The livestream for The International Dota 2 Championships is included in our roundup of feeds coming out of (or nearby) PAX 2012, but we're highlighting it here for you with a reminder that competition resumes at 12:30 p.m. EDT today with the semifinal rounds of the double-elimination tournament.

Valve, maker of the game and sponsor of the tournament, is hosting two feeds on this site (in Russian and Chinese, too), and also is offering a free Dota 2 Spectator Client for viewing on Steam. It allows you to view replays of prior contests in addition to multiple camera angles, player stats, and commentary.

Or you can check back in 90 minutes and watch it live from the feed below.

DOTA 2: The International (tournament).

There's the odd pirate reference here and there in Valve's DOTA 2, but that wasn't enough for this mod. No, the creators of the STS Pirate Language Pack wanted to essentially re-localise the game, so it could be understood by toothless nautical bandits of the 17th century.

Serving as a "complete rewrite of the entire language in Dota 2", the pack has, after two years of development and a test run last year, been released to the public and made available on the Steam Workshop. Why two years? Because it's a Steam-wide project for the services baked-in localisation, meaning that while a DOTA 2 patch is the first to hit the internet, there are more planned, with Team Fortress 2 next.

If you're in the DOTA 2 beta, you can try it out below.

STS Pirate Language Pack [Steam Workshop]

There's no question that Defense Of The Ancients (Dota) is big. It's a big deal. It's also an immensely complicated game that has evolved over years of intense play, modding, and sprawling evolution. It's not very much like any other game out there. And for that reason, it could be argued that Dota 2 lays bare just how unimaginative most video games these days are.

Resident expert in these proceedings: Quintin Smith of Rock, Paper Shotgun, a journalist, board-game enthusiast, and deft wordsmith who has recently spent a hefty chunk of his life deeply submerged in the world of Dota 2. He's been playing the beta before Valve releases the game in its final, free-to-play incarnation on Steam. His verdict? "It's no joke to say it'll become the biggest thing on the PC."

In fact, Smith thinks that Dota 2 is so fresh, so bracingly different in its design that it could never be the product of a major game studio. The game started as a mod and grew in hundreds of unexpected, uncontrollable ways, similar to his current examples of Minecraft and DayZ. But unlike those games, he says that Dota 2 is unlike anything that could be purposefully cooked up by a game development studio. Developers simply don't think the same way that a huge group of gamer/modders do—and as a result, they'll never make a game like Dota 2.

But unlike Minecraft and Day Z, Dota's design could never have surfaced from a commercial games development studio. Mostly, game development studios adhere to genre conventions, and we consider ourselves lucky when they work with no care for genre at all. But what they categorically do not do is go against people's instincts. Nobody's going to make a multiplayer game with one map, that takes an hour to play, that looks like an RTS but will fuck you if you try and play it like one.

Which is to say, it looks like Dota 2′s about to become the most popular game on PC. And it couldn't have come from a professional games studio. That speaks of a strange inadequacy within commercial game design. But that's not actually the depressing part.

He then goes one further, pointing out that despite the fact that a number of different studios are working on "Moba-Like" games, it's possible that none of them will outdo the original. That, Smith says, is perhaps the most dispiriting thing of all:

As you read these words, a dozen professional studios around the world are racing to emulate Dota's success. What's going to be truly depressing is if of all the contenders in the brand-new moba genre, Valve's curator-like porting of Dota 2 into the Source engine remains the most popular one. Not only could our games industry not have had this idea, they can't even improve on it.

All of this is to say that yes, mainstream game development is responsible for many wonderful things. But it may never channel the sheer complexity and scope of a community-driven, mod-based game like Dota 2. And hey, that's probably alright.

Dota 2: An Electric Valhalla, Pt. 1 [RPS]

Here's the documentary trailer for the upcoming DOTA documentary, which follows the players who are trying to go pro and compete in a million dollar tourney. It premiered tonight on GTTV and is "coming soon".

Some 25,000 players who had bought a community-created weapon within Dota 2 discovered a new item in their inventories after Valve learned it had been copied directly from the MMO Aion.

Valve brought this up on its Steam Workshop blog, probably because 25,000 people noticed they no longer had "Timebreaker," a popular user-created mace that made it into the game earlier this summer. The item is a straight copy of "Marchutan's Blessed Mace" from Aion.

It sounds also like Valve wanted to make an example out of this, as "it took a lot of time for us to investigate and remedy the situation," wrote Dota designer Alden Kroll. While about 1,400 community-created items have been removed from Dota 2, this situation was different because it involved one that had actually gone on sale. "It becomes more complicated if a Workshop item becomes offered for sale on Steam or in a game, and the item later turns out to infringe on someone else's work," Kroll wrote.

The user who made the mace has been banned from the game and is going "to lose out on any proceeds from the sale of the item," said Kroll, who added that 24,603 users spent money on keys to open a chest and receive the mace. He repeated an appeal for the community to flag plagiarized contributions, and for contributors to create only original work and swear to that fact.

Respecting Intellectual Property [Steam Workshop Blog]

There's a blood-stain on the logo atop the Team Fortress 2 website. A reader at the message board NeoGAF noticed today that it links to a letter. And in that letter is a story, a story that reads like a tease, a tease that seems to be pointing to something new for Team Fortress... a third faction?

The letter describes a heretofore unknown sibling to the owners of the game's Blu and Red teams, a person named Gray. Well, if Redmond and Blutarch are the owners of the multiplayer shooter's Red and Blu teams, could Gray have a team of his own? And what/who is the eagle?

Some of the folks on NeoGAF think a gray team could all be robots. (A Kotaku reader speculates the possibility of Red and Blu teaming up in a horde mode against Gray. Hmm.)

We know about as much as you do. Note the date of the sons' birth: September 2, 1822. September 2 of 2012 will be a Sunday, the final day of PAX, the big tradeshow that occurs in Valve's neck of the woods, Seattle Washington. On September 2, in Benaroya Hall in Seattle, Valve will host the final day of a tournament called The International. The tournament is for DOTA 2, Valve's upcoming MOBA-style game. It presumably has nothing to do with TF2, but, as with all things Valve, you get teases... you get hints... and we'll all find out soon enough.

(I've asked Valve what's up. I tend to think they won't say just yet.)

Gray couldn't have gone off and changed his name to Gordon, right? Nah...

Gray [Team Fortress 2 official site, via NeoGAF]

It's been sort of known for a while now, but today Valve came out and specifically stated that DOTA 2 will be free-to-play. And just like Team Fortress 2 these days, the company will make its money back not from game sales, but from hats.

There'll be a DOTA 2 Store available at launch (actually, it's live now!) that will sell clothes, accessories and other cosmetic items. That's it. Valve says "Dota 2 will not be a pay-to-win game. All the items in the store are cosmetic, and don't affect gameplay."

Because of that, all heroes in the game will be free and available to everyone. You'll even be able to get hold of the cosmetic stuff without paying if you feel like putting the work in, as "players who don't want to buy things from the Dota 2 Store will be able to earn them in a variety of ways, such as by simply playing the game, increasing their Battle Level, or by trading with other players."

As someone who paid $15 over my career to Battlefield Heroes for fancy jackets - the only "microtransaction" stuff I've ever parted with real money for - I've long hoped more publishers went down this path, instead of restricting necessary content behind paywalls. Good to see Valve, at least, agrees.

DOTA 2 will also be part of the Steam Workshop, meaning fans can help create stuff that has the potential to end up in the game itself.

Introducing the Dota Store [Valve]

Toby "Tobi Wan" Dawson is a professional commentator for esports site JoinDOTA. He covers DOTA and now DOTA 2 matches and tournaments, and is considered to be quite entertaining. Unfortunately, the commentary he was caught making while playing in a live-streamed public match over the weekend is not so much entertaining as it is inexplicably racist.

The comment, as seen in a screenshot, was: "have you heard the expression..lame as a ni**ers baby?"

He later apologized on the JoinDOTA forum, explaining, "it is not ok, that is rage combined with [the other player's] jokes to create a completely inappropriate comment which I am sorry for making."

Interest in DOTA 2 continues to ramp up as the game, published by Valve, runs in beta. Tobi Wan was a commentator at Valve's official tournament, The International, when it debuted at Gamescom last year. This year's tournament will take place at PAX Prime in Seattle at the end of August.

Valve is explicitly trying to encourage civility and good behavior in their multiplayer communities. The best time to make sure that DOTA 2's community grows to be a positive influence on the game is now. While the usual arguments are raging, the community seems to agree that even in the heat and adrenaline of competition, some language is out of bounds.

Two of gaming's best and most beloved video game studios are no longer squabbling about the word DoTA. The makers of World of Warcraft and the creators of Half-Life jointly announced in a blast to the press today that they have reached "a mutual agreement regarding concerns over names of upcoming products."

Peace in our time!

The agreement: Valve will still be making a game called DOTA 2 and use the DOTA term commercially (translation: on things you can buy). Blizzard will keep using the term non-commercially for Warcraft III and StarCraft II maps.

Blizzard is changing the name of its planned Blizzard DOTA custom game in StarCraft II, which will now be called Blizzard All-Stars. That name, Blizzard's Rob Pardo said, "better reflects the design of our game."

This resolves what was becoming an ugly trademark dispute between two fan-favorite game studios.

The DoTA term, short for "Defense of the Ancients", was a fan-made mod that was made in 2003 for Blizzard's Warcraft III. It involved a specific multiplayer game-type that involved players protecting opposing waves of minions. DoTA games have been surging in popularity thanks to games such as League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth. Valve entered the fray in 2010, raising eyebrows with their intent to team up with a top DoTA developer to make a game they'd call DoTA 2. They began pursuing a trademark of the DoTA term. Blizzard objected and recently tried to block the trademark, a few months after announcing that it was making its own official Blizzard DoTA game featuring characters from the companies popular series like World of Warcraft and Diablo.

It was getting awkward. Valve was issuing complaints like this to the U.S. government's trademark office: "Valve seeks to appropriate the more than seven years of goodwill that Blizzard has developed in the mark DOTA and in its Warcraft III computer game and take for itself a name that has come to signify the product of years of time and energy expended by Blizzard and by fans of Warcraft III."

Now it seems resolved between these two heavyweights.

Blizzard's Pardo: "Both Blizzard and Valve recognize that, at the end of the day, players just want to be able to play the games they're looking forward to, so we're happy to come to an agreement that helps both of us stay focused on that."

Valve's Gabe Newell: "We're pleased that we could come to an agreement with Blizzard without drawing things out in a way that would benefit no one. We both want to focus on the things our fans care about, creating and shipping great games for our communities."

League of Legends creators' at Riot Games have previously said that they'd object to Valve trademarking DoTA. Kotaku has reached out to Riot to clarify where they stand on this matter and will update when we hear back.

Reader Adam has an idea. An idea for old-timey bottles of rum, bottled by Valve Corporation, and named for Admiral Kunkka, a hero from the DOTA series. It is a wonderful idea.

Those wondering, um, why rum, Kunkka's Rum is found in both the original and Valve's upcoming sequel, with units doused in it receiving a bonus.

Adam went completely over the top with this, even going to the trouble of buying a custom rubber stamp and actual bottling wax.

There are more pics on Adam's site.

YO-HO-HO…[adammcbeamish]