Dota 2 News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Oh, look – Steam's gone and broken its own concurrent record. Again.

Palworld, an open-world action-adventure title where players can combat and capture Pokemon-like creatures, has become a phenomenon, rising to the top of Steam charts days within launch. The game, which also incorporates elements of the survival genre, now has the fifth-highest peak concurrent players in the history of the Valve storefront, going past heavyweight titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy. Palword developers Pocketpair also confirmed Monday that the game has sold over five million copies within three days of launch.

Valve has unveiled its annual ‘Best of 2023' list on Steam, revealing which titles dominated sales on PC. The titles haven't been numerically ranked, but have been grouped into tiers — Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze — based on data collected from January 1 through December 15, 2023. The Top 12 category is populated by both free-to-play multiplayer games and the biggest launches, with the award-winning Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077, and Hogwarts Legacy emerging as the best-selling titles. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which was disliked by both fans and critics alike, also made it to higher echelons, thanks to a dedicated fanbase wanting to experience its multiplayer segment.

Valve's making a list, and checking it twice; it's gonna find out who's naughty and nice. And if you happen to be on its Naughty List — which pretty much applies to any one of the «thousands» of DOTA 2 players now identified as being dirty, filthy cheaters — you can expect a cheerfully gift-wrapped lump of toxic coal and a permanent ban in your stocking as your festive treat for 2023.

Valve is channeling its inner Santa Claus with a Naughty & Nice List that includes a jolly festive update for Dota 2's nice players and a permaban for the tens of thousands of naughty players and smurf accounts. 

We’ve seen a number of ingenious methods of banning naughty players from video games over the years, but this latest attempt from Valve may be the funniest yet.

League of Legends' new champion Hwei is a human mage designed to be played in the mid-lane, and he has 10 different spells that take more than one button press to cast. If you happen to be a Dota 2 fan that might sound a little familiar, as Invoker—a wizard dating all the way back to Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients—basically does the same thing.

Those of you that were strapped into the back of your parents car when you were younger and taken on the yearly family road trip will remember a marketing technique as old as time itself. Take a regular everyday object, create an obnoxiously large model of one, and plaster billboards everywhere claiming it to be the «world's biggest x». Yes, it's a cheap stunt and yes, it was always somewhat disappointing, but you still begged your family to pull over, didn't you?

Dota 2’s The International is the game’s eSport competition that’s been going since 2011. For the first few years, developer Valve funded the prize pool that pro teams would compete for, roughly $1.6 million to $3 million.

It’s fall already, and Dota 2 The International 12 is just around the corner. As always, Valve is ‘crowdfunding’ the tournament’s prize pool, but with the battle pass system gone and the divisive Compendium put in its place, the jackpot isn’t looking too healthy this time around.

The International (TI) 2023, Valve’s annual Dota 2 eSports competition kicks off in early October, but something strange is happening with the prize pool. The prize pool for TI has grown every year since it started in 2011, but 2023 looks to offer pros the lowest prize pool to compete for in almost a decade.

Valve's smash hit MOBA Dota 2 has returned to the Steam Top Ten in the wake of its massive Summer client update.

Valve has announced that it's on the hunt for Smurf accounts and their associated main accounts. 

Valve has banned 90,000 Dota 2 smurf accounts, and will wipe out their associated main accounts, too, if they continue to spawn smurfs to bypass Valve's matchmaking system.

Earlier this week, Dota 2's summer update was released and included new tools for filtering toxic and unwanted players fromy our matches. Now Valve have taken an extra step of their own by declaring that "smurfing is not welcome in Dota," and permanently banning 90,000 accounts involved in the practice

Dota 2 summer update is out now, and among its many additions are several designed to make "Dota a better place to play, together." It includes a "dislike" button that lets you filter out people you'd rather not play with in future, a new reporting system, real-time review of toxic chat, and more.

It’s no secret that Dota 2 is a pretty confusing game – as a League of Legends player, it’s LoL on steroids. If you thought the MOBA couldn’t get any more complex, though, Valve has released the latest round of Dota 2 patch notes in emoji form – yes, seriously, the 7.34 update is fully written in emojis.

The new Dota 2 7.34 update is here and the patch notes detail a number of changes that are worth knowing about.

New Dota 2 patch notes dropped today, and they're a little different than most, because they've been rendered entirely in emojis. That makes them very difficult to read, but it hasn't deterred the Dota 2 community, which has whipped up a 55-page document that translates the whole thing.

As noted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, Valve has requested that all Dota 2 custom game makers cease real-money monetization in their creations by August 17. A number of popular modes for the juggernaut MOBA have already gone offline in response.