The Road to the Aegis
Congratulations to OG, Grand Champions at The International 2018.

OG defied all predictions, making the journey to this year's tournament through the gauntlet of the Open Qualifiers.

At first, they struggled in the group stage. But an impressive run over the final two days helped secure fourth seed and a trip to the Upper Bracket of the Main Event.

On the main stage, top-seeded VGJ.Storm were waiting. The North American squad drew first blood and kept on rolling. Riding the play of newly-returned Ana, OG weathered the early aggression, taking game one in a sudden reversal, and maintaining the momentum for a 2-0 series win.

Next would come a grudge match against Evil Geniuses. After a convincing win in game one, OG looked to close out the series, opening up a big lead. But Evil Geniuses showed amazing resilience, clawing back to force a game three. In the rubber match, Evil Geniuses tried to smash OG's defenses -- which bent but did not break. A clutch buyback teamfight wiped Evil Geniuses' chances, and earned OG a spot in the Upper Bracket Final.

With a spot in the Grand Final at stake, OG's next series came against PSG.LGD. After trading the first two games of the series, OG outlasted the DPC powerhouse in a tense battle that saw PSG.LGD throw all their heroes at the OG throne. With the help of Jerax's Earthshaker, OG barely held on, storming across the map to make a victory push of their own.

But PSG.LGD defeated Evil Geniuses in the Lower Bracket Final to set up a rematch, and a five-game Grand Final series for the ages.

There, PSG.LGD would take a 2-1 series advantage before pushing OG to the brink in game four. As they had done throughout the tournament, OG held on. Leveraging plays both crafty and clutch, they were able to outlast PSG.LGD to force a deciding game five. With an unorthodox draft of heroes that hadn't seen much success in the tournament, OG once again held out against an early PSG.LGD lead, turning the game around at the 25-minute mark and never looking back. Massive underdogs at the start of the tournament, OG took game five, and with it, the Aegis.

As bearers of the ultimate symbol of victory, these names shall forever be inscribed upon the Aegis of Champions:


2018
Anathan "ana" Pham
Topias "Topson" Taavitsainen
Sébastien "Ceb" Debs
Jesse "JerAx" Vainikka
Johan "N0tail" Sundstein



Looking Back
If you missed any of the tournament, or just want to relive the incredible moments and plays, head over to the Dota 2 YouTube channel, where you can find replays of the entire tournament, including broadcast content from in between the games. You can also find a stash of photos from the event over on the Media page and the Dota 2 Flickr.

We would like to thank all of the players, talent, and everyone in the Dota community for helping bring this celebration to life. The International is the crowning moment of the competitive season, and without everyone’s support, none of this would be possible. We hope you enjoyed this year’s tournament as much as we did.

The Days Ahead
In the wake of The International, we're extending the Battle Pass for two more weeks. So everyone that was busy watching OG's road to the Aegis can now enjoy their Battle Pass features until Monday, September 10.

Today's update releases a new hero — Grimstroke — into the world.

Chosen to serve as an arcane guardian of his people, Grimstroke was instead responsible for their eternal corruption. Trapped in agony as inky revenants, his former kindred cast cruel shadows of what might have been. But the sacrifice infused Grimstroke with great power, and he considers it a price well paid.

Learn more about Grimstroke and his abilities here. Or just launch Dota 2 and try your own hand at wielding the master's brush.

Following Grimstroke's release, the next hero debut will come this winter when Mars strides onto the battlefield, ready for war.

Don't miss out on the thrilling conclusion of The International tomorrow, August 25th. Broadcast begins at 10:00am PDT, and you can tune in right here on Steam.tv.

- Fixed a bug with the interaction of Undying's respawn talent and Wraith King's Aghanim's Scepter upgrade.
- Fixed a bug with Windranger's Sylvan Vedette and her Focus Fire ability.

* Fixed a bug where Morphling's Morph was triggering Aftershock.
* Added a new webpage where you can set your fantasy lineup and check your points during The International: http://www.dota2.com/fantasy

* Fixed Ball Lightning refunding too much mana when spam clicking it while already in ball lightning.
* Fixed a rare bug with Alchemist stun malfunctioning with high amounts of cooldown reduction.

The International Group Stage is just five days away, and as we await the crowning event of the Dota 2 competitive season, it's time to check in on some of the final details for those watching the event.

Tournament News
As always, you can check out your in-game Compendium for a complete list of Casters and Talent for this year's event. While you're there, don't forget to fill out your predictions for hero picks, team results, player performance, and tournament meta. Predictions lock before the start of Group Stage play.

Today we've also launched the official tournament website for The International 2018, your hub for keeping up with the day-to-day of tournament proceedings. As the Group Stage and Main Event progress, you'll be able to see updated standings and new social media content posted each day from Vancouver.

• Group Stage: August 15th – August 18th, 2018 – Like last year, two best-of-two groups of nine teams. Top four teams in each group advance to Upper Bracket, four – eight advance to Lower Bracket, bottom in each group is eliminated.
  
  
• Main Event: August 20th – August 25th, 2018 – As before, 16 teams battle through a best-of-three double elimination playoff. Lower bracket first round is best-of-one, Grand Finals are best-of-five.
  

Media
Eighteen teams from around the world have earned a place in Vancouver for the final test of the Dota competitive season. Look back on their journeys to the tournament with The International Lowdown videos. Multiple videos are already available with more coming each day as we approach Group Stage. Once the tournament begins, check in on what's happening both on stage and behind the scenes on our media page, which features all content from our Youtube Channel, Twitter feed, and Instagram.

Newcomer Stream
Help friends interested in learning more about Dota understand the tournament flow by sending them to the Newcomer Stream. They'll be able to watch the main broadcast enhanced with contextual overlays that call out information helpful for understanding the intricate world of Dota during the biggest event of the season.

Pubstomps
There’s no better way to enjoy Dota than watching The International with friends. But not every fan can make the journey to Vancouver to witness the tournament in person. To help people around the world connect with each other for their own celebratory Dota events, we’ve once again partnered with Barcraft United to facilitate Pubstomp administration. Just visit the Barcraft landing page to find a Pubstomp in your area.

One week remains until the first battle horns will sound to kick off Group Stage play at The International, and final preparations are well underway.

As the eighteen teams complete their journeys into Vancouver, now is an opportune time to take a look back upon the vastly different roads each has traveled through the Dota Pro Circuit season to arrive at the tournament.

Today, with the help of one SirActionSlacks, we'll recap all the DPC moments that determined the final standings for the eight direct invites in the new Dota Pro Circuit Rewind.

Starting tomorrow, SirActionSlacks will return each day leading up to the Group Stage to help you catch up on everything you need to know about all eighteen teams and their rosters in his week-long series, The International Lowdown.

Tune in daily August 9 - 14 at 10:00 AM PDT on our Youtube or Twitch channels for a new episode. The International Lowdown will feature three teams each day, and viewers on Twitch will also see select classic matches from the archives of The International.

* The recent treasure bundle added at level 615 now repeats every 615 levels.
* Fixed a bug that could allow Dark Willow to cast both ultimates at the same time

* Fixed various charged abilities not consistently being affected by cooldown reduction properly
* Fixed a bug where non-stun interrupts did not reliably cancel channeled abilities if cast an instant before the end of the channel; for example Vengeful Spirit's Nether Swap cast on a target at the last tick of channeling a Town Portal scroll.
* Hero voice lines for picking up bounty runes no longer play in the first 30 seconds of game time.
* Fixed an uncommon client crash with Morphling's Morph ability.
* Fixed a bug in the interaction of Lycan's Howl and units with low max HP, which sometimes created uncontrollable and unkillable units.

We’ve heard a bunch of complaints from the community after the recent treasure was released, and we wanted to walk you through how things unfolded from our end.

On Tuesday after the release, we heard the community being concerned if there were bugs with the item drops, with many examples of people not getting the Witch Doctor set but having the Phantom Assassin and Outworld Devourer sets. We looked into it to see if there were any differences between the drop rates of those items, and found that all three were identical, so we just assumed it was anecdotal cases and selection bias. Another contributing factor is that the volume of Treasure 3 is meaningfully less than Treasure 1 and 2, partly because a lot of customers bought the Weekend Bundle Sale and that did not include Treasure 3 (as is the case historically). So it would then be expected that a number of people would have some items and not the others, and that the Witch Doctor set would be the most rare.

However, the complaints continued to come in, and it was confusing to us why. We decided to investigate a bit more, but were generally still assuming it was a mixture of selection bias and supply differences between Treasure 1 and 2 and Treasure 3, especially since we knew the three items were identical. Late last night we eventually found a bug that existed for all the Immortal treasures this season. It primarily affected players who opened a very large number of treasures, causing the drop rates to not escalate as quickly as they did last year. And since the volume of Treasure 3s were lower than the other two, it was a more visible bug to players.

As a result of this, this morning we started working on fixing this. We are re-running the rolls for players on Immortal Treasure 1, 2 and 3, and will be granting the items shortly as well as fixing the bug for unopened treasures. We will also be giving all Battle Pass owners 10 extra levels.

In addition to this, we’ve also heard the community being unhappy at the content of the level 615 reward. As part of this update, we are adding an extra bundle of treasures at level 615. It’ll include 4 Immortal Treasure 1, 4 Immortal Treasure 2, and 4 Immortal Treasure 3.