As always, you can find today’s change log here. Our favorite addition is the broadcasting of spectator numbers to players in a game – a great way to make Dota stress your heart even more is to let you know there’s a crowd watching your every move!

Also, cookies and milk are a thing of the past. This holiday you should leave fresh chops, sweetbread and gravy near the chimney.

One cool new feature found in today’s update is the Suggested Item Editor. With it you can now customize your item builds while you play, and they will be available wherever you go, thanks to Steam Cloud.

Among the usual fixes and changes found in today’s update, you will also find Radiant’s new Ancient destruction and a new loading process – if a player fails to load into the game all other players return to matchmaking with higher priority.

In community news, some great matches have been coming out of the Dota2 Star Championship tournament. You can find all the coverage you will ever need at joinDota and Gosugamer.net.

Finally, you can find today’s change log here.

For our international testers, we have added IME support for better text input handling. Please let us know how this is working. We are also ramping up our leaver detection sensitivity, which results in leavers being temporarily placed in a separate matchmaking pool.

If you haven’t signed up for Dota 2 yet, its not too late! We are continuing to send invitations out each day at an increasing pace. You need to have a Steam account first and then fill out this survey.

You can find Today’s changelog here.

Tomorrow marks the start of Dreamhack, one of the biggest LAN events in the world. Their Dota 2 tournament includes both local and international teams, and should make for some exciting games to watch. You can find more information and coverage over at Dreamhack’s website or Gosugamers.net.

Among a variety of other fixes and additions, today’s update also adds another step in our ongoing work to tackle community health. A couple of updates ago we released a report and commendation system. This has given us a bunch of data about the various ways that some players are helping or hurting the fun of other players. One theme we noticed was that there are some players out there who reduce other people’s fun through the communication channels, but at the same time receive commendations in other games for being good players to play with or against. So with this update we’re adding a system that detects players who are clearly reducing the fun of other players specifically through text and voice chat – and temporarily removes their ability to use those chat systems. Once they return to being additive to the community, they can re-earn that functionality. As usual, we’ll be paying careful attention to whether this makes the Dota world a better place, and you can send us your thoughts after seeing it in action.

You can read Today’s changelog here.

In addition to Omniknight and Dragon Knight, today’s update includes another step in our process of tackling the problem of players abandoning games repeatedly. This is the first time we’ll be moving beyond just gathering data, and into the realm of taking action: players who have been identified as repeatedly leaving games will be moved into a separate matchmaking pool for a period of time. As usual, there’s a variety of other smaller additions and fixes.

We’d also like to welcome the new folks who received Dota 2 invites yesterday. If you weren’t one of the lucky folks, you’ll be happy to know we’ll be pushing out new invites every couple of days.

Finally, we’d like to give a shout out to Dreamhack’s Dota 2 tournament. If your team is in the area, sign up fast – there’s a limited number of slots.

You can read today’s changelog here.

We’ve just finished our first significant expansion of Dota 2 server capacity around the world, and that means it’s time to kick this thing up a notch. Starting this week, we’ll be handing out Dota 2 in increasing volumes. To celebrate, we’re releasing the first part of the official Dota 2 comic, Tales from the Secret Shop.

Once you’ve read today’s part, make sure you fill out the Dota 2 Survey in Steam to secure your place in the upcoming invitations. The extra data the survey provides will allow us to ensure we invite a wide spread of players and hardware. UPDATE: If the link above doesn’t work, in the Steam client click the ”Steam” menu in the upper left, then “Check for Steam Client Updates…” to get the latest version of the Steam Client.

One thing everyone will tell you is that Dota is a game that’s more fun with friends. Because of that, we wanted to make sure everyone we invited could bring a couple of friends – so everyone who receives Dota 2 will be given two extra copies that they can hand out to whomever they’d like. You’ll find your extra copies in the Steam section of your Steam account’s item inventory, and you can use the Steam Trading feature to give them to your friends.

Once you have Dota 2 installed, keep an eye on this blog. We update the game every Thursday with extra heroes, features, and bug fixes, and we’ll cover interesting elements of those updates right here. We’ll also be giving you some more insight into the development of Dota 2 over the coming months, as we roll through the rest of Dota’s many heroes.