Welcome to a new weekly feature in which we cup the week that was and ask it to cough gently. Here you ll find the PC Gamer team reflecting on the best and worst moments of the past seven days. On this page you ll find the good stuff. After which, it is quite literally all downhill

THE HIGHS

Tim Clark: Having thus far avoided becoming a Hearthstoner is that a thing? Can I make it a thing? the news that Blizzard s card battler has abruptly come out of beta means now feels like the right time to commit. If only because there are likely to be plenty of equally dewy-eyed marks on the servers to test my clumsy deck building on. The mix of deep strategy with the randomness of rare card acquisition means it already feels dangerously likely to pull my OCD levers/ravage my bank account. Damn you Blizzard. Damn you all to goblin Vegas hell.

Andy Kelly: I ve been using the Oculus Rift a lot this week, and a highlight has been exploring familiar places from film and TV. In Jerry s Place I wandered around Seinfeld s apartment from the classic sitcom. In another I looked around the boiler room from Spirited Away s bathhouse. This needs to be a whole genre. There s something incredibly surreal, and brilliant, about being in places you know so well from the screen. If someone makes an explorable Twin Peaks, I ll never take the Rift off.

Tom Senior: My highlight of the week has been watching Andy explore the future. We're on adjacent desks, and I can tell you that the future involves a lot of waving and sudden exclamations of "shit!". Earlier today he was manipulating glittering clouds with is hands using the Leap Motion controller. This week he braved the drizzle of Euro Truck Simulator in virtual reality, and hosted a stream of curious colleagues from various magazines at his desk. Based on careful observation, there seems to be a point whenever anyone tries the Rift for the first time when, pursuing some virtual item only they can see, they stare at their groin and declare "WOW". The future is brilliant. Andy will bring you more revelations from 2015 and beyond every week in The Rift Report, and this week we've published a series of articles on the future of PC gaming, which is looking very bright indeed, and quite weird.

Samuel Roberts: The BAFTA games ceremony was a nice affair, despite so few PC games actually winning an award. It was more about the spread of nominees, for me, seeing Gunpoint and The Stanley Parable receiving equal attention to a project as colossal as GTA V. That sort of mainstream publicity for these games is never a bad thing.

Phil Savage: It's the last full week of Guild Wars 2's Living World: a more than year-long saga of fortnightly content releases. It's not always been brilliant with many of the earlier releases padding out their content with rare drops and repetitive churn but the game's been left much stronger than it started. It's clear that ArenaNet now have a better understanding of the type of scenarios that make for an engaging and social challenge. Their last four releases have taken the game's traditional world events, and expanded them out to fill entire zones. The Living World ends on some of the most exciting experiences I've had with the game. All that said, if I never see another steampunk pirate it will be too soon.

Chris Thursten: Discovering Titanfall's capture the flag mode has been the highlight of my week. It's the best way to play the game, and I'm baffled that it hasn't received much attention prior to release. Actually, I'm not baffled. CTF is sometimes considered to be a bit old fashioned and unsexy, and I think that's terribly wrong. CTF is very sexy. It's sexy because it creates strategic space for titans and freerunning to be used in considered ways. It's sexy because it demands teamwork. This should be the way Titanfall is played competitively, and I'd love to see it attract an eSports following. It's just a shame that the game's lack of community features will make that less likely to happen.





THE LOWS

Phil Savage: As iconic lines go, standby for Titanfall took on a bittersweet edge this week. Thanks to the staggered regional launch, most of the world was left waiting on Respawn's fantastic men 'n' mechs shooter. Tying game releases to a specific day of the week is an increasingly archaic practice. We live in a fully connected world; we play games on a platform that leads the way in digital distribution, but, for some reason, we're still being arbitrarily held back based on whatever country we happen to physically exist in. At least, in this case, there were no spoilers to dodge, but that isn't really the point. A game's release is an event and gamers love to run away to join the circus that surrounds it. It's less fun having to queue for that circus, while you watch everyone inside enjoy their, er... clown robots? That metaphor could have been better.

Chris Thursten: I thought it was a bit of a shame that the BAFTA awards focused so much on triple-A games. Institutional award shows lag behind the times in every medium, but it doesn't feel like games necessarily need to be part of that trend. It's to the credit of Papers, Please and Gone Home that they managed to crack through the panel's preference for The Last of Us and GTA V, but I feel like the industry still struggles to delineate 'quality' and 'production values'. Also, Grand Theft Auto winning the multiplayer award? Really? #robbed #scandal #justicefordota

Tom Senior: Dark Souls 2's launch made me sad this week, because we're going to have to wait more than a month to join in. Right now console players are busy exploring the new world, dying to new bosses and piecing together the sequel's ambiguous lore. The collective act of discovery when players dive into a new game is valuable. Day-one players are buying into the fantasy of being a pioneer, breaking ground and uncovering secrets. Even though the PC version is getting a few fancy extras, like high-res textures, it's a shame to miss out on the goldrush. By the time we arrive, Drangleic and its vicious inhabitants will have been carefully analysed and categorised by those that have gone before.

Samuel Roberts: GOG.com abandoning its short-lived plan for regional pricing was a bizarre event. I primarily buy games from GOG because of how competitive the pricing is and the lack of a barmy regional UK uptick that demands I pay more for committing the terrible crime (and it is terrible) of being British. The whole thing was a bit silly, and GOG s melodramatic apology ends a mini-saga that didn t need to happen at all.

Andy Kelly: Peter Molyneux and his studio responded to criticism that their god game, Godus, is comprised almost entirely of clicking by replacing clicking with dragging. He describes the control change as smooth and delicious as he carves into the landscape. That s fine and dragging is certainly less RSI-inducing than clicking but the game s problems run deeper than that. I want Godus to be good, and I have a soft spot for Molyneux, but this focus on the new controls seems to be a distraction from a game with much bigger problems. Prove me wrong, Pete.

Tim Clark: Easily the biggest bummer of the week has been The Witcher III s not wholly unexpected delay. The combination of vertiginous ambition, as will be revealed in our forthcoming cover feature, with a vague release date (beware of any game which just lists the year you re already in) meant it always felt likely to slip. February 2015 it is then, although the nagging worry remains that CD Projekt may have decided to take inspiration from George R.R. Martin s lackadaisical approach to deadlines. Workshy geniuses, eh?

Are you ready for some Doter? That's just one of the questions posed by Rucks, the narrator from Bastion. He's an old-timey sort of fella, and ain't got no truck with these kids' short-As. If you'd like your wizard killing narrated by his smooth, folksy tones, you can now grab the recently released Bastion Announcer Pack for Doter Dota 2.

As with other announcement packs, it replaces the voice of both the announcer and the mega-kill announcer with the Bastion's elderly guardian. You can see (and hear) the full round-up of his proclamations over at the Dota 2 wiki. He's got some pretty sharp words for anybody caught cussing.

The pack is currently available at 3.24 for the next 20 hours. After that, it'll default to the regular price of 6.49. It follows a series of other external game announcement packs, including Half-Life 2's Dr. Kleiner, Portal's GLaDOS, and - oddly enough - the extremely British AI from Defense Grid. In the future, a Stanley Parable narrator pack is also planned.

In addition to commentating on Dota's forests of fantasy, Rucks' voice actor Logan Cunningham is also working on Transistor, the next game from Bastion developers Supergiant Games. You can read Cass's preview of that game here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes earnest, sometimes silly column about Dota 2. Previously a Tumblr blog, it now runs every week on PC Gamer.

Introducing somebody to Dota 2 is hard, and gets harder as your own skills improve. I was lucky to start playing with a group of people who all had exactly the same amount of prior experience - zero - and who were relaxed enough in each other's company to dodge the bickering and gamesmanship that skill imbalances can provoke. Most of the time.

I've seen the other side too. It's difficult to introduce somebody new to a group of knowledgeable players in a way that doesn't potentially ruin the game for everybody. Matchmaking will try to balance the average skill level of each team, but it's too hit and miss - and Dota is too complex - to guarantee actual parity. If you're trying to teach a friend to play, you're probably going to lose a bunch of games. Nobody likes to lose, and few newcomers are likely to be happy about the fact that they're (a) creating issues for their friends and (b) getting seven shades kicked out of them.

This problem has been on my mind. The last couple of patches made sweeping changes to how Dota 2 functions, and while the most dramatic upsets are felt at the professional level they have also had an impact on how new players are best introduced to the game. It is now, I'd argue, easier to win a game with a newbie in your team than has been for a long time - but to do so, certain attitudes need to change.

When I was starting out, being new meant playing support. There are a bunch of reasons for this. Warding and stacking are relatively easily-taught techniques that provide a general benefit to the team. Reliable stuns and easy-to-land teamfight ultis allow new players to be useful even if they're only capable of mashing all of the buttons and hoping for the the best. Nudging somebody into the support role also allows more senior players to reserve mid and carry for themselves, and this is sometimes symptomatic of a trend towards perceiving support as a subservient role. It's wrong, but it happens.

Problems arise when this creates an underclass of players who never get to play anything but support. If they take to the role and enjoy it, great - but there's an equal danger that somebody's entire experience of Dota will be warding the runes and bashing out stuns. These are players who won't be encouraged to master last-hitting, learn about stats, or to buy items that aren't arcane boots, pipe, and mekansm. This line of thinking is grounded in the idea that games will necessarily run long - that the game will be decided on a teamfight at the thirty minute mark when carries have had time to farm. The message it sends to your newbie friends is "don't touch anything and I'll win this for you in half an hour."

These are the players who will struggle most in the current meta. As IceFrog has worked to speed up the early game, on-point support play is becoming more and more important in intermediate pub matches. That means smoke ganks and early rotations. It means understanding fog of war, being able to anticipate enemy laning decisions, and knowing how to execute strategies with minimal farm. It means knowing what a push strat is, and how to see it coming. It's becoming less and less useful for a support to get their wards down and babysit the safelane, and as such it's no longer a good way for somebody to learn Dota - if it ever was.

Similarly, experienced players who lock the safelane carry role for themselves are missing out on what is arguably the most enjoyable phase of the game. Farming and rat Dota still win games, but just as many are won - and won more entertainingly - by teams that can pull off a gamechanging strat in the first five minutes. Na'Vi ran an offensive quadlane this week, for heaven's sake. I'm not saying you should try it in your next pub match, but you should be trying to figure out why it worked.

For these reasons, I'm starting to see the safelane carry role as the best way for somebody new to be introduced to the game. Rather than recruiting your inexperienced friends as ward mules, think about putting them in a position where you don't need them to secure the early game for you. What's more, the role provides a grounding in crucial skills: last hitting and finding farm, awareness of enemy rotations, and adaptive item builds. Whereas most new support players eventually find themselves needing to unlearn their early passivity, new carry players pick up skills that will remain relevant whatever role they subsequently settle on. In order for this to work, however, their experienced friends need to give up their claim to Void, Sven, Luna, Gyrocopter et al.

If you have a friend who is looking to get into Dota, then, try placing them on the safelane as a farming hero. Then, focus on executing strategies that give your team the advantage by the ten minute mark. Make it as easy as possible for your newbie friend to do well, and they'll have more fun - and you'll be playing more modern Dota into the bargain. Everybody wins! Except fifty percent of the time. Fifty percent of the time, you'll probably still lose.

Illustrations by Marsh Davies

All week long, we're peering ahead to what the future holds for the PC gaming industry. Not just the hardware and software in our rigs, but how and where we use them, and how they impact the games we play. Here's part two of our five-part series; stay tuned all week for more from the future of PC gaming.

The future of PC gaming is online. So is the present, actually Twitch livestreams and massive League of Legends tournaments are already integral pieces of the PC gaming community. As the audiences for livestreams and eSports surge over the next few years, our broadband infrastructure's going to be hard-pressed to keep up. Here's our look at what the future holds for online gaming: bigger and better eSports, the culture of livestreaming, and the slow spread of fiber Internet that could hold us back from our gigabit dreams.
Esports: Making hardcore games accessible
By Rob Zacny

Open up Twitch at any time of day or night, and the odds are good that you'll find a competitive gaming stream from somewhere in the world. An insomniac or early-riser might greet the day with an evening StarCraft or League of Legends broadcast from Korea. Take a break from a dull workday, and you might find a Dota 2 tournament in Eastern Europe or a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive match taking place in Sweden or Germany. You can watch the latest matches in Riot's League of Legends Championship Series with dinner, where the best players in Europe and the United States are showcased with production values that rival or surpass some TV broadcasts of more traditional sports.

Esports are global in a way that few traditional sports are. They transcend national borders, language barriers, and markets. They are also defined by their allegiance to hardcore PC gaming. While mainstream gaming was becoming increasingly focused on mass-market blockbusters, eSports celebrated deeper experiences that rewarded skill, commitment, and cooperation. Thanks to eSports, PC gamers around the world can play demanding RTS games, MOBAs, and shooters with a community of millions.



That has had tremendously exciting implications for PC gaming. There was a time, just five or six years ago, when it seemed like high-skill ceilings were about to be permanently lowered in favor of accessibility and mass market appeal. You didn't have to be a professional gamer to be depressed about the disappearance of fast-based twitch shooters in favor of slower, ostensibly more realistic military shooters, or the shrinking RTS genre.

This is always the anxiety behind dumbing-down complaints: some of us want more. You don't have to play games where you spend hours studying build orders, working on tactics, and coordinating with friends. But it's nice to have the option to forge that kind of relationship with a game, where you don't just skim the surface, but dive so deep that you understand how the pieces fit together.

Esports have proved there's a huge audience for that, and one that will reward developers who don't compromise in the name of accessibility. Look no further than the growing success of Dota 2, with its legendarily steep learning curve. Dota 2, like many eSports-focused games, is not a game that rewards its players over a period of months, but years.

That's a big ask for a lot of players, but eSports lower the barrier to entry by showcasing these games at their best, and demystifying what it is that makes them special. Even if you never play a ranked match or compete in a local LAN tournament, you can appreciate and engage with the most advanced gameplay in the world.

And players have responded around the world, proving that high-skill, competitive games have a bright future and a tremendous audience that's hungry for them. But it is a PC-based audience. The PC is the lingua franca of eSports, the only thing that unites these huge, disparate international audiences.



That means PC gaming is likely going to remain the home for these kinds of experiences, and we're going to get more of them. In the last year, Wargaming.net has launched major eSports initiatives to showcase what's possible in World of Tanks. Wargame: European Escalation has been spotlighted by Europe's Electronic Sports League. Between GDC and E3 last year, it sometimes seemed like every developer was trying to keep an eye toward the eSports potential of their upcoming games.

It doesn't really matter whether a game turns into a major eSport on par with CS: GO or Dota 2. Nor does it matter if eSports ever become so massive that they are broadcast in primetime on a cable sports network.

What matters is that eSports celebrate, preserve, and promote some of PC gaming's greatest traditions. In gaming landscape rife with Quicktime Events and meaningless scavenger hunts, eSports show that greatness awaits those who are patient enough to work for it. They ensure that the PC will remain a remain a place where players can earn achievements that don't need a badge or an icon. Esports can and should open up the hardcore to the masses, and the PC is the perfect place for that.
Smile! The game you're playing is live
By Cory Banks

Unless you suffer from debilitating performance anxiety, chances are good that you ve tried livestreaming. Thanks to services such as Twitch and apps like the free Open Broadcasting Software, it s super easy to capture gameplay video or stream your playthrough live on the Internet. Which means the future of PC gaming is a comment room full of viewers, mocking your Hearthstone deck.



Humiliation aside, this near-instant access to people playing games, live right now, means that a game s watchability a word I just made up is just as important as its playability. Esports is the prime example: the importance of a user interface that not only conveys info to the player, but the 300 people watching that player jungle in League of Legends, cannot be overstated. But even non-competitive games will embrace streaming in the future, with brighter colors and cleaner UIs. It s just smart business: YouTubers playing your game is the greatest kind of marketing, and there s no better way to discover or learn a game than to watch someone play it.

Livestreaming will also allow us to enjoy games when we simply can t play them, an important factor as our community matures and responsibilities grow. With a family and a full-time job, you might not have the spare 400 hours to conquer in Europa Universalis IV. That s okay: other streamers will have content ready for you to watch on demand. It s yet another way PC gaming will become more social, in the living room, in eSports, and in front of the camera.
Faster, fiber! Spread! Spread!
By Wes Fenlon

As we venture into the future of PC gaming, with games gobbling up 30 gigabytes in a single download, we need a brave new broadband service to lead us to the land of plenty. A service that casts off the heavy chains of bandwidth caps and delivers Steam games unto us at the rate of a gigabit per second. A service with a name that inspires hope, and awe, and salvation. It shall be known as...fiber.

Fiber Internet will shepherd us into this new age of high speed bliss. At least, fiber will lead a chosen, geographically privileged few to affordable gigabit (1024 megabit) connections. 2014 and 2015 will be big years for fiber rollout in the US, but Google Fiber and Verizon FiOS two of the best-known fiber services are, combined, only available in two dozen US cities.

The city count is increasing, but slowly. Google Fiber is launching in Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah in 2014, and AT&T has already launched a competing fiber service in Austin.



Some cities, like Chattanooga, Tennessee, have taken matters into their own hands by building public-owned fiber networks. Gigabit Internet costs $70 per month in Chattanooga. If you're not in the mood to cry, don't compare the price-per-megabit to what you're currently paying your ISP.

More cities plan to follow Chattanooga's lead. If those plans bear out, select gamers will have access to incredible download speeds without dealing with Big Cable.

The future doesn't look as bright for the rest of us. A January 2014 court decision overturned the FCC's net neutrality regulations, theoretically making it possible for companies like Comcast and Verizon to prioritize traffic on their networks. This could have a very real effect on PC gamers. Comcast could charge bandwidth-heavy services like Twitch a premium for reliable access to gamers--in other words, an Internet fastlane.

There's more bad news. Netflix's monthly ISP reports indicate that US service providers deliver an average throughput of less than 2 mbps during prime hours. Most online games even big ones like Battlefield 4 require deceptively little bandwidth, and a steady 2 mbps should keep the bullets flying lag-free. But streaming and cloud gaming demand more bandwidth and rock-solid reliability.

Twitch requires a bitrate of 1.8 - 2.5 mbps, higher than the average throughput Netflix reported for US providers. Nvidia GRID, Nvidia's take on cloud gaming (think OnLive), recommends a 10 mbps connection.

One more downer: Comcast is bringing back the bandwidth cap in seven states, testing the waters with a 300 gigabyte monthly limit. A weekend of heavy Steam downloading and constant streaming could easily blow through that limit.

We need fiber to meet the rising demands of livestreaming and cloud gaming. It's the future of broadband in the United States, and it's expanding, slow and sure. As sci-fi author William Gibson would say, the future simply isn't evenly distributed yet.

Welcome to Three Lane Highway, Chris' new weekly column about Dota 2.

Sand King is - like Lich, Axe, and, I like to think, Phoenix - a gentleman's hero. Characters with a lot of early and midgame potential are key to setting the pace of the match, and if your team is snowballing off the back of a few crucial early kills then it's likely that someone like Sand King was involved. Opting to play Sand King is a declaration that you are a team player; that you will buy wards and smoke; that first blood will be secured with a reliable two second stun and the sound - distant, like thunder - of somebody listening to Darude.

Sand King is a gentleman's hero. He's also a giant talking scorpion who sounds like somebody strapped a subwoofer to Vincent Price, but you take what you can get.

What does someone's favourite hero say about their preferences, values, or outlook? What does it mean that Sand King is Gabe Newell's personal pick? Moreover, what does all of this mean for Valve? I submit to you: it means something. It means stuff. It certainly doesn't mean nothing. The premise of this inaugural Dota 2 column has unshakable foundations. If you disagree, that's fine, good for you. Here is a review of a processor.

Let's get started, then. I am going to do this as a list, because (a) somebody told me that you loved lists and (b) I am lazy.

His lore
Sand King is the avatar of a magic, sentient desert. He isn't simply the king of sand - he is sand, trapped inside armour that happens to look a bit like a scorpion. His is a singular identity expressed by a much broader collective consciousness. To my mind this is a little like Gabe's relationship with Valve, and, more broadly, like Valve's relationship with the Steam community.

The concept of 'GabeN' is nothing more or less than the expression of the gaming community's sometimes ironic, sometimes earnest need for leadership - leadership that Valve traditionally withholds. Valve will always stress that they work to empower others, to solve short term problems, and to respond to the vast amounts of data they gather from the Steam community. They are a company without job titles, and they claim no titles for themselves.

But the vast majority of human beings like and respect leadership - they want people to thank or blame, not philosophies. Hence GabeN, deliverer of cheap games and withholder of Half-Life 3. The sturdy but capricious ruler of PC gaming, a kingdom that is in reality comprised of innumerable, infinitesimally small and diffuse parts. A king, as it were, of sand.

His attributes
Sand King is a melee support hero and his primary attribute is strength. This places him in a class of character that also includes Earthshaker, Undying, Treant Protector and Omniknight. Strength supports are a little more gold-dependent than their intelligence counterparts due to their low mana and reliance on distance-closing items like Blink Dagger.

This suggests that even as Gabe is working to buy wards, smoke and courier upgrades for his team he must also be careful to find gold for himself. Risks are fine - even encouraged, when it comes to securing first blood - but these risks must be grounded in solid principles. Overextending for its own sake, dying and losing money is a disaster for Sand King. A good support wants to maximise efficiency for everybody. This means both moving constantly and moving reliably, and not everybody is able to balance the two. This mirrors Valve's own attitude to risk, particularly when it comes to tinkering with Steam. Wow, did it get hot in here? These analogies are on fire.

Strength heroes are the sturdiest characters in Dota 2 because they gain both hitpoints and damage with every point in their primary attribute. These are the two stats that really count, at the end of the day, because if you're dead it doesn't matter how big your mana pool is. Gabe's choice of a strength hero indicates that he believes that ideas, companies and people should be able to withstand attrition at a fundamental level. Dreaming big is great, but it needs to be backed up by proven durability.

The trade-off, however, is that tiny mana reserve. Gabe has powerful spells, but he has to use them at exactly the right time or not use them at all. A strength support hero is a continual presence, but action must be taken decisively. This is probably the best explanation for why Half-Life 3 is taking so long: Valve have run out of mana, they've been buying all the wards, and they haven't had time to save up for arcane boots. If you cared, you'd pool them some clarities.

His skills
Sand King is versatile, but the way his skills mesh with one another won't necessarily be apparent to a new player. Let's break them down one by one.

Burrowstrike is classic Valve. It's both a disable, a nuke, and - potentially - an escape, packing tonnes of utility for a modest mana cost. It is more or less effective depending on the skill of the user, but is fundamentally reliable in a way that makes it powerful in the hands of anybody. It can be the spearpoint of an assault or a way of following up on somebody else's initiation; a platform for capitalising on others' success or a means to experiment with new strategies. Burrowstrike is, in short, the Team Fortress 2 of Dota abilities.

Sand Storm is what happens if you use the word 'vision' or 'plan' in an interview with a senior Valve employee. A whirling shroud of avant-garde thinking appears, concealing the man or woman at its centre. Somebody will use the word 'feedback', and almost certainly also the word 'creators'. Then, 'network'. Well-meaning journalists, in this scenario, take anywhere from 25 to 100 damage per second. There's someone in there somewhere, you might think, as your naive writerly dreams erode and crumble. Why didn't I bring sentry wards?

Caustic Finale is an oddity. Some don't invest in it at all, because causing creeps to explode on death is a great way to screw up lane equilibrium. Use it right, however, and that 220 bonus damage at level four can be enough to turn a teamfight. Its inconsistency reflects Valve's work to empower Steam users: sometimes, they explode with creativity! Other times, they explode in a shower of ASCII dicks.

Epicenter. Two seconds of channeling followed by an earthquake that slows movement and attack speed and deals huge damage in a massive radius. You can't ignore it, and you can't escape it. It is a Steam Sale, a new game announcement, and a seasonal Dota event rolled into one. Pulled off perfectly, a good Epicenter shakes the enemy team apart and showers Valve's partners in assist gold. Let's all take a moment to think about serious business people tumbling around their boardrooms while a man bellows 'wombo combo', because that is a fun thing to think about. The problem with Epicenter is that is highly vulnerable to cancellation during the channeling phase. Here's looking at you, Ricochet 2.

It also requires Gabe to pick up a Blink Dagger, but that's no big deal. What's another knife?

Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes earnest, sometimes silly column about Dota 2. Originally a Tumblr blog, it's now part of PC Gamer proper.

The International, Valve's annual Dota 2 tournament, is one of the largest gaming events in the world, a celebration of Steam's most-played game that last year took over a symphony hall in Seattle. A report at onGamers, citing sources from eSports teams and officials, indicates that this year's event will move from July from August, and according to Valve's Gabe Newell, may take over a sports stadium.

"We haven't finalized where this year's International will be," Newell wrote Tuesday during his Reddit AMA. "We are pretty sure it will be at Key Arena in Seattle, but we haven't gotten everything finalized, and there is always a risk that our schedules and theirs won't align in some way. As soon as we get everything finalized one way or another, we'll get the dates out there for everyone who would like to attend. Should be fun this year."

Key Arena hosts concerts and sports events and was the home of Seattle's former NBA team, the SuperSonics. With a potential capacity of more than 17,000 seats, depending on the event, the arena would be a massive upgrade in size from the Benaroya Hall setting of previous tournaments. In any case, it's looking like an especially packed summer for competitive Dota 2 teams, as we've known for months now that the MLG Spring Championship in Anaheim annually one of the year's biggest eSports events will take place June 20-22. Another large Dota 2 tournament, held by the Electronic Sports League, is also set to take place at the end of June in Frankfurt, Germany.

The onGamers report also quotes anonymous Major League Gaming sources that say the dense schedule for competitive Dota 2 has them reconsidering plans to feature the game in Anaheim due to the stress on players and teams. Based on the tournament schedule above, the training schedule must be grueling. But there's a lot on the line: the pot for last year's International was a staggering $1.6 million.

Additional reporting by Tyler Wilde.

Valve s Gabe Newell did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit today, answering scores of community questions and no, not revealing that he has a build of Half-Life 3 hidden in a volcano lair. If you're hearing otherwise, one user edited his (now deleted) question to include Half-Life 3 and create the appearance that Newell confirmed it. Nope. He did, however, talk about Source 2, Steam, CS: GO, and Dota 2, as well as answer a question vaguely related to HL3 in the form of a question about Ricochet 2.

The biggest news is that Valve is working on making Steam "a self-publishing system," something Newell hinted at during Steam Dev Days when he announced that Steam Greenlight is going away. Before Greenlight, Valve "got bottle-necked pretty fast on tools and decision making," says Newell. That led to Greenlight, and is now leading the company toward self-publishing.

When asked about Linux, Newell agreed that it's probably the future of gaming and desktops. He reiterated that Valve will not release any Steam OS exclusives, but he does think that all Steam games will eventually run on Linux/Steam OS, and says there has been surprisingly little problem getting developers to add Linux compatibility.

He also notes that Valve is making progress on lower cost Steam Boxes for streaming, and that Counter Strike: Global Offensive for Linux is being worked on, but there s no ETA.

In the category of personal tastes, Newell s favorite non-Valve game is Mario 64. Dota 2 is currently his favorite game and he plays about 20 hours a week his favorite hero is Sand King and yes, he has been yelled at by a teammate before.

Here's a selection of some of Newell's other interesting answers:
On Ricochet 2 (a supposed sequel to Ricochet that's often jokingly used to refer to Half-Life 3) not being announced: When we announced our products years in advance in the past and then were really late delivering them, it was pretty painful for both us and the community. We'd rather not repeat that.
On what improvements we ll see in in Source 2 engine: The biggest improvements will be in increasing productivity of content creation. That focus is driven by the importance we see UGC having going forward. A professional developer at Valve will put up with a lot of pain that won't work if users themselves have to create content.
His vision for Steam in the next ten years: I'm not trying to dodge the question, but we find it more useful to think in terms of feedback loops than in terms of visions/goals. Iterating with the community means that your near-term objectives change all the time. The key benefit to Steam is to shorten the length of the loop. Longer term, we see that working at the level of individual gamers, where we think of everyone as creating and publishing experience. "How can we make gamers more productive" sounds weird, but is an accurate way to characterize where we're going. It may make more sense if you think of it as "How can we make Dendi more entertaining to more people."
On SteamOS and Valve s core audience: We see Steam Machines (along with Steam OS and the Steam Controller) as a service update to Steam, porting the experience to a new room in the house. As we've been working on it, we've focused first on the customers who already love Steam and its games. They've told us they're tired of giving up all the stuff they love when they sit in the living room, so it seemed valuable to fix that.
On Valve s VR being light years ahead of the original Oculus Rift dev kit: I'm not sure I'd agree with that. We are collaborating with them, and want their hardware to be great.
On the future of eSports: We still think we have a long way to go to get to the point where all of the different people that are contributing value to competitive play get everything out of it that they should. Feels like we are making pretty good progress though.
Giving the consumers of content a direct relationship with the creators of content is something we think about a lot. That is what drove our thinking about how the community could be more involved in the tournaments that mattered to them.
About his collaboration with JJ Abrams: The main thing is that when we talk with him it's like talking with someone who works at Valve. That's not usually the case with people from the film industry.
About Valve accepting cryptocurrency (Bitcoin): There are two related issues: one is treating a crypto-currency as another currency type that we support and the broader issue is monetary behaviors of game economies. The first issue is more about crypto-currencies stabilizing as mediums of account.
On why the company is named Valve: Because it was better than Rhino Scar.