Valve have launched the Winter 2016 Battle Pass for Dota 2 [official site], a 5.29 virtual ticket giving you access to… new ways to get more hats for your wizards, I think? Look, I’ll be honest: I’ve played 1,498 hours of Dota 2 and I’m still confused by this. The end result is that you can get new cosmetic items by way of a great many progression tracks and statistics and gambling and… ah, go look. Basically, if you want pretty new stuff, you can get it by paying a fiver then playing a load of Dota.

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After 18 years at Valve, working on everything from Half-Life to Dota 2, writer Marc Laidlaw has confirmed that he’s retired from the company. That’s an eternity for the games industry! He wrote novels before getting into video games, and it sounds like he’s getting back to writing for himself.

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I’ve spent my afternoon watching the wildlife of the Dota 2 [official site] desert terrain. There are some newcomers who aren’t native to the vanilla map which is cool – scorpions and vultures and the like. There’s also a proliferation of beetles and I love looking at the new trees and the cacti. This isn’t an exhaustive animal catalogue – there are definitely some butterflies and fish and spiders I wanted to include but the Reborn launch Dota crashes a lot and I was getting fed up! HOWEVER here are some nice shots of little creatures going about their business :)

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N.B. I’m posting this outside the paywall from the get go because I’m hoping people will add their own suggestions in the comments and it will become a Useful Resource for those who don’t know what to play over Christmas!>

Whether you celebrate or not, chances are you’ll have a bit of extra downtime in the coming fortnight and you might be looking for games to play. For me I tend to pick multiplayer things which I can use to get a chunky bit of time with friends even though we’re all scattered around the country. If I want to be on my own I tend to go for puzzles because it means I can watch Midsomer Murders at the same time.

Here’s what I’m planning to hunker down with over while the festive season is in full swing but it would be great if you share your own plans as well…

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I do enjoy the Dota 2 [official site] patches which change so much that I have no idea how the game even plays anymore. Version 6.86 is arriving this week with The Balance of Power Update and… I’ll be awful for ages figuring out what’s even happening. It ports another hero over from the original DotA, Arc Warden, while also adding new items, tweaking balance, and reshaping the map.

The patch is currently on the test client, and I imagine it’ll launch properly on Thursday.

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Article by James Archer>

Professional Dota 2 [official site] players descended on Los Angeles this past weekend to take part in The Summit 4 the latest instalment of professional Dota 2 s most casual competition. Ahead lie spoilers for the event along with our picks of the best matches the tournament had to offer. Let’s get cracking!>

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Scammers! They’re everywhere nowadays. Cheats! Hackers! Frauds! Phoneys! These rogues and more want your precious wizard hats and shark guns, to plunder your Steam account of its cosmetic goodies and steal them away for their own nefarious ends. CS: GO guns and Dota 2 wizard hats can be worth a lot of money, you know. Valve are sick of folks doing this, and probably sick of the headaches it creates for their support department. To reduce this, they’re soon adding trade holds that’ll hold things up by a few days – unless both parties are using the Steam app‘s Mobile Authenticator.

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When is a ban not a ban? That’s a question which cropped up twice this weekend as League of Legends team Jin Air Green Wings and Smite team EnVyUs each passed up an opportunity to ban a character from a competitive match.

No-bans or skipped bans happen in the phase before the main game starts. At this point the teams are working out which characters their team will play and which to remove from play. Choosing NOT to remove something is vary rare but it does happen. It’s well worth trying to understand what’s going on in those scenarios, whether it’s to unpick the strategic thought behind them or to nod sagely over the capacity for humans to make terrible blunders on the global stage. So let’s take a closer look at no-bans, what they are and how you can use them to your advantage:

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“Laughter is the best medicine,” say people who are about to discover laughter actually makes a broken nose worse. Laughter’s pretty okay, though, as are other emotions – and creative mediums can help stimulate them. Valve have rolled out the red carpet (it smells rusty?) for the year’s finest Source Filmmaker machinima, little films mostly starring Valve characters, declaring which are the bestest best so you too can easily experience such human emotions as Action, Comedy, Drama, Short, and Extended.

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Each year, Valve honour the finest Source Filmmaker creators with an imaginary gold statuette of a shirtless imaginary man with chest hair in the shape of imaginary country Australia. Ah, the Saxxy Awards! Saxxy season is upon us once again, and you – yes you! – can join movers, shakers, and thinkfluencers like Steven CP_Steelberg and Shia LaBadlands. Valve have opened up public voting on submissions to whittle down entrants to the finalists, so you can watch and vote on machinima shorts to your hearts’ content.

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