ValveTime

This week’s Dota 2 update continues the recent trend of extremely light patches which focus more on gameplay fixes and cosmetic items as opposed to introducing new features or heroes. This particular patch features some minor fixes for Elder Titan, a series of improvements to the UI and a major reduction to the game’s memory usage, which should help to improve the game’s performance for users with less powerful computers. A series of cosmetic item sets have been introduced for Beastmaster, Chaos Knight, Clinkz, Leshrac, Lycanthrope, Phantom Assassin, Razor, Rubick and Weaver. Three brand new cosmetic couriers have also been added to the game including Maximilian the Beetlebear, Yonex’s Rage, and Shagbark, which has been a community favourite courier for some time after being designed and developed by CyborgMatt, Anuxi and several other famous personalities. Yonex’s Rage, an Invictus Gaming themed courier, and CyborgMatt’s own Shagbark are both available from the Dota 2 drop system while Maximilian is rewarded as a purchase incentive to owners of the "Raidcall Dota 2 League Season 3 Pass".


A series of unearthed UI files hint at the upcoming release of a "Guild" system, which appears to function similarly to the team organisation feature, only in a less serious manner. A massive selection of new models for upcoming second tutorial map were also discovered in the game files, which appeared alongside the addition of an updated world map showing a total of three separate tutorials, two of which are brand new but cannot currently be accessed. A series of "Low Violence" alternative censored assets were also introduced for use in the recently released Chinese client. Strict censorship laws in China prevent violent content such as blood and gore from being shown, forcing Valve to make a series of cosmetic modifications to a number of heroes including Ancient Apparition, Bane, Clinkz, Doom, Huskar, Lich, Lifestealer, Night Stalker, Pudge, Pugna, Shadow Demon, Shadow Fiend, Skeleton King, Undying and Visage. A number of item and ability icons were also modified to remove violent content in order for the game to conform to the previously mentioned censorship laws, including changes for Queen of Pain, Warlock and the Morbid Mask. Fear not, however, as this 'Low Violence' feature will only affect the Chinese version of Dota 2. CyborgMatt has uploaded images of every affected hero and icon in his update analysis should you want to take a curious look at restrained Lifestealer, Robo-King, Shadow Crow or masked Doom. The officially released changelog can be found over on the Dota 2 Blog as always. glhf!

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.