Patch 7.36b is out now. You can check out the patchnotes here.

Additionally, a few bugs were fixed over the last several days:

• Fixed various hotkey issues
  
• Fixed Shield Rune buff not having an icon
  
• Roshan's attacks no longer instantly kill Shadow Shaman's Mass Serpent Wards and Massive Serpent Ward. Instead, Roshan's attacks are treated as Hero attacks
  
• Fixed Arc Warden's Tempest Double taking more damage than intended
  
• Fixed Beastmaster's Level 20 Talent Max Health Aura to Beastmaster and his units applying to couriers in certain circumstances
  
• Fixed Broodmother's Spin Web having less cast range than intended if it touches another web
  
• Fixed Death Prophet's Silence having some unintended interactions
  
• Fixed Dragon Knight's Frost Dragon Wyrm's Wrath unintentionally applying its effect to buildings
  
• Fixed Drow Ranger's Multishot being canceled by casting Glacier
  
• Fixed Faceless Void's Time Zone crediting assists incorrectly
  
• Fixed Huskar's Life Break in combination with Parting Shot occasionally causing players to be unable to issue commands
  
• Fixed Invoker's Elitist passively granting spell amp without applying the debuff first
  
• Fixed Invoker's Mastermind not granting experience
  
• Fixed Leshrac's Nihilism not getting affected by Defilement & other AoE increases
  
• Fixed Lina's Flame Cloak not refreshing Fiery Soul's duration if cast while at max Fiery Soul stacks
  
• Fixed Lina's Laguna Blade with Level 25 Talent Laguna Blade Damage into barrier not granting barrier from Slow Burn damage
  
• Fixed Lycan's Spirit Wolves sometimes being controllable
  
• Fixed Morphling's Attribute Shift bar being misaligned
  
• Fixed Muerta's Ofrenda being stealable
  
• Fixed Shadow Demon with Shadow Servant being able to create infinite duration illusions if Reins of Chaos procced upon casting Disruption on a Chaos Knight
  
• Fixed Techies' Spleen's Secret Sauce not dealing the correct amount of damage
  
• Fixed Undying's Ceaseless Dirge sometimes causing Undying to be unable to issue commands
  
• Fixed Venomancer's Patient Zero dealing more damage than intended
  
• Fixed Warlock's Black Grimoire not swapping when players swapped heroes in game
  
• Fixed Witch Doctor's Gris-Gris not swapping when players swapped heroes in game

Between a massive 7.36 update and Act II of Crownfall, there were a lot of big announcements vying for your attention last week, so we decided to give everybody a few days to process everything before we posted any more big Dota news. But now a new week is upon us, and we're happy to turn our focus from the in-game experience to pro Dota, with the the announcement of the six direct invites to this year's The International!

Read on for that unveiling, as well as details on the qualifying road for those still fighting to earn the last ten spots in Copenhagen.

From Dubai to Birmingham to Bucharest and beyond, the year has been packed with top-tier Dota tournaments. Befitting their dominant performances across the year so far, we're happy to invite the following teams directly to The International 2024:

• Team Spirit
  [expand type=details]
  Illya "Yatoro" Mulyarchuk
  Denis "Larl" Sigitov
  Magomed "Collapse" Khalilov
  Myroslav "Mira" Kolpakov
  Yaroslav "Miposhka" Naidenov[/expand]
  
• Xtreme Gaming
  [expand type=details]
  Wang "Ame" Chunyu
  Guo "Xm" Hongcheng
  Lin "Xxs" Jing
  Zhao "XinQ" Zixing
  Ding "Dy" Cong[/expand]
  
• Team Falcons
  [expand type=details]
  Oliver "skiter" Lepko
  Stanislav "Malr1ne" Potorak
  Ammar "ATF" Al-Assaf
  Andreas "Cr1t-" Nielsen
  Wu "Sneyking" Jingjun[/expand]
  
• Team Liquid
  [expand type=details]
  Michael "miCKe" Vu
  Michał "Nisha" Jankowski
  Neta "33" Shapira
  Samuel "Boxi" Svahn
  Aydin "Insania" Sarkohi[/expand]
  
• Gaimin Gladiators
  [expand type=details]
  Anton "dyrachyo" Shkredov
  Quinn "Quinn" Callahan
  Marcus "Ace" Hoelgaard
  Erik "tOfu" Engel
  Melchior "Seleri" Hillenkamp[/expand]
  
• BetBoom Team
  [expand type=details]
  Egor "Nightfall" Grigorenko
  Danil "gpk" Skutin
  Matvey "MieRo`" Vasyunin
  Vitalie "Save-" Melnic
  Alexander "TORONTOTOKYO" Khertek[/expand]

The remaining ten slots will be awarded to those worthy teams able to battle through the daunting Regional Qualifiers, with the final slot breakdown and dates for each region set as follows:

• China and North America - June 9th to 13th
  [expand type=details]
  China (2 slots)
  Azure Ray
  G2.iG
  LGD Gaming
  Team Bright
  Team Zero
  Dark Horse
  (+6 teams from Open Qualifiers)
  
  North America (1 slot)
  Shopify Rebellion
  Nouns
  La Correntada
  (+5 teams from Open Qualifiers)[/expand]
  
• Eastern Europe + South America - June 14th to 18th
  [expand type=details]
  Eastern Europe (1 slot)
  Natus Vincere
  Virtus.pro
  1win
  L1GA TEAM
  Night Pulse
  Nemiga Gaming
  One Move
  Yellow Submarine
  9Pandas
  (+3 teams from Open Qualifiers)
  
  South America (2 slots)
  HEROIC
  beastcoast
  BOOM Esports
  Midas Club
  Infinity
  Leviatán
  (+6 teams from Open Qualifiers)[/expand]
  
• Southeast Asia + Western Europe - June 19th to 23rd
  [expand type=details]
  Southeast Asia (2 slots)
  Aurora
  Blacklist International
  Talon Esports
  Neon Esports
  Execration
  Bleed Esports
  MANTA Esports
  Salvation Gaming
  (+4 teams from Open Qualifiers)
  
  Western Europe (2 slots)
  Tundra Esports
  PSG Quest
  OG
  Team Secret
  Entity
  MOUZ
  NAVI Junior
  Nigma Galaxy
  Rest Farmers
  JustBetter
  (+2 teams from Open Qualifiers)[/expand]

For those of you now making plans to spectate or compete in said qualifiers, we've also got some important dates to keep in mind. The Road to The International will officially kick off with Open Qualifiers for all six regions June 3rd to 8th, followed by the Regional Qualifiers as described above.

Once all the initial dust has settled and the tournament field has been filled out, the Road to the International will continue when all sixteen teams meet in Copenhagen. The two-day Group Stage will commence Wednesday, September 4th, immediately followed by the five-day Playoffs, a studio production that will run through Tuesday, September 10th,

The International itself will be held in Copenhagen's Royal Arena, with the top eight teams slated to take the main stage from Friday, September 13th through Sunday, September 15th. Fans hoping to attend in person will be able to purchase tickets starting Monday, June 10th. Set your reminders now, and we'll see you when qualifiers start next Monday, June 3rd.

Patch 7.36a is out now. You can check out the patchnotes here.

Additionally, a few non-gameplay bugs were fixed:

• Fixed Some Crownfall empty dialog lines
  
• Fixed Crownfall paths changing their token requirements
  
• Fixed Dragon Knight Griffin Knight set having Facet-based coloration swapped
  
• Fixed various issues with cloth stretching
  
• Fixed watching replays from Broadcaster perspective not displaying heroes
  
• Fixed an issue with post-match rewards being delayed
  
• Fixed Crownfall Pit Fighter encounter dialog
  
• Fixed Crownfall Fishing Spear not being available
  
• Fixed Crownfall Graphical issue with Pineapple clickable on Crownfall map
  
• Fixed Crownfall Graphical issue with Questing Hearts sign not showing
  
• Fixed issue with Act 2's Riki's attribute token being wrong type

People have been asking about it. They've been waiting for it. They've been guessing for months what would be in it. And now... we're finally shipping it.

That's right: Crownfall Act II's fishing game is LIVE!

For those of you who didn't just die of adrenaline shock, we also shipped a massive new gameplay patch, which you might want to read up on. Go find out more about 7.36 here.

We also shipped the second part of Crownfall, this time taking place in the unforgiving deserts of Druud. There's a new overworld map, a new story, some new characters (and some familiar favorites), new cosmetic items, new minigames, and more than a few surprises.

Lastly, in case you got busy last month (it happens) and were wondering if you'll still be able to play Crownfall Act I now that Act II's shipped: You can. All of Crownfall's acts will be available as new acts come online, up to the conclusion of the event.

OK, that's probably enough fishing and fishing-adjacent (7.36, Crownfall Act II) news for one update. What are you waiting for? Boot up the game and get angling!

We announced Dota Labs a couple months ago, and since then we've continued to iterate quietly on the features in it as we get feedback and data. "Quietly" is fine, but sometimes it can be useful to be a bit louder so today we're turning up the volume a little:

• We're happy to announce the first promotion of a Dota Labs option out of Labs and into the game itself: high-visibility hero health bars, under Options -> Interface.
  
• Over the last weeks (and today), we've shipped a variety of updates to the other features, including additional controls for the overlay map, new data in the pre-match analytics, and the ability to treat targeting modifier keys as toggles rather than holds.
  
• Lastly, because we've gotten so many useful submissions from the Feedback button built into the Crownfall map, we've added one to the Dota Labs UI as well.

As always, please continue to tell us which parts of the still in-development Labs features you like and which you think need improvement.

Our community of artists have also been hard at work. Hundreds of item sets have been lovingly crafted, lovingly polished, and lovingly uploaded to the Workshop, and now it's up to you, the Dota community, to lovingly vote on which ones you'd like to see in the next Collector's Cache!

In the spirit of Dota Labs experimentation, this time voting is open to everyone. From the dashboard, simply click the Collector's Cache Voting button and then upvote or downvote the sets you're the most passionate about. Voting runs from now until May 21st, with the most popular sets getting released as part of a future Crownfall update.

Over the last few days since Crownfall's release we've addressed the following issues:

• Fixed the match history Dota Plus rank change column sometimes displaying zero change for matches where a Ranked Double Down token was used. (The correct rank change was recorded on the server, this was just a display issue.)
  
• Fixed Crownfall Ranked Double Down tokens beyond the first not being correctly granted. Missing tokens have been granted to all affected accounts.
  
• Fixed voice chat indicators not appearing for some players.
  
• Fixed the in-game Ranked Double Down button not appearing for some players.
  
• Fixed a bug allowing Shadow Demon to level up his ultimate outside of the correct level points.
  
• Fixed the Demo Hero mode Target Dummy being unintentionally killable.
  
• Fixed a bug in the combat log that caused an additional tower killed message to be printed along with tower deny messages.
  
• Fixed a bug in the combat log that caused barracks kills by creeps being attributed to a player.
  
• Fixed a bug in the combat log that incorrectly showed no gold being given to all players when barracks were killed by creeps.
  
• Fixed models shown in loadout or pregame screens not always using the highest quality rendering options.
  
• Fixed missing visual effects for heroes with the Aviana's Feather neutral item.
  
• Fixed the Crownfall Snake Charmer encounter to also grant credit when you play two Turbo games.
  
• Fixed the Crownfall Snake Charmer encounter not greeting players the first time you open it.
  
• Fixed some minor visual issues with the Drow Ranger The Finer Points taunt.

For over a decade now, Skywrath Mage and Vengeful Spirit have been ambiguously entwined. Eagle-eyed players noticed that they come from the same town, seem to have related backstories, and might even be dating. Pretty mysterious stuff.

Earlier, we dropped a comic that solved those mysteries, but introduced an even bigger one: "Why are you posting comics instead of updates?"

We can now reveal the answer: Because we've just released The Markets of Midgate, the first act of an ongoing story event called Crownfall, filled with legendary heroes and unique rewards. In this act alone, you can expect dozens of new cosmetic sets, taunts, creeps, emoticons... are we forgetting anything? Oh right, and two brand-new Arcana, one for each of Crownfall's main characters.

So what is Crownfall? It's something completely new that we've wanted to try for a while. And when we say new, we mean new— a new way of telling stories, offering rewards, and making it more fun to win every game of Dota. And it's available right now to all Dota players for free.

Honestly, it's a little hard to describe in a tiny blog post. But luckily, the description is exactly website-sized. Go read the details here. Or, if you'd rather just play instead of hearing us describe it, boot up the game and enter the world of Crownfall for yourself.

A young princess, betrayed by her sister on the day of her ascension. Her wings torn from her body.

Thrown from the highest tower of the Ghastly Eyrie. Left for dead. Found by a god. Turned into a spirit of vengeance.

A Skywrath Mage, sworn to serve the murderer of his beloved. His life and powers forfeit should he betray his captor. Waiting for his moment. To avenge the one he loves.

A dying god. Starved of followers by an evil Queen. Wasting in the ruins of a condemned temple. The last of her powers leaving her. One last chance at revenge.

Vengeance is coming. The Flightless will rise.

A crown will fall.

• 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.

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.