<a href="http://www.dota2.com/tournaments/international/compendium/"><img class="aligncenter" alt="" src="http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/images/blogfiles/inline_compendium.jpg" width="100%" /></a>

Each year we spend some of the planning time for The International trying to figure out ways to improve the connection between fans and the players in the tournament. We know that the majority of our viewers will be watching the tournament unfold over the internet, so we'd like to make it easier for an online fan to dig deeper into the event, the teams, and the players. In addition to wanting more detail, we know fans also love to compete with each other at predicting tournament results. This year we're taking our first shot at addressing all of the these concepts, with an additional step that we hope will result in the tournament itself getting bigger and better as a direct result of fan enthusiasm.

Today we're announcing <i>The International</i> <a href="http://www.dota2.com/tournaments/international/compendium/">Interactive Compendium</a>, a virtual book that will keep you fully up to date with the state of <i>The International</i>, and allow you to play games with other fans for fun and bragging rights. In addition to making you eligible for special virtual item drops throughout the tournament, it'll also allow you to vote on tournament-related community polls, such as the selection of which player should receive awards based on their play in the tournament. After the tournament is over, you'll be able to browse your friends' Compendiums to see how successful they were in their predictions.

Finally, to directly tie fan interest in Compendiums to the players themselves, we're going to redirect 25% of the revenue directly into the prize pool. That means the total $1.6 million prize pool for The International is now just the starting point. The Compendium will be available in the <a href="http://www.dota2.com/store/">Dota Store</a> tomorrow morning at 10:00am PDT. For those of you planning to attend The International in person, your ticket purchase will include a Compendium.

Each year we spend some of the planning time for The International trying to figure out ways to improve the connection between fans and the players in the tournament. We know that the majority of our viewers will be watching the tournament unfold over the internet, so we'd like to make it easier for an online fan to dig deeper into the event, the teams, and the players. In addition to wanting more detail, we know fans also love to compete with each other at predicting tournament results. This year we're taking our first shot at addressing all of the these concepts, with an additional step that we hope will result in the tournament itself getting bigger and better as a direct result of fan enthusiasm.

Today we're announcing The International Interactive Compendium, a virtual book that will keep you fully up to date with the state of The International, and allow you to play games with other fans for fun and bragging rights. In addition to making you eligible for special virtual item drops throughout the tournament, it'll also allow you to vote on tournament-related community polls, such as the selection of which player should receive awards based on their play in the tournament. After the tournament is over, you'll be able to browse your friends' Compendiums to see how successful they were in their predictions.

Finally, to directly tie fan interest in Compendiums to the players themselves, we're going to redirect 25% of the revenue directly into the prize pool. That means the total $1.6 million prize pool for The International is now just the starting point. The Compendium will be available in the Dota Store tomorrow morning at 10:00am PDT. For those of you planning to attend The International in person, your ticket purchase will include a Compendium.

- Made team schedule text entry boxes 32 characters rather than 16.
- Fixed crash on Alt-Tab.
- Fixed crash on map load.
- Increased the size of the team selection dropdown.
- Corrected a sorting issue in the heroes played profile popup
- Changed memory allocation strategy to address a crash when the game has been running for a long time.

The Elder Titan returns to the world he shattered!

<a href="http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/images/blogfiles/keyart_eldr_ttn.jpg"><img class="aligncenter" alt="" src="http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/images/blogfiles/inline_eldr_ttn.jpg" width="100%" /></a>

The International tickets will go on sale on Tuesday, May 7th, at 10:00am PDT. They will be sold directly through the <a title="http://www.dota2.com/store/" href="http://www.dota2.com/store/" rel="nofollow">Dota 2 Store</a>. This year we'll be putting all tickets up for sale at once, so set your alarm clocks.

We've also updated the <a title="http://www.dota2.com/tournaments/international/announcement/" href="http://www.dota2.com/tournaments/international/announcement/" rel="nofollow">The International Qualifiers</a> with the 16 competing teams. Divided into East and West, these teams will compete for the 3 remaining slots in The International. The West Qualifier will be hosted by <a title="http://www.twitch.tv/thegdstudio" href="http://www.twitch.tv/thegdstudio" rel="nofollow">GDStudio</a> from May 13th through the 19th, and the East Qualifier by <a title="http://www.twitch.tv/beyondthesummit" href="http://www.twitch.tv/beyondthesummit" rel="nofollow">BeyondTheSummit</a> from May 20th through the 26th. All qualifier matches will also be available for free through DotaTV, right inside your Dota client.

Updates notes go <a href="http://www.dota2.com/news/updates/">here</a>.

The Elder Titan returns to the world he shattered!



The International tickets will go on sale on Tuesday, May 7th, at 10:00am PDT. They will be sold directly through the Dota 2 Store. This year we'll be putting all tickets up for sale at once, so set your alarm clocks.

We've also updated the The International Qualifiers with the 16 competing teams. Divided into East and West, these teams will compete for the 3 remaining slots in The International. The West Qualifier will be hosted by GDStudio from May 13th through the 19th, and the East Qualifier by BeyondTheSummit from May 20th through the 26th. All qualifier matches will also be available for free through DotaTV, right inside your Dota client.

Updates notes go here.

- Added Elder Titan!

GAMEPLAY
- Fixed Dark Pact removing Last Word.
- Fixed Dark Pact not removing Poison Attack.
- Fixed Dark Pact not removing Poison Touch.
- Fixed Dark Pact not removing Telekinesis.
- Enabled Bristleback Skywrath Mage and Slark to Captain's Mode (Tournament Version)

COMMUNITY
- Fixed a bug that was allowing extra report submissions on Sundays

UI
- Revised the Community page.
- Added an icon for league games to the Live, Recent and Downloaded game lists.
- Changed Heroes Played and Game History to be popups in the Profile.
- Numerous improvements to the Tournament Scheduling interface.
- Fixed Buy Back availability in spectator dropdown being inaccurate sometimes.
- Improved web browser performance.
- Fixed hitches when spectating games and switching between heroes.

SOUNDS
- New lines added to Skywrath Mage, Timbersaw, and Bristleback.

WORKSHOP
- Added an Animation Overlay dropdown to the Workshop Model Preview.
- Added Lycanthrope's wolves to the Ability Model import list.

UI
- Fixed an issue where matchmaking region selections were not being saved correctly. These selections have been reset and players will have to re-select their regions.

GAMEPLAY
- Enabled Drow and Tusk in Captain's Mode (Tournament Version)
- Enabled Bristleback, Slark and Skywrath Mage in Captain's Mode (Latest Version)
- Brewmaster: Fixed primal splits not always starting with the correct unit selected.
- Skywrath Mage: Fixed hitbox being too small.
- Slark: Fixed Shadow Dance giving Slark flying vision.
- Slark: Fixed Shadow Dance granting passive bonuses to Slark illusions.
- Slark: Fixed an issue causing Shadow Dance's passive modifier to not update in the UI, despite being active.
- Slark: Fixed Dark Pact continuing while Slark is dead.
- Slark: Essence Shift counters on both Slark and enemy heroes will show the total duration ( i.e. the time that the most recent stack will expire.)
- Slark: Fixed a number of incorrect spell interactions with Dark Pact.
- Slark: Fixed a number of horizontal movement ability interactions with Pounce.
- Troll Warlord: Fixed Berserker's Rage bonus damage not being applied as base damage.
- Tusk: Fixed Frozen Sigil not affecting magic immune units.

ECONOMY
- All Defense 2 War Dogs are now Vintage quality.
- Dota 2 Vintage quality items can now be traded on the Steam Community Marketplace.

WORKSHOP

- Added HUD Skins to the Workshop Importer.

PERFORMANCE
- Reduced CPU usage for rendering

Introducing Skywrath Mage!

<a href="http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/images/blogfiles/keyart_skywramg001.jpg" target="_blank"><img class="alignnone" title="Gyrocopter was caught in the jetwash" alt="" src="http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/images/blogfiles/inline_skywramg001.jpg" width="576" height="426" /></a>

 

Today we’ve shipped some changes to the report system as part of our ongoing initiatives in the community space. We’d like to do what we can to discourage some of the negativity that can go on during games as well as encourage folks to exhibit more cooperative behavior with other members of the community.

To that end, we’ve implemented the following changes:

-- We’re restricting the number of report fields per report to a single field in the hopes of increasing some of the clarity for the specific behavior being reported.

-- In concert with the above change, we’ve combined the ‘text’ and ‘voice’ abuse fields in the report dialog into a single ‘communication’ field.

-- We’re implementing a stricter system of communication (both text and voice) bans for abusive players. The system takes into account reports, in-game behavior, and other factors to determine whether or not a ban is warranted. These bans will be for voice and text communication channels only; they will not affect matchmaking, and they will not place players in the low-priority pool. The bans escalate according to the following scale:
<ul>
<li>1st ban: 1 day</li>
<li>2nd ban: 2 days</li>
<li>3rd (and subsequent) bans: 1 week</li>
</ul>
-- We’re changing the number of report submissions per week to 4 to act as an initial baseline, as we fine-tune the system.

-- We've removed a couple of lesser-used features (like spectators being able to report) that our data has shown not to correlate with accurate reports of bad behavior.

These changes are the beginning of a series of ongoing efforts to make the gameplay experience for all members of the DOTA community as enjoyable as possible. We’re going to be constantly monitoring and improving the system (and running many more experiments) as we go along, and we’re hopeful you’ll find these changes result in an improved experience in-game.

Patch notes are available <a href="http://www.dota2.com/news/updates/" target="_blank">here</a>.

Introducing Skywrath Mage!



 

Today we’ve shipped some changes to the report system as part of our ongoing initiatives in the community space. We’d like to do what we can to discourage some of the negativity that can go on during games as well as encourage folks to exhibit more cooperative behavior with other members of the community.

To that end, we’ve implemented the following changes:

-- We’re restricting the number of report fields per report to a single field in the hopes of increasing some of the clarity for the specific behavior being reported.

-- In concert with the above change, we’ve combined the ‘text’ and ‘voice’ abuse fields in the report dialog into a single ‘communication’ field.

-- We’re implementing a stricter system of communication (both text and voice) bans for abusive players. The system takes into account reports, in-game behavior, and other factors to determine whether or not a ban is warranted. These bans will be for voice and text communication channels only; they will not affect matchmaking, and they will not place players in the low-priority pool. The bans escalate according to the following scale:

• 1st ban: 1 day
  
• 2nd ban: 2 days
  
• 3rd (and subsequent) bans: 1 week
  

-- We’re changing the number of report submissions per week to 4 to act as an initial baseline, as we fine-tune the system.

-- We've removed a couple of lesser-used features (like spectators being able to report) that our data has shown not to correlate with accurate reports of bad behavior.

These changes are the beginning of a series of ongoing efforts to make the gameplay experience for all members of the DOTA community as enjoyable as possible. We’re going to be constantly monitoring and improving the system (and running many more experiments) as we go along, and we’re hopeful you’ll find these changes result in an improved experience in-game.

Patch notes are available here.