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]
