ValveTime

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".

If you thought Dota 2 took the spotlight in previous weeks, you'd better get yourself ready for this week's ValveTime Weekly News Round-Up! In the news this week, the International 3 tournament received several major updates while the SteamDB community unearthed something known as the "Steam Trading Card Beta". If you're interested in virtual reality and/or Linux, you'll want to check out Half-Life 2 as a set of updates earlier this week introduced beta support for Ubuntu and the Oculus Rift. Stay tuned for more ValveTime videos, news and reviews coming soon.

SteamDB, a website dedicated to exploring the Steam database, has a listing up for "Steam Trading Card Beta" which was added to Steam a few days ago. A banner image for the Beta was also found on the Steam servers and looks like this:


Unfortunately that's all the info we have on this. Is Valve building some kind of trading card game directly into Steam or will these cards represent something about your Steam account? Share your thoughts in the comments.

This week’s Dota 2 update, which was released late last night, included a few minor gameplay fixes and a brand new "Solo Matchmaking" option which allows players who have queued without a party to be given a fair match up by removing possibly unfair communication benefits available to teams comprised of grouped up individuals. While the contents of the update change log are particularly light this week, the patch itself also includes a new cosmetic item set for Tusk known as "The Arctic Hunter", which is now available from the Dota 2 store. A series of seven unreleased custom HUDs were also added to the game files including in-game displays which appeared to be themed after Magnus, Alchemist, Ancient Apparition, Nature’s Prophet and several others. Legion Commander and the second tutorial map both also received a series of in-game assets, hinting at the possibility of a major update arriving sometime soon which may include one or both of these major new features.


The Dota 2 competitive scene has also seen a number of key developments in the past week. Since we last reported on the International 3 tournament, Valve have revealed the entire team roster including the remaining 12 teams invited directly into the main event and the 16 teams set to compete in the pair of qualifiers set to take place very soon. Teams Orange.Neolution, Alliance, Fnatic, Team Liquid, Na’Vi, Team Zenith, Team Dignitas, Virtus.Pro, DK, LGD Gaming.Int, Invasion MUFC and TongFu all join 2012 reigning champions Invictus Gaming in the main tournament. The Western Qualifier, set to take place from May 13th until May 19th, will involve Absolute Legends, Evil Geniuses, mousesports, RoX.KIS, Empire, ICCup, Qpad Red Pandas and DD.Dota fighting it out for a place in the main event. A day later, on May 20th, First Departure, Neolution.Int, LGD Gaming, Vici Gaming, RattleSnake, Rising Stars, MiTH.Trust and Mineski will take place in the Eastern Qualifier, which will run for three days until May 23rd before continuing for another two days on May 28th 2013. It was also recently revealed that Dota 2 professional commentators TobiWan and Ayesee have both accepted invites from Valve to shoutcast the main International 3 tournament in August of this year, which will take place at the Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

While tickets for the main event have already sold out, those of you wanting to watch from home can view the tournament using the in-game DotaTV spectator system, which is being provided free of charge for the first time. The International Interactive Compendium, an e-book which can be purchased from the Dota 2 store, allows players to get directly involved with the tournament by predicting tournament statistics, voting for an All Star match and awards while competing with friends.

Every player who purchases the £6/$10 compendium will receive a brand new customisable Smeevil courier, which can be upgraded based on the amount of tournament games viewed. For every purchase, 25% of the total price will go towards increasing the total tournament prize pool, which has already risen by around $165’000 from the initial $1.6m amount. Valve has also set up a series of Stretch Goals which will provide the community with more rare items based on how high the prize pool rises. Stretch Goal 1 has already been reached, which provides compendium purchasers with a rare 125% battle bonus from now until the end of the tournament. Stay tuned to ValveTime for more Dota 2 news in the near future.

On May 7th, a live discussion was held between Valve employees and Indie developers via the Greenlight Developer group on the Steam Community page. The aim of the chat was to answer questions and concerns amongst the Greenlight community, as well as take suggestions for the future improvement of the system. Taking part in the discussion on Valve's behalf were Alden Kroll, Tom Bui and Chet Faliszek.

Reaction to Greenlight since its launch in September has been mixed, with many developers expressing concern towards the functionality of the system as well as the concept as a whole. Many view the feature as a popularity contest, in which certain unfinished concepts gain massive support, while other, completed titles become lost in the crowd. This visibility problem was high on the agenda during the discussion, with some calling for a major shakeup in how the system sorts and displays individual projects, as well as how projects can recover from an initial spate of down-voting.

Valve responded by saying that limited resources are holding the system back from delivering titles at the rate they wish, leading to the recent decision to release greenlit titles as mini-batches in shorter intervals. They also repeated Gabe Newell's recent comments on making Steam an open platform, where greater power would be given to third party users and developers wishing to build their own communities around features like customised store fronts.

A thorough transcript of the discussion posted by Tom at Crunching Koalas, which highlights most of the major points discussed in the chat, can be found here.