The return of a wraith king is a pretty big deal (one would think so at least) so you can expect a lot of interesting features added to the game for this special event.

According to their Wraith-Night mini site players will be able to participate in daily events of varying difficulty and gain a bonus when the invite new friends to the game.

In addition players will be able to purchase a new playable character.  The Legion Commander will be available today for purchase from the Dota 2 store.

The team in charge of Dota 2 development at Valve hasn’t exactly had the best record when it comes to seasonal events. The did cancel Frostivus last year and replace it with The Greeviling, and they decided not to do The Harrowing and forget to tell everyone else.  It’s reasonable that Dota 2 players are skeptical that they will actually be able to participate in a fun winter inspired event this December.

FINALLY, FROSTIVUSSince last year’s celebration was cancelled (the less said about that the better), rest assured that this year’s Frostivus will be twice as caring and serene.

There’s not a lot of info to go on at this point, but the fact that they have a web page for it (http://www.dota2.com/frostivus2013/) surely means they are at least somewhat dedicated to the idea of seasonal events.Here in the Gamecrastinate office we got our start playing Dota 1 at a lan center in Lake Worth, Florida during the early days of the mod. Even though we’re LoL players now Dota will always hold a special place in our heart. As will the idea of Christmas seasonal events!

It speaks volumes of the quality of this mod and the developers behind it that Valve is allowing their intellectual property to be licensed and sold on their own distribution platform.

Many Steam game developers are currently working on native SteamOS titles, which will result in the best possible living room experience being delivered to their customers. In the meantime, we believe it’€™s important to make sure that the existing catalog of games is also available to Steam users in the living room. So we’d like to talk about in-home streaming, a way for people with good home networks to seamlessly play their Steam games anywhere in the house.

Steam in-home streaming will allow you to play a game on one computer when the game process is actually running on another computer elsewhere in your home. Through Steam, game audio and video is captured on the remote computer and sent to the player€™s computer. The game input (keyboard, mouse or gamepad) is sent from the player€™s computer to the game process on the remote computer.

Any two computers in a home can be used to stream a gameplay session and this can enable playing games on systems that would not traditionally be able to run those games. For example, a Windows only game could be streamed from a Windows PC to a Steam Machine running Linux in the living room. A graphically intensive game could be streamed from a beefy gaming rig in the office to your low powered laptop that you are using in bed. You could even start a game on one computer and move to a more comfortable location and continue playing it there.

If you want to get in on the action join the official Steam Group and cross your fingers.

Check out the quote from Shacknews on the changes…

The change that’s making waves, though, is an overhaul of crafting introducing recipe scrolls, which allow you to combine items to get something fancier. This, in addition to sockets on cosmetic items, means you’ll be able to make really customised items.

This is all very interesting of course, but as PCGamesN points out, it also means that unusual couriers are no longer as rare as they were after Valve patched out randomly generated coloured flame particle effects just a few weeks after introduction. One unique example was sold for $38,000 last week, and in a very short amount of time there will be copycats popping up everywhere. Ouch.

Reports across various forums are of many players who were holding these items in hopes of scoring a quick buck or maybe holding on for a while in hopes of highers profits down the road only to find out that the item is now essentially worthless. A steamgifts.com forum member reported his item previously considered a quick sell at $2000 was worthless as of this morning.

The updated, dubbed the Three Spirits Update adds an Earth Spirit and Ember Spirit while also updating the Storm Spirit as well,

In addition the update adds in an in-game coaching function allowing skilled players to teach beginners (or pros to make money teaching noobs), a showcase view when watching matches, and the belated return of the Diretide event.

In a time where they need the players more than ever you’d think they would at least have their community relations people on the ball trying to communicate to the client base. What an odd mistake by Valve and the Dota II devs.

Bandwidth be damned, when it comes to free DLC you’d better believe 15 year olds across the land will be sharing their numerous deaths to “hackers” on twitch.tv in a major way.