Product Update - Valve Nov 21, 2013
- New Venomancer model
- Update to Gyrocopter model
- Update to Axe visuals
- Update to Luna model
- Update to Omniknight colors
- Update to Dazzle model
- Update to Pudge model
- Necrolyte changed to Necrophos
- Windrunner changed to Windranger
- Lycanthrope changed to Lycan
- Updated Necrophos voice processing.
- Bug Fix : Unusual Couriers will properly stop Unusual Effects on death.
- Workshop Fix : Workshop weapon submissions for Abaddon will include materialize/dematerialize settings.
- Added Teammate cooperation survey question


Diretide:

- More Flesh Heap fixes for Diretide
- Cleave no longer affects Roshan in Diretide
- Roshan movement cannot be obstructed during Sugar Rush
- Magic Resistance increase reduced from 10 per level to 5 per level
- Base Magic Resistance increased from 0 to 50%

December 20, 2013 - Valve

- Fixed Governor's Salakots that had been wrongly converted into Ancient Imbued Spinal Blades.

- Fixed the 400% battle booster giving only 300%. Active battle boosters of this type have been reset to 500 minutes remaining. The 9 players that already fully consumed their battle boosters have each been granted two new boosters.

- Launching the game will now allow you to reconnect to a match in progress even while searching for the Dota 2 Network. In concert with this change, all existing low priority punishments have been reset.

by Alice O'Connor, Dec 12, 2013 6:00am PST
Related Topics – Dota 2, Valve, PC, Mac

Dota 2's Christmas update arrives today, and oh! what an update it is. Along with bringing over a new hero from the original DotA, the long-awaited Legion Commander, it adds a wave survival mode which pits heroes against hordes of creeps, trying to defend Skeleton King so he can be reborn as the Wraith King. And there shall be... such... prizes.

Old Skellypants is crumbling to dust, Valve explains, and is performing a ritual on Wraith Night to become, well, not flesh again, but perhaps ectoplasm. And he needs heroes to defend him until dawn. He was removed from the game in a patch earlier this week, and it seems he'll return with a new look once this event is over, which is a very clever way to slip through a character redesign.

The Wraith Night mode, then, is a co-op wave survival mode for five players. It only has a handful of the full game's heroes, but their skills have been tweaked to work better against hordes of enemies. Drow Ranger's Frost Arrow skill is now a split shot, for example. Some items have been boosted too. Collecting treasure from monsters murdered can get you special festive prizes.

The patch also brings Legion Commander into Dota 2, a strength hero whose ultimate skill forces an enemy hero to duel her. She was added to DotA in December 2011 (well, technically he was, as LC is a mustachioed chap in DotA), but only now is coming to the remake.

Patch 6.79c also adds the promised Ranked Matchmaking mode, lets parties watch tournaments together if at least one of them has a ticket, fixes that awful bug of item icons getting stuck on screen, and revamps the new player experience to better ease newbies in. On the balance front, it notably nerfs the currently-ubiquitous Hand of Midas and Necronomicon, tones Venomancer down a bit, and thankfully hits Elder Titan's Ancestral Spirit skill. Do check the notes for more. The test client has already been updated, and it'll roll out to the main client later today.

• Fixed a bug that caused some gem names and stat values to get truncated in the tooltip.
• Recipe costs have been reduced. This change will affect newly dropped recipes.
• Items with gems that convey the Inscribed, Autographed, and Ascendant qualities will now appear consistently. If the gemmed item already had a special quality (like Genuine) then that special quality will take precedence over the gem quality.
• Several issues with crafting have been fixed:
o A bug that made it appear that items were 'eaten' by crafting has been fixed. No items were actually eaten (they are still in your inventory). For example, a recipe that took 5 inputs would sometimes only consume 4 of the inputs and remain incomplete. The 5th item was never consumed even though it appeared to be by the UI. Recipes will now consume the correct number of items.
o A bug has been fixed that made the display of some recipes show the wrong type of items already fulfilled (i.e.: 4 of the same thing when actually 4 different items were fulfilled).
o The server is notified of a crafting attempt earlier in the crafting process so that crafting results will appear earlier.
o The crafting completed animation now also plays for partial crafts. A dialog will appear during a partial craft indicating the recipe is not complete and needs more components to be finalized.
• The tradability policy for socketed gems and crafted items has changed:
o Gems extracted from an item that is "tradable after date" now become tradable after the same date.
o Gems extracted from an item that can never be traded no longer inherit that restriction. You can safely add gems to a permanently untradable item without the gems becoming permanently untradable.
o Gems that are not tradable (like Ascendant gems) will make the item they are added to untradable, but only while those gems are socketed. Extracting the gems will remove the trade restriction from the item they are added to.
o If one or more crafted inputs are "tradable after date" then the recipe and output will become "tradable after date" with the latest date of the inputs.
o If one or more crafted inputs are permanently untradable then the recipe and output will become permanently untradable.
o All previously crafted items have been grandfathered into these new rules and have been made tradable.

Here we go!

The latest Dota 2 update introduces the three amigos: Ember Spirit, Storm Spirit and Earth Spirit, and features like Crafting, Coaching and the givin' of the Diretide.

Matchmaking
December 6, 2013 - Dota Team
Over the past several months we’ve been working on improving matchmaking. In this post we’d like to share with you where matchmaking currently stands and give you a sneak peek on an upcoming matchmaking feature.

Ranked Matchmaking is Coming

The next major update will add a ranked matchmaking feature to the game. This mode is aimed at experienced players who want to play in a more competitive environment and know their matchmaking rating (MMR). Dota 2 matchmaking has always calculated MMR and used it to form matches; in ranked matchmaking we make that MMR visible.

Ranked matchmaking is unlocked after approximately 150 games.
All players in the party must have unlocked the mode.
Currently, only All Pick, Captains Mode, and Captains Draft are available.
You may not participate in ranked matchmaking while in the low priority pool.
Coaches are not allowed in ranked matchmaking.
Matches played in normal matchmaking do not impact your ranked matchmaking MMR, and vice versa.
Your ranked MMR is visible only to you and your friends. The MMR used for normal matchmaking is not visible.
When you first start using ranked matchmaking, you will enter a calibration phase of 10 games. During this time, your ranked MMR will not be visible.
Your Matchmaking Rating (MMR)

Dota 2 uses standard techniques to quantify and track player skill. We assign each player an MMR, which is a summary metric that quantifies your skill at Dota 2. After each match, we update your MMR based on what happened in that match. In general, when you win, your MMR will go up, and when you lose, your MMR will go down. Win/loss is the primary criteria used to update MMR, but individual performance also plays a role, especially when our uncertainty about your MMR is high. It is possible for an individual MMR to increase after a loss or decrease after a win, but in general the winning team’s average MMR will increase and the losing team’s MMR will decrease.

We also track our uncertainty about your MMR. New accounts and those playing in Ranked Matchmaking for the first time have high uncertainty. Higher uncertainty allows larger adjustments after each match, and lower uncertainty leads to smaller adjustments. Together, the MMR and uncertainty can be interpreted as a probability distribution of performance in your next game; the MMR itself serves as the mean of this distribution and the uncertainty is its standard deviation. If the match outcomes (both the win/loss and individual performance) repeatedly match our expectations, the uncertainty tends to decrease until it reaches a floor. A surprising match outcome will tend to cause an increase in uncertainty.

We actually track a total of four MMRs for each player:

Normal matchmaking, queuing solo
Normal matchmaking, queuing with a party
Ranked matchmaking, queuing solo
Ranked matchmaking, queuing with a party
Each of the two ranked MMRs has its own calibration period. Under certain circumstances, we may need to reactivate calibration, if we think the MMR is inaccurate.

To give you a feel for the range of MMR, below are some MMRs corresponding to various percentiles.

5% 1100
10% 1500
25% 2000
50% 2250
75% 2731
90% 3200
95% 3900
99% 4100

Note that this distribution is from normal matchmaking. We don’t know yet what the distribution will be in ranked matchmaking, but we expect it to be different. The players who participate in ranked matchmaking will be more skilled, more experienced players. We anticipate that any given player will have different expectations and play the game differently in ranked matchmaking compared to normal matchmaking.

What Makes a Good Match?

The ultimate goal of automated matchmaking in Dota 2 is for players to enjoy the game. The matchmaker seeks matches with the