ValveTime

Valve have begun a trial run of a new community initiative for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive named Overwatch. The idea is to recruit a group of "investigators" from the community in order to combat persistent cheating and other disruptive, in-game behaviour. Players are selected to become investigators based on a variety of criteria, including their win ratio in competitive games, the age of their steam account, the number of hours they have played, and their own record of behaviour.

Once chosen, community investigators will receive cases via a new "Overwatch" option on their menu screen. Each new case will consist of around 10 minutes of recorded footage featuring the suspected player in action, after which they will be asked to make a decision as to their accountability. If enough investigators agree that the accused player is guilty of an offence, then a suitable banning will be issued. Over time, each individual investigator will receive a score based on the number of cases they have judged, as well as the frequency that other Overwatch Investigators agree.

For now, the system is undergoing a limited beta test in order to ensure the fairness of the system and reveal any major problems with its conception. A full FAQ for the Overwatch initiative can be found here.

The last week was a particularly busy one for Valve, as they released a series of new updates for a variety of products. Steam received Trading Cards, Dota 2 received more compendium stretch goals and Team Fortress 2 recieved...more hats. Robotic hats. There was also a lot more news that you should check out in this week's ValveTime Weekly News Round-Up. Thanks for watching.

This week's Dota 2 update shipped a little later than usual in order to avoid complications with the ongoing International 3 Western Qualifier. The update includes a series of gameplay tweaks relating to Elder Titan and Ursa, while a few modifications related to memory management were made to help improve the game's performance. Lobby and tournament games now support up to 6 broadcast channels, which has been increased from the previous limit of 4, allowing even more commentators and language options to be available by spectators viewing online matches or replays. A new cosmetic item set was released for Queen of Pain as a reward for purchasers of the recently released "Premier League Season 5" ticket. This item set is unique however, as the appearance of the "Wicked Succubus Set" can be upgraded and improved based on the amount of tournament matches the owner has viewed. The three different levels and their cosmetic differences are shown in the below image.

A pair of new cosmetic HUDs, namely "The Powered Star" and "Stone Ruin", were also added as ticket purchase incentives for the "StarSeries Season VI" and the "Premiere League Season 5", respectively. These HUDs were included alongside a wide series of unreleased alternate HUDs, including the "International 2013 HUD" promised to all Compendium owners after the newly added Stretch Goal 3 was completed earlier this week. Additionally, a new announcer pack was also added to the game files, this time themed after the extremely popular community personality "Pyrion Flax", which has apparently been sitting in the Steam Workshop for many months. The announcer pack also features an accompanying 'Mega Kill' version for all you triple killers out there interested in hearing Pyrion Flax scream at you through your speakers in celebration. For more information on this week's Dota 2 update, head on over to the Dota 2 Wiki for the official changelog, or check out Cyborgmatt's blog for his full patch analysis.

Back in February we posted about a large number of staff departures from Valve that started off when Jeri Ellsworth tweeted about her leaving the company. The Verge have revealed Jeri's reason for leaving Valve: She and fellow ex-Valve employee Rick Johnson left to found their own company called Technical Illusions which aims to create augmented reality technology.


The technology itself is being called CastAR and it is quite different to the Google Glasses method ofaugmented reality. A miniature projector is mounted on a pair of glasses which bounces an image off special retroreflecting panels. The panel also has infrared LEDs that a camera on the glasses can detect which the system uses to determine the user's position so that it can project the correct image as if the the user was moving in 3D space. An interesting aspect of the device is that multiple users can use the same screen to see different images as the light from each pair of glasses is reflected back at them.

More information, and a video showing CastAR in action, can be seen at the Verge.

After nearly half a year without a major Team Fortress 2 update, Valve have announced "Robotic Boogaloo" - the most recent sizable patch for everyone's favourite war themed hat simulator. The update, which was announced on the Team Fortress blog alongside the release of a brand new short teaser trailer and comic, is being described as "the first entirely community-created update" and includes 57 brand new community developed cosmetic items, many of which are robot themed replicas of existing hats and miscellaneous items. Every element of the update was created by the community before being evaluated and accepted by Valve including the website pages, the teaser trailer, the comic, all artwork and all in-game models. The new items are all available from the RoboCrate, a robot themed crate the community have been collecting en masse since it was added by Valve in late April 2013.


The update website uses original community created artwork uploaded to the Steam Artwork section to highlight a series of individual items included with the patch. The update is now available, so head on over to Team Fortress 2 if you feel like checking it out. While you download the update, don't forget to watch the impressive update teaser trailer included on the main announcement page, which was created by community member "MrPopulus89".