We wanted to share some information about The International so that you’re able to start making room in your schedules. This year the Main Event in Seattle will include 16 teams and will run for 6 full days, from Monday August 3rd through Saturday August 8th. Ticket availability will be announced on this blog prior to going on sale. Team invitations will occur shortly after May 1st.

We wanted to share some information about The International so that you’re able to start making room in your schedules. This year the Main Event in Seattle will include 16 teams and will run for 6 full days, from Monday August 3rd through Saturday August 8th. Ticket availability will be announced on this blog prior to going on sale. Team invitations will occur shortly after May 1st.

* Reworked how the Gift Wrap system works:
** Gift Wrap is now a free feature inside the game available to everyone.
** It can now be used with items that are temporarily untradeable (such as recent purchases), unless they have been previously Gift Wrapped.
** Hud Skins, Loading Screens, Wards, Announcers and Cursor Packs are now able to be Gift Wrapped.
** Players who have purchased Gift Wrap will receive some number of Treasure Redemption Tokens.
** Players who earned Gift Wrap by opening Treasure of the Nested Cache will receive some number of Treasures of the Nested Cache.
* Fixed various bugs in the Winter map.
* Fixed a recent change causing Chronosphere to affect invulnerable heroes when using abilities like Ball Lightning or Eul's Cyclone.

* Fixed a bug with a recent network optimization that could cause servers to crash. Abandons are never assessed when players are disconnected due to a server crash.

* Coaches and in lobby spectators can now view match details and replays of practice lobby games they participated in
* Fixed an issue where Mac OS X users could not connect to servers reliably.
* Fixed an issue where the first spectator watching a game could time out too early.
* Themed map preference option now available for 1v1, coop bot, and ranked matches.
* Themed map preference is now a soft matching parameter, not a hard compatibility requirement. In ranked, the standard map will be used unless all players have opted into the themed map. In all other modes, the map with the most votes wins, with ties going to the oldest account.

- Fixed various pathing issues when moving around trees
- Fixed Match Ready dialog ignoring clicks sometimes
- Fixed the fifth game in the series popup drawing off the bottom of the screen in the Watch panel

Once again, we're putting out a call to artists to create items based around the themes of Chinese New Year, Chinese history, and springtime, and submit them to the Dota 2 Workshop to be considered for the next New Bloom Festival. This time around we would like to ask artists to avoid the use of dragons and written Chinese characters, as well any concepts that involve human skulls, blood and gore. Additionally, to have the best chance of having your work make it into the game, please be careful not to mix cultural concepts in your designs, such as traditional divisions between the dress of children and adults, warriors and civilians and upper and lower classes. Also, our workshop particle process is due to be reworked, so please refrain from using custom particles in your submission. Remember to mark your submissions with the "Spring2015" tag when placing your items on the Workshop. All submissions must be on the Dota 2 Workshop by January 19th. To everyone else: remember to visit the workshop and vote through your queue to make sure your voice is heard.Also, the excellent people at WeLoveFine are hosting a contest for Dota 2 merchandise designs for the New Bloom Festival, so if your talents lean toward creating awesome swag, they'll have you covered.

Once again, we're putting out a call to artists to create items based around the themes of Chinese New Year, Chinese history, and springtime, and submit them to the Dota 2 Workshop to be considered for the next New Bloom Festival. This time around we would like to ask artists to avoid the use of dragons and written Chinese characters, as well any concepts that involve human skulls, blood and gore. Additionally, to have the best chance of having your work make it into the game, please be careful not to mix cultural concepts in your designs, such as traditional divisions between the dress of children and adults, warriors and civilians and upper and lower classes. Also, our workshop particle process is due to be reworked, so please refrain from using custom particles in your submission. Remember to mark your submissions with the "Spring2015" tag when placing your items on the Workshop. All submissions must be on the Dota 2 Workshop by January 19th. To everyone else: remember to visit the workshop and vote through your queue to make sure your voice is heard.Also, the excellent people at WeLoveFine are hosting a contest for Dota 2 merchandise designs for the New Bloom Festival, so if your talents lean toward creating awesome swag, they'll have you covered.

As we mentioned in September, there are a number of features in the works for Dota 2 that we're really excited to share with you. Among them is a major improvement to Dota 2's engine that we are aiming to release in the first half of next year. One of the main features in this engine improvement will be the ability to rapidly create entirely new game modes. You've seen some of this work with the Dota 2 Workshop Tools Alpha that began earlier this year. In the past, our Diretide and Frostivus updates contained game modes that were very time consuming to build and maintain, and would need to be rebuilt from the ground up after the release of the engine update.

With Diretide this year, we decided that it didn't make sense to build another one of those resource-intensive game modes, for two reasons. The first was that the mode would quickly become obsolete when the engine changes arrive, and the second was that building it would have taken resources away from the work that needed to be done to ship the engine change itself. Now that Frostivus is on the horizon, we find ourselves facing a similar choice and, after some thought, we believe that once again the right choice is to not develop a Frostivus game mode.

This doesn't mean that you won’t see interesting updates from us before the engine improvement goes out next year. We are already hard at work on our next major update, the New Bloom Festival in February, although we will continue to avoid building new game modes until the engine improvements come along.

As we mentioned in September, there are a number of features in the works for Dota 2 that we're really excited to share with you. Among them is a major improvement to Dota 2's engine that we are aiming to release in the first half of next year. One of the main features in this engine improvement will be the ability to rapidly create entirely new game modes. You've seen some of this work with the Dota 2 Workshop Tools Alpha that began earlier this year. In the past, our Diretide and Frostivus updates contained game modes that were very time consuming to build and maintain, and would need to be rebuilt from the ground up after the release of the engine update.

With Diretide this year, we decided that it didn't make sense to build another one of those resource-intensive game modes, for two reasons. The first was that the mode would quickly become obsolete when the engine changes arrive, and the second was that building it would have taken resources away from the work that needed to be done to ship the engine change itself. Now that Frostivus is on the horizon, we find ourselves facing a similar choice and, after some thought, we believe that once again the right choice is to not develop a Frostivus game mode.

This doesn't mean that you won’t see interesting updates from us before the engine improvement goes out next year. We are already hard at work on our next major update, the New Bloom Festival in February, although we will continue to avoid building new game modes until the engine improvements come along.