Mar 5, 2024

Shape Shifter: Formations - Castec Studios

Hey Everyone,

Hope you're all doing well. Update 2 is now available, introducing new challenging Prime Bosses, and rare but powerful Artifact upgrades. We've also included multiple Ships/Weapon/Upgrades, alongside many bug fixes and tweaks.

Key Features

Prime Bosses
Artifact Upgrades (10 As of now with more to come later.)
New Boss/Enemy/Arena
2 New Ships
3 New Weapons
7 New Upgrades

This is just a quick summary, the full patch notes will be listed below. Thank you for your continued support!

Castec

Additions/Changes

Prime Bosses - These bosses are more difficult variants of each boss that have an increasing chance to spawn based on your current threat level, and require the base version of the boss to be defeated at least once. Defeating these bosses rewards you with Prime Cores, which are required to unlock Artifact Upgrades.
Artifacts - These are a new tier of items, that are above legendary items. These are unique, un-stackable items and extremely rare, but provide very strong effects. These can be unlocked in the Artifacts menu, in exchange for Prime Cores. Prime Cores are earned by defeating prime bosses, and are also awarded once per run if you successfully beat the Octagonopus.
New Boss/Arena/Enemy added. This arena is unlocked by defeating the Block-Buster 3 times. After being unlocked, it will be randomly selected each run as an alternate to the square arena. This arena has its own unique boss and enemy type.
New Ship - FLASH - Active: Null-Strike - Dash in the direction you're moving and damage all enemies you pass through. Triggers all "On Dodge" effects. Passive: Every enemy hit by your ability reduces your dodge cooldown by 0.5 seconds.
New Ship - IMPULSE - Active: Drains 25% of your current health, based on the health lost, fire up to 5 explosive projectiles at nearby enemies. Passive: Deal increasing damage the lower your health gets.
New Weapon - Energy Blade - A fast attacking melee weapon, which fires out projectiles when at max health.
New Weapon - Frost Spear - A medium speed melee weapon, which pierces through all enemies in a line. Applies frost on hit.
New Weapon - Caustic Glaive - A slow, powerful melee weapon with wide arcing swings. Applies corrosion on hit.
New Upgrade - Quicksilver - Artifact - Triggers on dodge effects both at the start and end of your dodges. +1 dodge charges.
New Upgrade - Replicator - Artifact - Doubles all projectiles but reduces base weapon damage.
New Upgrade - Ascendancy - Artifact - Provides permanent random stats every time you level up.
New Upgrade - Twist of Fate - Artifact - Provides a large number of free rerolls, item locks, and banishes.
New Upgrade - Subsistence - Artifact - Doubles all healing received when below 50% health. Restores 1 health per second.
New Upgrade - Void Rift - Artifact - Drains a percentage of all nearby enemies health rapidly, but also drains your own at a slower rate.
New Upgrade - Devastation - Artifact - Increases the strength and size of all your explosions.
New Upgrade - Evolution - Artifact - Periodically adds a stack to one of your upgrades, chosen randomly.
New Upgrade - Malleable - Artifact - Permanently reduces the experience required to level.
New Upgrade - Order - Artifact - Rerolls all your upgrades to match your current ship tags, if their rarity allows it.
New Upgrade - Evasive Volley - Legendary - When dodging, fire out multiple projectiles that target nearby enemies.
New Upgrade - Cheat Death - Legendary - If you would die, reduce your health to 1. Must recharge before activating again.
New Upgrade - Blitz Manuever - Epic - When dodging, increase fire rate and extra shot chance for a short duration.
New Upgrade - Crisis Nova - Epic - When reaching or taking damage at low health, trigger a large explosion around you. Recharges every few seconds.
New Upgrade - Backdraft - Rare - After dodging, fires a burning trail behind you that applies burn to all enemies hit.
New Upgrade - Active Recharge - Rare - Reduce ability cooldown by 1 second per stack.
New Upgrade - Full Power - Uncommon - Healing to full health instantly cools down your ability.
New Skill - Strategic Synergy - Your first X level ups will always provide tagged upgrades if the rarity given allows it.
Adjusted the look of cards in the co-op level up menu to improve readability.
Added a new unlocks screen at the end of each run.
You can now save your run by interacting with a new portal at the end of each level, this can be continued from the main menu at any time. You may only have one run saved at a time.
Added indicators on the ship selection screen to show when higher threat levels have been beaten with each ship/weapon. A new pip is added every 10 threat levels beaten.
Added more detailed descriptions for ships and weapons.
Improved the way aim assist is handled for manual aiming. It is now enabled by default, but can be disabled in the Settings->Accessibility menu.
Added an option in the to keep the stats/upgrades tabs always visible when in any menus. This can be changed via "Settings->Gameplay->Always Show Stat Tabs"
Added damaged models for bosses which did not currently have them.
Added multiple new SFX for boss and enemy attacks.
Added new SFX when ability has cooled down to differentiate between player 1 and 2.

Bug Fixes

Prevented a fatal crash on start-up by changing the way player statistics are saved.
Fixed a bug where locking an upgrade and then rerolling could cause some upgrades to be replaced.
Fixed a bug where the triangle enemies could increase their speed when affected by frost.
Fixed a bug where the Combat Manuever upgrade could reduce damage incorrectly when gaining/losing stacks while it is active.
Fixed an issue where some upgrades wouldn't function correctly if you selected them multiple times in the same level up window.
Fixed a bug where it was possible to get stuck on the stats or upgrade lists when levelling up. (Hopefully, we haven't been able to recreate this since but please let us know if it crops up again)
Fixed an issue where aim could snap to an incorrect angle when firing close to walls when targeting with a mouse.
Fixed an issue where lifetime stats were not being updated unless the run was a win.
Fixed an issue where the lifetime high score was not including your multiplier for the run.
When using manual level ups, the icon should be correctly displayed when you have level ups available.
Fixed a bug where the Octagonopus' rotation would snap at the start of some attacks.
Fixed an issue where the Octagonopus was firing projectiles from missing tentacles at the wrong rotation when spinning.
Fixed an issue where the Demolisher upgrade was not correctly applying its damage bonus to the Octagonopus in phase 1
Fixed an issue where status effect VFX were not showing correctly on some enemies.
Fixed an issue where the top run cards were showing incorrect ship icons.
Fixed a bug where multiple of the same upgrade could appear on one level up screen in rare conditions.
Fixed an issue where prime enemies were not updating their beam locations correctly on the Pyramind boss.
Fixed an issue where it was possible to navigate to the stat/upgrades tabs as the level up menu was closing.
Fixed an issue where the chain lightning weapon was benefiting twice from extra shot chance.
Fixed an issue where you weren't able to navigate the ship selection screen with WASD.
Fixed a rare crash that could occur when using any chain lighting effects.

Balance Changes

Rerolling upgrades when levelling up now also reroills item rarities
Spark Drive (Uncommon Passive) - Increased damage dealt from 25->35
Combat Manoeuvre (Rare Passive) - Damage bonus increased from 10%->15%.
Thunderstep (Epic Passive) - The damaging pool is now left at the end of your dodge, rather than the start. Radius increased from 1.5m->2m
Splinter Salvo (Epic Passive) - No longer increases the number of projectiles fired. Now increases the damage of each shot per stack. Adjusted projectile travel speed/lifetime for clarity.
Shatter (Epic Passive) - Damage increased from 75%->100%
Shock (Status Effect) - Overload now deal damage equal to the amount of shock applied. This way any excess shock stacks over 100 are converted into extra damage for the overload explosion.
Chain Lightning (Weapon) - Damage is now applied instantly rather than after a short delay for the first tick.
Increased the health scaling on enemies from loop 3 onwards.
Slightly increased boss health scaling in endless mode.
Slightly decreased the hitbox of the electric walls threat modifier.

Mar 5, 2024

Dota Plus Update — Spring 2024 (And Dota Labs)

Dota 2 - ericl_*****

Dota Plus Seasonal Update

As Spring blooms to life around us, it transports us here on the Dota team to the springs of yore, when the world was new and vibrant. Who could forget climbing that old oak tree by the bridge? Or stealing carrots and turnips from cranky old Farmer Maggot? Or taking that ring to Mordor, and casting it into the fiery pits of Mount Doom where it was forged?

Dota Plus Seasonal Treasure

That last part of our spring memory trilogy is especially relevant today, since we’ve uncovered another priceless treasure. And this time it’s too good to throw into a volcano.

The Spring 2024 Seasonal Treasure is here and available for purchase with shards. This treasure features all new sets for Disruptor, Dark Willow, Spectre, Chaos Knight, Doom, Earth Spirit, Underlord, and Nyx Assassin. There's also a chance to unlock the Sir Molestach Irondrill courier, who arrives in the lanes bearing random prismatic and ethereal gems.

We've also taken sets that were available in the Summer Treasure 2022 and made them available for direct purchase for 15,000 shards each as part of the collection of legacy sets in the Shard Shop.

Updated Seasonal Quests & Guild Rewards

Today’s update also comes with a new set of Dota Plus quests to shore up your shard stash for new relics and the Seasonal Treasure — offering up to 115,200 shards over the course of the season. Guild rewards have also been updated, making new emoticons, sprays, and chat wheels available to high-scoring guilds.

Guild Tier

Rewards

Silver

Emoticon - lion_bounce
Emoticon - rainbow_phoenix
Emoticon - riki_peaceout

Gold

Spray - Aghanim - Push
Spray - Bounty Hunter - Riches
Spray - Hoodwink - Acorn

Platinum

Chat Wheel - "Что это?! Какая жесть!"
Chat Wheel - "Ooooh, por dios!"
Chat Wheel - "你行你行，你上你上"

Introducing Dota Labs

In addition to the Dota+ content, today's update introduces a set of experimental features available to all Dota players, and a new way for us to ship experiments like them: Dota Labs. (We had fun coming with names like "Unstable Concoctions" and "Tinker's Tinkerings" but ultimately decided we'd rather have the name be boring and clear and the features themselves be interesting.)

If you load up your options menu, you'll see a new tab with the Dota Labs label. Features here are experimental, and less polished than many other features we ship, so they're all in a special menu and disabled by default. These are features where our playtesting has produced mixed or ambiguous data. We can't really know if they're good or how to make them better without seeing real Dota players using them, so we're shipping them in an earlier form on purpose so you can tell us whether they're worth continuing to invest in.

The initial set of Dota Labs features includes:

Overlay Map. It's sort of just like the minimap, but it's large instead of small, and transparent instead of solid, and is full-screen instead of being isolated to the corner. We have a bunch of questions, including but not limited to: Is it helpful for your playstyle? How do you interact with it? What do you wish it did?
Modifier Key Filter Bindings. Targeting commands in chaotic environments can be challenging, and misclicks can be devastating. Dota does the best it can with your inputs, but sometimes it really does look like you wanted to Laguna Blade that creep. This new feature allows you bind modifier keys that, when held, will force your target selection to enemies, allies, creeps or heroes. Which targeting methods are the most and least useful in practice? What are we missing?
High-Visibility Local Hero Healthbar. Dota teamfights can be hectic, and sometimes in the chaos it's hard to keep track of your hero. This option significantly changes the styling and readability of only your hero's nameplate. Does this help, or does it introduce even more visual chaos?

We fully expect that some of these features (or future Dota Labs ideas) will mature and graduate out, while others may be retired. Which are which depends on you.

Some of you reading this are probably excited about trying these features out, but worried about whether we'll continue to use them moving forward. "The last time you introduced a new named Dota thing, you called it Between the Lanes, and it's been some months since you last posted one of those." You're right! We figure the best way to make the point that we're planning to continue to invest long-term here is to continue to invest long-term there as well, so: Enjoy today's Between the Lanes as well.

Mar 5, 2024

Between the Lanes: Denying Denial of Service

Dota 2 - kyled

Welcome back to Between the Lanes, a blog feature where members of our development team walk through some of the challenges, bugfixes, and occasional happy accidents we encounter while working on a game as unique as Dota.

This is a story about the internet, and how it doesn’t work like it should, when it works at all, except when it doesn’t. It’s a story about how the internet stopped working for our customers, and how we fixed it.

The internet is more of a wild frontier than we give it credit for being. Stray from the safe confines of your two-factor identification and trusted cookies, and it can be a bit of a wilderness out there, full of random trolls with the maliciousness—and, increasingly, the ability—to make your life pretty miserable for no other reason than because they can.

Back in 2014, the method those trolls were using was distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. “Distributed” refers to a large number of internet hosts maliciously flooding a particular target IP with traffic in an effort to overwhelm the network stack. This is called a volumetric attack, and the intent isn’t to try to get into the network. It’s just trying to deny service. A distributed denial of service means that legitimate people who want legitimate service are crowded out by the bad traffic.

The problem with DDoS attacks was that, by late 2014, they weren’t being committed by data-exfiltrating super-hackers with advanced computer science degrees. They were being committed by just about anybody who wanted to pay a service or a bot to do it for them. And it’s pretty obvious why. Although some people were happy to do it purely for vandalism’s sake, others had a motive: A DDoS attack was a surefire way to shut down a match that either you or someone you were rooting for were losing. This wasn’t just an occasional irritation anymore. It was turning into an outright assault on any game where players competed.

By the opening months of 2015, we were seeing a huge uptick in DDoS attacks on Dota and CS:GO, with other companies reporting a huge jump as well. Someone had, very suddenly, made it very easy for anyone to do this.

In August 2015, The International was disrupted with DDoS attacks. Although the pros playing the match weren’t affected, for more than two hours, the broadcasters couldn’t get into the matches to give play-by-play and color commentary. Sending out the stream as a TV broadcast became an issue. The players were suddenly playing in a void. This was a professional gaming event with millions watching and millions of dollars on the line, and it was being disrupted by random people with five-dollar software. It was a problem Valve couldn’t ignore.

We tried several solutions to deal with DDoS attacks before we arrived at one that worked. Initially, we attempted to filter the traffic with a powerful network switch. Unfortunately, this type of filtering is inherently difficult to do with game traffic. It is the nature of game servers to receive unsolicited UDP (User Datagram Protocol) traffic from arbitrary IP addresses. Imagine you had a post office that weeded out unwanted junk mail for you. But now imagine your job is as an advice columnist, and you receive tons of legitimate mail from random strangers all the time. For you, the post office doesn't know what's junk mail and what isn't. That's how traffic to game servers tends to look. Furthermore, the source IP in UDP packets is not secured, and can be easily spoofed. Our post office cannot even look at the return address on the envelope for clues, because the senders of junk mail forge that.

Steam delivers a lot of bits for game content, and has built up a large network for doing so. We were already taking advantage of this network to deliver game traffic over dedicated links, obtaining good peering, ensuring that networking engineering best practices were used, etc. This kept player ping times low, but did not protect against DDoS attack. The problem is that UDP protocols are not secure, so while we had our own network, it wasn't private.

To prevent attackers from using our own network to attack our servers, we needed to control all the entrances and secure them. We accomplished this by creating proxies for game traffic, routing every single packet of data transmitted across the network through relays. Now when a client wanted to talk to a game server, it had to do so through a relay that both authenticated it and proxied that traffic to the game server. This meant the IP address of the server was always hidden—the attacker simply had no idea where to attack.

To re-use our antiquated post office metaphor from earlier, our spammer no longer had an address to send junk mail to. They could send it to every post office in the area and ask them to mail it, but without authorization, that post office isn’t going to. (Moreover, that post office would find it a little suspicious that someone was trying to send a single person 100,000 letters.)

But couldn’t you just attack the relay? Technically, you could. But we have an essentially limitless number of them, and we built them to be attacked. A “relay” is just another word for a computer running software. You can attack it or take it offline, but the protocol was designed with that assumption in mind. If a client is trying to play a game and loses contact with a relay, it just switches to another. Relays are like hundreds of pawns scattered around the world with the singular purpose of guarding the game server. (Incidentally, taking out a relay is harder than it sounds. They’re engineered pretty well and positioned in a specific part of the network, so although they were built to be taken offline, we haven’t lost one yet.)

The solution was straightforward but effective. Before, if someone wanted to disrupt a game, they could just overpower a single game server (a very low bar to clear). Now they had to overpower essentially the entire data center—a much, much, much higher bar. Are there attacks that could still accomplish this? Of course. Are there attacks that can do this that anyone online could buy for five dollars? No. An attack this sophisticated was officially out of the price range of most people.

With this new system up and running, we had an epiphany: If we controlled our own private network, we wouldn’t be beholden to how the normal internet works. We could use it to make the customer experience even better. With the normal internet, when you send a packet from one IP address to another, the route you use is determined by Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This is a routing algorithm that decides how your packet will travel across a network, and you have no choice in the route it picks.

But with a virtual private network composed of hundreds of global relays and data centers, we could essentially choose our own route from the client to the game server—often a faster shortcut than the default route. If you’re using Steam Datagram Relay (SDR), the Steam overlay will show your ping time and what route we’re giving you, so you can see for yourself how it gets optimized.

A feature that started as a way to protect Dota game servers has grown past what anyone could have expected. The SDR network routinely delivers as much as 140M packets and 550GBit per second. We have relays in 31 data centers with a capacity of over 5TBit. What we now call the Steam Datagram Relay not only protects against DDoS attacks, but also increases connectivity and lowers ping for every Dota customer. And it doesn’t just do this for Dota, but for any game on Steam that wants to take advantage of it.

We hope you enjoyed another peek between the lanes of Dota. This was a pretty technical one, thanks for hanging in there for it! And feel free to let us know what you’d like us to cover next.

Mar 5, 2024

Patch Notes v2.36

Rocket League® - Psyonix_Laudie

Version: Rocket League v2.36
Platforms: Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Steam, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
Scheduled Release: 3/05/2024, 4 p.m. PST / 3/06/2024, 12 a.m. UTC

THE HEADLINES

Additional patch notes will be posted when Season 14 begins on March 6 at 8 a.m. PST / 4 p.m. UTC

CHANGES AND UPDATES

Play Menu Update

Added new animations and icons to the Casual Card in the Play Menu
- Dueling Arcade: A small “VS” icon will appear in the lower left corner of Dueling Arcade Cards
- LTMs (Limited Time Modes): A small golden wheel appears in the lower left corner of LTM cards
- The Play Menu will call out which Dueling Arcade Playlists or LTMs are active in the upper left corner

NEW CONTENT

New Arena Variant

The new Arena variant AquaDome (Salty Shallows) is now live in Private Matches, Exhibition Matches, and Free Play

McLaren 765 LT

The McLaren 765 LT is now fully customizable!
If you own the McLaren 765 LT, the following Common Decals have been added to your inventory:
- Geofade
- Lightning
- Tigerclaw
- Stripes
- Techy

BUG FIXES

Fixed a bug blocking data from populating on the in-game League Rankings page
Fixed a bug causing your last highlighted selection to be forgotten when navigating away from the Play Menu
Fixed ability to concede and abandon LTM matches
- When abandoning a match, matchmaking bans will apply if applicable
Fixed the countdown timer on LTM details page
[Tournaments] In a 1v1 tournament, fixed a bug causing a ban message to appear in error after a player abandons the match
Whistling Birds and Seismic Charge Goal Explosions should now be usable with any Car Body
Under Manage Inventory, RLCS items should now follow Team Edition sorting rules.
Fixed a bug preventing the Zigzag Decal from appearing in the Decals menu
Changed the name of several Avatar Borders:
- Dragon Flame (Season 13 Rocket Pass) is now "Dragon's Breath Ca"
- Tatsu (Season 12 Rocket Pass) is now "Dragon's Breath Li"
- Dragon’s Breath (Season 9 Rocket Pass) is now "Dragon's Breath K

[Steam] Fixed appearance of button symbols for PlayStation controller users when Steam Controller Settings are set to either "Use Default Settings" or "Enable Steam Input"

KNOWN ISSUES

For a complete list of known issues in Rocket League, go here