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Hi, and welcome back to the ValveTime news.
After a week-long break,
we're back to bring you all the biggest talking points regarding Valve Software and the community.
Now, the news:
Steam Greenlight headlined earlier this week
as the sixth official batch of community Greenlit games were announced by Valve.
The new update introduced a total of 20 titles,
2 of which were software and 18 of which were games.
As usual, the list of games include a variety of titles from different genres and developers
including an MMO known as City of Steam,
2D platformers like Shovel Knight and Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures, and many more.
On the software front, PlayClaw, a game recording utility, and GamePlan, a clan organization system,
were both added to the steadily growing list of software selected by the community in the past few months.
Valve was also keen to stress that this update has pushed the number of titles selected through Greenlit past a total of 90.
For more information, or to read the full list of Greenlit games included in the update,
head on over to our website via a link in the video description.
Valve returned from their scheduled two-week holiday in Hawaii earlier this week,
which means the Dota 2 team were back at work on weekly patches.
This week's update, which rolled out a day later than usual, introduced Skywrath Mage,
a new ranged intelligence hero who is regularly played as a nuker or support hero
capable of dealing massive amounts of magical damage to opponents in extremely small bursts.
His ultimate, dubbed Mystic Flare, allows Skywrath Mage to bombard a small area with magic for a 2 second duration,
which, at max level, can deal up to 1200 damage to a target caught within the blast radius.
What makes his ultimate unique, however, is the manner in which the damage is evenly split and distributed
depending on how many opponents are caught in the AOE.
The ultimate will deal a potential 1200 damage to a single target, 600 damage to two targets,
400 damage to three targets and so on,
meaning that Skywrath Mage's ultimate can quite easily become a real turning point during a team fight.
A variety of visual improvements also arrived in the form of some new shopkeeper models,
a new in-game ground model for the Smoke of Deceit,
an improved model for the Gem of True Sight,
and a huge update to the quality of Riki's textures.
Valve have also streamlined the 'report player' function by merging the "Voice" and "Text" report categories
into a single "Communication Abuse" section,
a change which was applied alongside a reduction to the total number of bans a player can make per week,
which has been downgraded from 6 to 4.
Spectators are also no longer allowed to report players,
something Valve believes will help streamline bans and prevent users exploiting the function.
Unreleased heroes Elder Titan, Abaddon, and Legion Commander all received sizeable updates
to textures, particle effects, strings, sounds, and portrait images,
all of which point to their potential inclusion sometime soon.
Perfect World, the Asian game publisher in charge of distributing Dota 2 into the Chinese market,
announced earlier this week that the first set of Dota 2 invites for China will be distributed on April 28th 2013.
What makes this news story interesting, however, is the mention that the Dota 2 Chinese build
will run on a stripped down and simplified version of Steam
designed specifically to run Dota 2 alone.
Perfect World and Valve both believe that this will help to negate previously reported issues
related to slow Steam updates in the Chinese area
which has limited player accessibility to the platform up until now.
To read more about this week's Dota 2 news, we've included a variety of links in the video description
which you can use to access Valve's official changelog, our own write-up over on ValveTime.net,
and Cyborgmatt's update analysis on his personal website.
Team Fortress 2 received a minor update earlier this week which has introduced a console command into the game
which allows players to view their full character model even outside of the recently-introduced VR mode.
Facepunch Studio's own MaxOfS2D was resourceful enough
to create this short video in order to appropriately demonstrate
how the new system would be useful for viewing in-game models...
...including one of his own...custom....skins.
Yup...
Anyway, in merchandise news, NECA and the Valve Store officially unveiled that
their 1:1 scale replica of Half-Life 2's Gravity Gun will be available in June.
We'll keep you up to date with any further developments regarding this amazing looking replica.
Also worth noting is the recently-released Balloonicorn Plushie,
which was made available at the Valve Store over a week ago.
The plushie, which is priced at $24.99, also comes bundled with a coupon code
which will unlock a genuine Balloonicorn item in-game,
so head on over to the Valve Store via the link in the video description to get your hands on one if you're interested.
Last Friday, April 19th 2013, marked Portal 2's second anniversary since release,
and we've recently seen a slew of community content released to celebrate the occasion.
Happy 2nd Birthday, Portal 2!
Now, we'd like to take a few moments to highlight a few of the original videos
which we really think deserve as much attention as they can get.
Firstly, we highly recommend you check out Harry101UK's most recent Portal-themed song, titled "Making Science",
which continues Harry's long-running theme of using Portal parodies of Tim Burton songs
to develop unique music videos.
If live action fan films are more to your taste, you might want to check out the recently-released "Aperture: Shadows,"
a 6-minute fan film produced by the same team
responsible for the creation of the extremely popular and well-received "Lab Ratt" short film
which was released in May of last year.
Last, but definitely not least, be sure to check out Episodes 5 and 6 of Aperture R&D,
both of which were released over the past week.
Valve are also celebrating the release anniversary by including Portal 2 in a Steam weekend sale
at a 75% reduction until Monday April the 22nd at 10:00am Pacific Standard Time,
so now would be a pretty good opportunity to get your hands on it if you haven't had the chance to play it.
We'll stay on-topic with Portal 2's anniversary for this week's discussion.
Let us know which you find to be the more enjoyable experience and why.
That brings this week of Valve news to a close.
We'd like to say a big thank you to everyone who put in an application on our open writer position back in March.
We've now accepted our three new writers,
so keep an eye out for content from Lobster, Emily453 and TheBreakfast coming soon.
We're extremely happy to have them on board, and we hope you'll all like their upcoming content.
Thanks for watching and bye for now.