team are on the high end or the low end.

Why is this a Dota Labs feature? The only way to know for sure how millions of Dota players are going to interact with a feature is to ship it, so that's what we're doing. We've done extensive modeling, but there's still real risk here: We may be wrong about how players will use this feature or how it will affect the overall matchmaking experience in Dota. We don't want to let those fears that we might be wrong stop us from doing something that may benefit millions of Dota players, so we're shipping this as an experiment. Shipping it inside Dota Plus limits access, and accordingly limits the risk to Dota as we learn about how everyone interacts with it. As with the other Dota Labs features, time and your feedback will tell whether it grows, or changes, or gets retired.


We know many of you are looking forward to Crownfall, and we're looking forward to getting it into your hands. We're wrapping things up and expect to release in mid-April. We'll see you then.

The opening stage of the PGL Copenhagen Major has come to a close and storylines are rapidly developing. New rosters are rising to the occasion. Seasoned teams are reaching peak form at the perfect time. Asia and the Americas have come roaring back to life. Who will reach the playoffs? Tune in to the Elimination stage and find out!


If you've been looking for a way to show your support for your favorite teams, now is your chance. Team and Player Autograph sticker capsules are now available for purchase in the Copenhagen Major hub. You'll find all of the players and teams at the Major, split into capsules featuring paper, glitter, holo, and gold stickers. 50% of the proceeds go to the players and organizations participating in the Major.

For those of you playing the Pick'Em Challenge, don't forget to set your picks before the first Elimination stage matches!

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• Elimination Stage Pick'Em Challenge is now active with 13 qualified teams (three more teams will qualify tomorrow). Elimination Stage picks can be updated and saved all the way until the first Elimination Stage matches begin
  
• Added a reminder for players who purchased their Copenhagen 2024 Viewer Pass that the pass must be activated in order to become eligible for the Copenhagen 2024 Coin Challenges
  
• Added a checkbox to show final Swiss standings in the Major Hub
  
• Added ability to preview souvenir packages from the Major Hub
  
• Various UI improvements in Copenhagen 2024 Major Hub

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• Fixed a case when C4 could fall through the floor if dropped while planting
  
• Added a popup confirmation before launching Training Day from the Play menu

[COPENHAGEN 2024 MAJOR]

• The Copenhagen Major Hub is now available. Visit the hub to purchase tournament items, play the Pick'Em Challenge and more.
  
• Purchase a Copenhagen 2024 Viewer Pass to receive an upgradable Copenhagen 2024 Coin. With an active pass, you can upgrade your coin and earn extra souvenir packages by playing the Pick'Em Challenge. Additionally, you will show up on the Active Pass Leaderboard where you can compare your Pick'Em Challenge performance to your friends.
  
• All players with Prime status can place Pick'Em picks for free! However, to complete challenges and earn rewards from an event stage, you will have to activate a Viewer Pass before that stage begins.

[GAMEPLAY]

• Adjusted molotov fire to address a case where a player who could see through fire could not be seen by their opponent.

In December, hundreds of teams from around the world began their long journey to the first Counter-Strike 2 Major. Fighting through open, closed, and regional qualifiers--now only 24 remain. Tune in to the PGL Copenhagen Major on March 17th and watch the best Counter-Strike teams in the world battle for the title of Major Champion!


Today we're shipping the all-new Copenhagen Major Hub, where you can find the Pick'Em Challenge, the Copenhagen 2024 Viewer Pass, Souvenirs, and (coming soon) Team and Player stickers. 50% of the proceeds from tournament items are shared with players and organizations.

Playing the Pick'Em Challenge with an active pass will give you a chance to upgrade your Copenhagen 2024 Coin and earn extra Souvenir Packages. You'll also show up on the Active Pass Leaderboard, where you can compare your Pick'Em Challenge performance to your friends.


In the past, you needed an active pass to play the Pick'Em game. No more! Now, everyone with Prime status can place their picks for free. However, to complete challenges and earn rewards from each event stage, you'll have to activate your pass before the stage begins.

So place your picks and get ready to cheer for your favorite teams. The PGL Copenhagen 2024 Major is almost here!