Here’s your 30-second summary of this issue of Ancient Tidings:
3.5 weeks of the best Dota in Singapore. Prepare your wallets.
GOATs meeting temporary presidents
The Human tendency to hunt for patterns truly knows no bounds
Multiple communications by Valve (Shocker)
Ceb meets The President of France
One of the only tier-1 pros from the land of the Louvre graced Macron with his presence. While we’re not exactly privy to what was discussed, it is safe to surmise that Macron aims to push France forward as the next hub in esports, given his comments back in April… and this is a rather public move of making himself known amongst the esports community at large.
Who knows what Macron is capable of now that he’s received the Ceb speech buff?
The International 11 will be twice as long as any of its predecessors
This time around the International will be taking on a fresher, more drawn out approach, promising to be, at the very least, the longest running Valve event ever. If you’re planning on viewing the annual celebration of Dota in person, be prepared to negotiate for a long break away from work.
Check out the details of the format here.
The event begins right from the “Last chance qualifiers” (featuring the runner-ups of all regional qualifiers, out of which 2 qualify further) on October 8th, ending with the lifting of the Aegis of Champions on October 30th. Strangely enough, there will be a gap of almost a week before the final stage of the Tournament… either letting the hype build up feverishly or ebb away in bits and pieces.
Either way, a fresh approach is on the cards. What do you think about the new format? Yay or nay?
Dota 2 Bug tracker
If you’re an avid doomscroller on r/Dota2 every so often you’d come across a post related to performance improvements or bug fixing by u/JeffHill, a developer working on Dota 2. Him and his team decided to come up with an official solution to report bugs, along with easy ways for the community at large to view and interact with each bug fixing request.
On their GitHub here, users are free to report new bugs and react to existing ones raised by other members of the community. This also enables the devs to keep the public informed of their progress on various bugs.
A welcome step indeed.
Thanks Jeff and team!
Wyk plays the community like a fiddle
Wyk has been known as the unofficial community manager for Valve ever since the scene first bloomed. It is no surprise, then, that even seemingly innocous tweets aiming for nostalgia were dissected by battlepass-starved fans of the community.
His original tweet:
Seems rather ordinary, yes? You’d reminisce about a few noteworthy games you’ve played so far, remembering that one time you didn’t click BKB fast enough, and then move on.
Well yes, but not if you’re desperate to throw wads of cash on shiny in-game cosmetics, of course.
Look at this Reddit post, for instance.
The trend continued here as well.
As we all know, random profile picture changes can surely imply something cooking behind the scenes.
Even Team Secret was convinced.
Even the blog post I’d mentioned earlier did not make the faintest mention of an upcoming Battle Pass.
It did, however, talk about 7.31d gameplay patch!
What do you hope to see here? Perhaps a Wraith Pact nerf? Perhaps Marci and Primal Beast finally see the light of day in the pro scene?
IO Skins, by u/Express-Fee-6941
A week or two back, posts such as this the one below began doing the rounds on r/Dota2.
Instead of these being a one-off thing, the artist continued to come up with concept after concept for our favourite ball of sentient energy, with some truly creative ones like this:
Check out more on his profile! These really caught my eye, and who knows they might even stir up conversations relating to glance value in the game as of late…
And… that’s it! Quite possibly the shortest issue of Ancient Tidings ever, but that might be set to change now that the DPC has begun with potentially a new patch on the horizon!
As always, thank you for sticking around, and I’ll see you next week!
That Legion Commander skinned IO is great!