Dota 2 Full HD Wallpapers

Description

Dota 2 is a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena video game developed and published by Valve Corporation. The game is the stand-alone sequel to Defense of the Ancients , which was a community-created mod for Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and its expansion pack, The Frozen Throne. Dota 2 is played in matches between two teams of five players, with each team occupying and defending their own separate base on the map. Each of the ten players independently controls a powerful character, known as a "hero", who all have unique abilities and differing styles of play. During a match, players collect experience points and items for their heroes to successfully battle the opposing team's heroes in player versus player combat. A team wins by being the first to destroy a large structure located in the opposing team's base, called the "Ancient".




Port to the Source 2 engine
In June 2015, Valve announced that the entirety of Dota 2 would be ported over to their Source 2 game engine in an update called Dota 2 Reborn. Reborn was first released to the public as an opt-in beta update that same month, and officially replaced the original client in September 2015, making it the first game to use the engine. Reborn included a new user interface framework design, ability for custom game modes created by the community, and the full replacement of the original Source engine with Source 2. Largely attributed to technical difficulties players experienced with the update, the global player base experienced a sharp drop of approximately sixteen percent the month following the release of it. However, after various updates and patches, over a million concurrent players were playing again by the beginning of 2016, with that number being the largest in nearly a year. The move to Source 2 also allowed the use of the Vulkan graphics API, which was released as an optional feature in May 2016, making Dota 2 one of the first games to offer it.


Release

Dota 2 was first made available to the public at Gamescom in 2011, coinciding with the inaugural International championship, the game's premier eSport tournament event. At the event, Valve began sending out closed beta invitations, with the first few being sent out shortly after Gamescom. During the event, Newell speculated that Dota 2 would likely ship in 2012, despite original plans for a full release in late 2011. In September 2011, Valve scrapped its previous development and release plans, which would have kept the game in its closed beta phase for over a year. IceFrog then announced plans to begin beta testing. Simultaneously, Valve announced that the non-disclosure agreement for the beta was being lifted, allowing testers to discuss the game and their experiences publicly.After nearly two years of beta testing, Dota 2 was officially released on Steam for Microsoft Windows on July 9, 2013, and later for OS X and Linux on July 18, 2013. The game did not launch with every hero from Defense of the Ancients. Instead, the missing ones were added in various post-release updates, with the final one, as well as the first Dota 2 original hero, being added in 2016. Two months following the game's release, Newell claimed that updates to Dota 2 generated up to three percent of global internet traffic. In December 2013, the final restrictions against unlimited global access to Dota 2 were lifted after the game's infrastructure and servers were substantially bolstered. In order to abide by the standards set by the economic legislation of specific countries, Valve opted to contract with nationally based developers for publishing. In October 2012, the leading Beijing-based video game publisher, Perfect World, announced the acquisition of the exclusive rights of Dota 2 in China. The Chinese version also has a region-specific "Low Violence" mode, which censors and changes most depictions of blood, gore, and skulls in order for the game to follow censorship policies of the country. In November 2012, a similar publishing deal was made with the South Korea-based game company Nexon to distribute and market the game in the country, as well as in Japan. Three years later, Nexon announced they would no longer be operating servers for Dota 2, with Valve taking over direct distribution and marketing of the game in those regions.In December 2016, Dota 2 was updated to gameplay version 7.00, known as "The New Journey" update. Prior to the update, the Dota series had been in version 6.xx for over a decade, marking the first major revision since IceFrog originally took over development of the original mod in the mid 2000s. The New Journey update added and changed numerous features and mechanics of the game, including adding the first original hero not ported over from Defense of the Ancients, a reworked map, a redesigned HUD, a pre-game phase that allows for players to discuss their team strategy, and a "Talent Tree" hero augmentation system. In April 2017, Valve announced changes to the game's ranked matchmaking system, with the main one requiring the registration of a unique phone number to a player's account in order to play them, an anti-griefing and smurfing practice they had previously implemented in their first-person shooter game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Further changes to the game's matchmaking were brought in an update in November 2017, where the old numerical MMR system was replaced by a seasonal one based on eight ranked "medals" that are recalibrated every six months, a move that brought the game's ranked system closer to ones used in other competitive games such as Global Offensive, StarCraft, and League of Legends. In early 2018, IceFrog announced that he and Valve would begin on a different way to handle gameplay balance updates for the game. Instead of releasing larger updates irregularly throughout the year, smaller ones would be released on a set schedule of every two weeks. Around the same time, the game also introduced the "Dota Plus" paid montly subscription system, replacing the seasonal battle pass. Dota Plus includes everything that battle passes did, such as milestone and hero-specific achievements that reward players with exclusive cosmetics, as well as introducing the "Plus Assistant" feature, a tool that provides match data gathered from thousands of recent games at each skill bracket for players, such as hero suggestions during a draft, and item and ability suggestions during a match.


Professional competition

To ensure that enough Defense of the Ancients players would take up Dota 2 and to showcase the game's capabilities, Valve sponsored sixteen accomplished Defense of the Ancients teams to compete at The International, a Dota 2 specific eSports tournament, for a one million dollar prize in 2011. The International became an annual championship tournament in 2012, with the venue changing to Seattle. In its third year, The International allowed crowdfunding to add to its prize pool through an interactive, in-game app called a "Compendium". Compendiums, which are optional, allow players who buy them to directly raise prize money for The International by spending money on unique cosmetics and other in-game items offered through it, with 25% of all the revenue made going directly to the prize pool. Sales from the 2013 compendium helped raise over $2.8 million, making The International 2013 reclaim its previous title as having the largest prize pool in eSports history from the League of Legends Season 2 World Championship. Since then, each annual tournament of The International has broken the previous one's prize pool record, with the fourth iteration of the tournament raising nearly US$11 million, exceeding the prizes pools of the Super Bowl, Masters Tournament, and Tour de France. At The International 2015, the prize pool exceeded $18.4 million, earning the champion team, Evil Geniuses, over $6 million.Following the inaugural event of The International, several other eSport events began to transition from Defense of the Ancients to Dota 2, including the Electronic Sports World Cup. DreamHack would also support Dota 2 in 2011, following a year without support for the original, on account of other MOBA titles such as Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends. By the end of its first year in its beta phase, Dota 2 was one of the highest-paying eSport titles of 2011, second only to StarCraft II. Snake VS. Colors
. In 2012, Dota 2 began as an official title for the World Cyber Games annual event at World Cyber Games 2012. Evil Apples: Dirty as ____.
. The Electronic Sports League began a seasonal tournament for Dota 2 called the RaidCall EMS One in 2013, which was the largest independent tournament for Dota 2 by the beginning of 2013. Drive Ahead!
. Beginning in September 2013, the Association for Chinese eSports began a league, called the WPC ACE Dota 2 League, which had the largest third-party prize pool in Dota 2 eSports history at the time. Disney Crossy Road
. At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2013, Nexon announced the investment of two billion South Korean won, , into amateur and professional leagues in South Korea for 2013, to coincide with the launch of their distribution agreement in the fall of that year. PUBG MOBILE
. Modeled after the interactive compendium for The International, Valve introduced a compendium third-party tournament organizers could sell, beginning with DreamLeague in February 2014. In February 2015, the Valve-sponsored Dota 2 Asia Championships was held in Shanghai with a prize pool of over $3 million, raised through compendium sales. Other Dota 2 Asia Championships have also taken place, with it being sometimes being referred to as the "Chinese International".In total, professional Dota 2 tournaments had earned teams and players over $100 million in prize money by June 2017, with over half of that being awarded at the International tournaments, making it the highest earning eSport game by a margin of nearly $60 million.


Dota Pro Circuit
Starting in 2015, Valve began sponsoring smaller, but seasonally held tournaments with a fixed three million prize pool, known officially as the Dota Major Championships. The format for the tournaments were based on the series of