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Hi, and welcome to the ValveTime news.
Each week, we’ll bring you the biggest talking points regarding Valve and the community.
Now, the news:
The news spotlight was mainly pointed at CS:GO this past week
with the reveal of the latest community map pack,
which arrived on Thursday in the form of Operation Phoenix.
The pack is reintroducing eight community-made maps
which previously featured in the Operation Payback and Operation Bravo events.
Every map in the roster was voted for by the community
using an in-game voting system we mentioned on the previous two Round-Up episodes.
The full roster is made up of Cache, Motel, Seaside, Downtown, Thunder, Ali, Favela, and Agency.
(All of which I may have pronounced incorrectly. I have no idea.)
Since all of these maps have previously been featured,
the price of Operation Phoenix is considerably lower than both previous map packs,
as the pass is available for price of $2.99 in the US, and £1.79 in the UK.
A new “Operation Phoenix Case” weapon case series was also introduced,
which, as usual, features numerous community-created alternate weapon skins
for a large variety of the game’s guns.
Upon purchasing a pass for the map pack, the player will be awarded with a Operation Phoenix Coin,
which tracks the user’s personal playtime and wins
on any of the maps included with Operation Phoenix.
This time, however, the coin also doubles up as a competitive stat tracker,
racking up how many kills, wins, headshots, and MVP awards the player achieves
while playing competitive matches on both official Valve maps
and the returning community levels included within Operation Phoenix.
For more information about this new CS:GO Operation,
be sure to check out our write-up on ValveTime.net or the game’s official announcement page,
both of which can be reached using helpful links available in the video description.
Additionally, you may want to check out the update changelog,
as the Operation launched alongside the usual number of minor map and balance tweaks.
The update changelog can also be found in the video description,
alongside links for everything else we’re talking about this week.
It was revealed that Steam Workshop contributors
can now create and upload their own unique sticker designs,
which may be added to the game should they receive significant community support.
An all-new instruction guide was made available on the Counter-Strike blog,
which covers all of the basics you’ll need to know if you’re looking to create your own designs.
This past week was also an important time for Dota 2,
as the release date for the long-awaited "Free To Play" documentary was finally revealed.
The feature-length documentary was created by a small team within Valve over the period of a few years
and takes a close look at how Dota 2 and the first International tournament in 2011
affected personal lives of some of the biggest players in the Dota 2 competitive scene.
The documentary primarily focuses on the personal sacrifices and struggles
made by Danil Ishutin, a.k.a. Dendi, Benedict Lim, a.k.a. HyHy,
and Clinton Loomis, a.k.a. Fear.
While the film was privately screened to attendees at the International 3 tournament last August,
the documentary will publicly premiere for the first time at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco
on Tuesday, March 18th 2014 at 8:00pm PDT.
After a full screening of the film, the premiere event will conclude with an exclusive Q&A
with the Valve employees associated with the creation of the documentary
and some unannounced special guests,
who we imagine will include some community figures featured in the film,
such as professional players or commentators such as Tobiwan.
Tickets for the premiere event are available for $25 from the EventBrite website.
Just... don’t fret if you won’t be able to make it.
The following day, on March 19th 2014,
the film will be made publicly available to access on Steam free of charge,
and we imagine it will likely be added to the Dota 2 or Valve YouTube channels around the same time.
To coincide with the public release of the film,
Valve will be adding an all new “Free To Play” cosmetic item pack to the Dota 2 store,
which features player-themed item sets for Doom, Pudge, and Sven.
The pack will also include a Free To Play themed courier, HUD,
and a pair of wards made by Valve themselves.
As with most items, a percentage of the proceeds from every sale
will be distributed to the players featured in the film and the contributors
responsible for the creation of the cosmetic item sets we just mentioned.
Since the premiere is almost a full month away,
we’ll be sure to include a reminder on the show sometime after the film is added to Steam.
In other Dota 2 news, the New Bloom Festival event is now coming to a close.
The Year Beast has departed for the final time,
and players now have until Tuesday February 25th 2014
to redeem left over Jade Tokens for in-game items.
All remaining Flamesalt ingots were destroyed after the Year Beast’s final departure on Thursday,
so be sure to purchase your final few New Bloom chests to avoid losing out.
Gabe Newell took to Reddit earlier this week to quell a number of recent concerns
regarding an update to Valve’s Anti-Cheat service.
The update in question was noticed and highlighted by Reddit user “theonlybond”
in the early part of last week,
who posted about how the version of VAC used in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
now features the ability to read through all of a player’s DNS cache entries
before reporting back to Valve with the information.
Reddit users began to speculate about the use of this service
and how Valve could potentially be harvesting personal information.
However, while this does sound rather worrying at face value, fear not,
as Gabe himself stepped in to discuss the new functionality and how it was used.
Gabe describes how the system was only in use for around 13 days
before being deactivated after cheat providers identified easy workarounds to avoid detection.
Rest assured, however, as, while the system was publicly active for just under two weeks,
the system was only used to target known or suspected hackers,
helping Valve to permanently ban 570 cheaters as a result.
In actual fact, the service did not take all of the DNS information from an entire machine,
instead trying to identify particularly suspicious instances of cheat and hack mechanisms
“phoning home” to certain websites before banning the user for having the cheat enabled.
Both posts contain a whole lot of in-depth information that we’re really not going to get into right now,
mainly because we don’t understand half of it,
so Gabe helpfully left a brief Q&A at the base of his message, which reads as follows.
"1) Do we send your browsing history to Valve? No."
"2) Do we care what *** sites you visit? Oh, dear god, no. My brain just melted."
"3) Is Valve using its market success to go evil?"
"I don’t think so, but you have to make the call if we are trustworthy."
"We try really hard to earn and keep your trust."
Well done, everyone... Panicking about your internet browser history made Gabe lose his mind.
Good job.
In Team Fortress 2 news, A Crowded Coop were showing off the first series
of their new blind box figures at Toy Fair 2014 earlier this week.
An image released to the company’s Facebook wall highlighted the Spy and Scout models,
both of which stand at around 3 inches in height.
Both are made entirely of vinyl and appear to feature poseable arms and some neat weapons.
The Facebook post also mentioned that the blind box series is due out “this Spring,”
which we imagine means they’ll probably be out sometime around April.
In other news, the winners of the 5th 72-hour mapping contest over at TF2Maps.net
were revealed earlier this week.
The winners were revealed in an announcement forum post by event organizer Frozen
before being highlighted in a “Winners Showcase” video over on the TF2Maps.net YouTube channel.
We highly recommend heading on over if you want to check out
which maps took the took home the top prizes.
And that brings us to the end of another week of Valve news.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
As usual, our Dota 2 Announcer Pack could use some love on the Steam Workshop,
so be sure to head on over and rate it positively!
Thanks for watching and bye for now.