Today, the Dota 2 developers announced that they are accepting applications for Battle Pass collectible rewards. The International 2018. Each level thousand Battle Pass owner will receive a mini copy of Aegis of Champions, and for those who reach level two thousand, Valve (through a contractor) will send a Baby Roshan figurine. To do this, you just need to register on the official website before September 20. There are no additional costs required (shipping is free).

Registration for collection awards is now open.

All Battle Pass owners who have reached level one thousand can receive the The International 2018 collectible Aegis, and those who have reached level two thousand are eligible to receive a collectible Baby Roshan figurine in addition to the Aegis.

To claim your rewards, visit the registration site and provide your shipping address and contact information. To access the site, you will need to enter your Steam account information and have a Battle Pass level 1000 or higher.

Collectible rewards can only be delivered to the address specified during registration. If you need to change your shipping address after registration has completed, please contact CMD Collectibles support at .

This year there will be two waves of Aegis delivery: the first in August, the second in November. Baby Roshan figurines were also planned to begin shipping before the main part of The International 2018, however, due to problems with the first batch, we are currently negotiating the launch of a new production, so the delivery of Roshans will begin when we are convinced that the quality of this reward meets expectations.

Please keep in mind that all communication with you regarding delivery will be made through the mailing address provided during registration. Providing an incorrect shipping address or contact information may result in you not receiving your collectible rewards.

To receive rewards, you must register, do not forget to do this before the end of the validity period of The International 2018 Battle Pass...

In May of this year, owners of last year's Battle Pass began receiving the Roshan figurines they were entitled to. Their quality left much to be desired, and as a result of community outcry, Valve began the production process again and replaced all low-quality products.

Follow the news on our website and in our group

Users of social networks want not only to spend their time comfortably, but also to receive gifts that bring pleasure. The social network VKontakte itself very rarely gives free gifts to its users; most often this happens on some major holidays, such as September 1st.

Today we will talk about how to receive free gifts, regardless of whether it is a holiday or a regular weekday...

There are several ways to receive gifts on the VK.com website and we will tell you about each of them.

1 way

The most effective way is to get them for some tasks on the site. The community administration gives its winners free votes and gifts(person's choice). All you need to do is join the group and upload your photo to the album. The moderators of the group will create a photo battle with your participation and you must publish a post with the battle on your wall, where your friends and subscribers will vote for you.

The more votes you get, the more chances you have to receive a free gift from the Group Administration. The group is currently recruiting moderators. To apply, you need to add the Administrator as a friend and ask him to make you a Moderator.

2 way

The second way to receive gifts is a special offer from the VKontakte website. More details have been written about it. By completing simple tasks, you get votes for which you can then give yourself a gift. You can give yourself a gift anonymously and then no one will know who it is from.

3 way

This method makes it possible to receive gifts from other users, but it is not always free. Once you receive votes using the first or second method, you can exchange gifts with your friends. You give it to your friend and he makes you happy free gift in reply.

4 way

This method does not always work well, but you can still write about it.

There are sites that give users votes or gifts for completing tasks. Tasks of this kind: join a group, bring a certain number of friends to a specified group, subscribe to updates, put “Tell friends”, add someone as a friend or something similar. It is worth warning you right away that by performing such tasks you are putting your profile at risk. The VK administration doesn’t like it when users do such things and simply bans pages.

5 way

This method is the most proven and correct.

The social network has its own internal currency - votes. By purchasing votes for money, you can give yourself as many gifts as you like, give free gifts to your friends and family, spend votes on games and applications, etc.

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Gifts in Dota 2 are exchange objects in Valve's item exchange system, which has undergone significant changes over the many years of its existence.

Gifts in Dota 2

Since the release of Dota 2, all in-game items, also known as cosmetic items, could be exchanged or sold on the trading Steam platform. This policy existed for quite a long time until non-transferable items began to be introduced into the game, they were assigned to the owner’s account, they could neither be exchanged nor sold for trading platform.

After the release of the next update, the trading system has changed a lot. The chance of items dropping after gaming matches has been significantly increased, but almost all of these items have become intransferable. Along with this change, a gift system was added to the game, which allowed Dota 2 items to be gifted to other Steam users. In this way, it was possible to give a non-transferable and non-sellable item to another player. Now the system is more developed, you can give almost all items, sets, treasuries and more.

How to send a gift in Dota 2?

This system works very simply: in your arsenal, in the game Dota 2, you need to right-click on the item you want to give and select “Wrap as a gift”, then in the window that appears, select to whom the gift will be sent. If necessary, you can add a note, this is the text that the recipient will see and which will be attached to the description of the gifted item.

There are some rules for exchanging gifts in Dota 2. After binding Steam account to your mobile ID, gifts can only be sent to players who have been on your friends list for at least 30 days.

Today you and I will learn to give each other something on the VKontakte social network. I think there is no need to explain to anyone what a gift is, but what it means on VKontakte is an ordinary picture that is placed in a special “Gifts” section on the page of the person to whom it was sent.

There is no need to equate such surprises with real ones and there is no need to replace them either. Otherwise, we’ll get to the point where, instead of going to cinemas, we’ll start throwing films on each other’s walls and that’s it)))

Usually gifts are paid, that is, in order to send someone something on VK you must give a certain number of votes (a kind of social network currency). This has always amazed me, giving virtual ones instead of real ones and also paying money for it)))

Let's, dear friends, move on to practice.

How to give a gift in the full version

This is done very simply. You need to go to the page of the person you want to send a gift to and click on the button under the avatar (next to “Write a message”).

Now we have a window opening with a huge number of gifts that we can give. Right next to them it is written how many votes they are worth. Click on the one you want:

A window opens with a detailed description of the “surprise”.

1. You see how much it costs and how many votes you currently have.
2. See who the recipient is. You can add a few more or remove them.
3. You can insert a message that will be displayed along with the gift.
4. You can hide your name and the text you send together from everyone except the recipient. To do this, you need to place a bird near the corresponding point.

After filling out all the fields, feel free to click on the “Submit” button.

That's basically all, after payment all this will be sent to the recipient.

How to send a free gift

They are absolutely free only on holidays. Then several of the same theme for a particular holiday are selected and you can send them absolutely free to some of your friends.

For example, these could be given for free for the New Year.

If you are offered to download some software that will help you give free gifts, then know that this is a scam. There is a high probability that after installing such a program, your VK page will be hacked.

I also came across articles on the Internet on various sites that suggest simply sending pictures to friends and this will be considered as free gifts. No, friends, pictures are pictures.

If you send a picture to a friend, it will not appear in his gifts section. And so, of course, you could open any paid one, save it in the browser as a picture and send it to a friend. But this will be a little different.

Gift anonymously

It will not be possible to send completely anonymously. All the same, the recipient will know who it is from. You can only hide your name for all other users of the social network, who will view the gifts of the person to whom the surprise was actually sent.

I have already shown you how this is done in this article. You just need to check the box on the sending page next to the item “Show the text and my name only to the recipient.”

A gift to myself

Personally, I couldn’t do this and it’s hardly possible. If you find a working way, please share it. I doubt that he exists, of course, but still.

Send from your phone

If you use the VK mobile application for smartphones and tablets, now I will show you how gifts are sent there.

We go to the page of the person we want to surprise, and in the upper right corner click on the box icon with a bow. See screenshot:

We choose what we want to send. In my case there are 5 free gifts. I click on them:

After all the settings are made, you can click on the “Send a gift” button:

That's it, dear friends, we have sorted out all the basic questions regarding gifts on the VKontakte social network. If you have any left, then ask them in the comments.

September 17, 2019 - Dota Team

The new Ranked season is here. Today’s blog will go over the changes we are doing as well as areas we are still thinking about. The changes in this update will be rolled out gradually over the next two days as we iron out bugs. The calibration part of the new season will begin this Thursday.

Role Symmetry
====

One big observation that we had since the previous update was that matches with misaligned roles had a meaningful impact on game quality. An example of this is when the mid player for one team has the highest rank on their team, and the mid player on the other team has the lowest rank. This tends to cause games to be really volatile and not enjoyable. In the past we used to prioritize rank spread between the two teams as one of the main criteria for the matchmaker to judge success, however as part of this update we are changing its priorities. It will now put a big emphasis on making sure that the roles are more symmetric rather than other criteria. This will also be something we will continue to tweak and iterate on over the coming weeks to make sure the algorithm’s search structure is correctly tuned and optimized for this.

Draft Role Report
====

To help ensure everyone plays the role they queued for, this update includes a role report function during the drafting and beginning minutes of the game. Starting with today’s update, using this information along with some other detection mechanisms, we will be much more aggressive in punishing players who abuse the system.

Core and Support Ranks
====

Some baseline dota skills and knowledge are shared between the Support and Core roles. So having the two numbers be entirely separated didn’t seem like a good idea to us, as we’d be losing valuable information about the player as well as promoting some warped incentives when you play your least used roles. As such, when you win or lose a game queued as one type of role, we’ll also update the MMR of the other type by a percentage of that game’s gains or losses. We'll be tweaking that ratio over time as we figure out the best balance.

Ban Waves
====

This update includes a few different ban waves for bad actors. The first ban wave is to players with exceptionally low behavior scores. We will continue to do regular ban waves for users who fall into this small percentage of the community. Users that reach this low level of behavior in the game are too big of a tax on the rest of the community and are not wanted. The second case where users will be banned today is for anyone detected of violating the Steam Service Agreement that prevents the purchase or sale of Steam accounts. Buying accounts to get a higher or lower rank is not allowed and causes negative side effects for the play experience of others. This doesn’t catch all account sales that happen, but we think we have caught enough to take some action. We are also banning players who’ve been detected using exploits to gain an advantage over other players. In the coming weeks, we will be refining the detection algorithms for these abusive behaviors and will begin issuing weekly bans that will go into effect without notice to violating accounts. Accounts that we ban will now also have the associated phone number permanently blacklisted from being able to have access to ranked matchmaking.

Smurfs
====

We recognize that recently there has been an increase in smurf accounts. We share the sentiments of the community has expressed on this issue and we consider it a high priority for us to solve as well. There isn’t a single solution that can address this issue easily, but we hope that a combination of multiple different changes over time will reduce the negative impacts and frequency of it.

The first change in this area is the usage of phone number verification. We’ve found a loophole that allowed a large number of users to play ranked without a unique phone number attached. We have fixed this bug and any user that does not have their account set up correctly will be prevented from queuing until it is resolved. This will also affect accounts that have been actively playing in ranked matchmaking, rather than just new accounts going forward.

We are also changing the mechanism to grant Ranked access. Rather than a fixed number of games, we are changing the metric to be a time based one and increased that amount to 100 hours of playtime. Any users that already have access to ranked without meeting this requirement will be removed from ranked until they’ve played enough time.

Our general approach to Smurfs is to try to get accounts that are performing higher than expected to their correct rank faster. The first change on this axis is to adjust MMR by more than just +/- 25 when we detect that a user has been clearly over performing (based on how the played heroes usually perform at a given rank). This will be an ongoing process as we get better at detecting this, but from the data analysis we’ve done so far, we think we can make some progress using this. This change will be silent for a few days as we verify the detection mechanism is working as intended, and will be enabled once that is verified. The other change we are making is how we calibrate the initial ranked MMR for new accounts entering ranked. Leveraging the new hours played gate we are adding for ranked access, we will be using your account’s historical performance more aggressively to place you into a more accurate initial rank. In the past we introduced a really low cap on initial rank, we think that was a mistake on our part, because it caused smurfs to unnecessarily impact a large volume of games before arriving at a closer-to-accurate rank.

Moving forward, we will be spending more time on live detection of smurfing and boosting behaviors. This will hopefully allow us to put detected accounts into an aggressive recalibration, resulting in a much quicker adjustment to an accurate MMR while reducing the number of games that are ruined in the process. In addition to this aggressive recalibration, we’ll also be detecting and banning accounts for egregious boosting or exploiting of game mechanics.

Miscellaneous Changes
====

To help reduce role confusion when queuing as a party, we’ve added a detailed popup for times when your party’s selected roles are incompatible, such as when two players have only selected the same role.

While this update is banning extremely low behavior score players, we’ve also increased the number of commends available for each player so you can recognize good behavior in your games as well.

Other Thoughts
====

There are a few other general changes that we are not sure are needed yet or haven’t been able to address yet, but are on our radar. We thought it might be a good idea to supplement this blog with information in the hope that community conversation about it can be helpful.

– High MMR games: While we have some changes here that directly and indirectly improve matchmaking quality for the extremely high end bracket, we will be closely monitoring this to see if other changes are needed.

– Hard Support: For certain MMR brackets, queue times and game quality would be meaningfully improved if there were a bigger percentage of players queuing for Hard Support. Many of the subpar matches we’ve found were a result of there not being enough players queuing for this role. We are exploring to see if any solutions can be effective for incentivizing this. We also know that it is more common that you’ll get Hard Support if you queue for all the roles, and we’d like that to eventually not be the case.

– Role queue abuse: As mentioned above, we’ll be much more aggressive in punishing players who don’t play the role they’ve queued for. If we find that role abuse persists despite these efforts, we’ll consider implementing role-specific bans that prevent a user from queuing for the abused role in future matchmaking games after they’ve left low priority. Our hope is that implementing such measures will be unnecessary as the results of our other changes.

– Smurfs: Dota 2 being a free-to-play game introduces various matchmaking related challenges. One option we have thought about is having Ranked access have a one time entry cost, and that access can be lost for players who regularly ruin games. We may also grandfather in users that we have enough data on, but we haven’t gone too deep in assessing the details here. We aren't sure if we need this as a solution yet either, we hope that other solutions can have a good effect at improving the matchmaking ecosystem.

In terms of our development focus moving forward, we are spending more of our time than usual focusing on matchmaking quality. We believe that is the right call given how much opportunity there is to make the day-to-day experience better for all players. We look forward to seeing your feedback on this update, and to continue to hear feedback in the following weeks for how to improve matchmaking.

We would like to thank all of the players, talent, and everyone in the Dota community for helping bring this celebration to life. The International is the crowning moment of the competitive season, and without everyone’s support, none of this would be possible. We hope you enjoyed this year's tournament as much as we did.

The Days Ahead
In the wake of The International, our next focus will be on preparing for the new Ranked Season as well as releasing some small gameplay balance tweaks. With the recent changes to Ranked Matchmaking, we’re interested in hearing any feedback or suggestions you have. As always, it’s helpful to include account info and match IDs with your feedback in the contact form.

Our next major release will be arriving later this fall with The Outlanders update, featuring the two new heroes– Snapfire and Void Spirit–that we announced at the event, as well as the next gameplay patch.

The International Group Stage is almost upon us. As the teams, fans, and broadcast crews make their final preparations for the crowning esports event of the year, it’s time to unveil some of the final details for everyone watching.

Tournament News

Head over to the in-game Compendium for a complete list of Casters and Talent for this year’s event. Don’t forget to fill out your predictions for hero picks, team results, player performance, and tournament meta. Predictions lock before the start of Group Stage play.

We’ve also launched the as a hub for keeping up with the daily tournament proceedings. As the Group Stage and Main Event progress, you’ll be able to see updated standings and new social media content posted each day from Shanghai.

• Group Stage: August 15th – August 18th, 2019 – As before, two best-of-two groups of nine teams. Top four teams in each group advance to Upper Bracket, five – eight advance to Lower Bracket, bottom in each group is eliminated.
• Main Event: August 20th – August 25th, 2019 – The tradition continues as 16 teams battle through a best-of-three double playoff elimination. Lower bracket first round is best-of-one, Grand Finals are best-of-five.

The top eighteen Dota teams in the world have earned the right to join the final test of the Dota competitive season. As the tournament progresses, check out the main stage and behind-the-scenes action on , which features all content from our