Diretide!!!

Oh man, I do love me a good old DotA event! 

Diretide is the new DotA event that will continue on to around the 28th I think and it's being held in November because there was some update that threw their schedule off, so we get our trick or treating thing in November.  Better late than never though!

Diretide is a special game mode where each team has a big old bucket of candy on their side of the map.  The idea is that you have to kill monsters to gain candy and go drop it off at your bucket and the team with the most candy at the end wins the game.  Although, you can hop on along with your team into your enemies base and steal candy from their bucket, so a good balance of offence and defence is required if you want to win.

After a little while, the game ends and the winning team is granted a bunch of items, then the big monster that walks around the map sits his ass down and the 10 of you team up to go kill him as many times as you can within a time limit.  The more times you kill him, the better loot you get at the end so the great thing about this mode is that you're guaranteed some kind of prize just for participating.

It's a fun little mode and the games are way shorter than your usual DotA match, so you can hop on for half an hour, play a little bit and still come away with something for your time.  The problem is that it's a little bit broken with some characters being way better than others and some just being outright useless, but for a little mini game it's forgivable. 

The other thing is that there are groups of players who have figured out how to get the big monster kill count really really high, and this means that you will be seeing the same handful of characters basically every game, which can get a little bit dull.

But all things considered it's a fun little mode and if you're like me and don't give a flying fuck about item drops, the stuff you can sell on the steam marketplace means that you'll probably get to buy a cheap free game at the end of it, even if you only played a couple of games a day.

So if you don't already play DotA, go give it a shot.  People are a lot more forgiving of new players during an event because winning really isn't all that important here, just have fun and get some free stuff.

Steam Marketplace! Free Games (With some luck and patience)

I'm surprised this is something I was not made aware of sooner, because it's fucking awesome!

So, Steam have had this service for a while where you can buy and sell in-game items for real life dosh.  When I first saw this I laughed thinking it was a load of shit, and while I was half right after fucking around with it for an evening I ended up making £7.50 which is enough to buy a game off the store.

So how does it work?  Well the only games that are supported are Team Fortress 2 and DotA2, and even then you can't just sell all the shit in your steam inventory willy nilly, only certain things at the moment are marketable.  So I had a bunch of chests from DotA, and some items on TF2 and I put them up for like, 20p (or a penny for the DotA chests)

After waiting for what has now been about 24 hours, I know have enough money in my steam funds for a cheap game.  You know, if you ask me this idea is pretty fucking amazing.  Granted your selling stuff for basically nothing, like I said chests and crates go for about a penny, but if your big on DotA or TF2 and you make some sales, then do it long enough and you'll have enough for a free game.

Steam do take a percentage of the sale for themselves which I've seen some people complain about, but you are getting money for shit that you earned in game and didn't pay for, so really you have nothing to lose by selling all those crappy chests.

I don't know what I'm going to do with my spare pocket change, probably save it until I have about a tenner then buy something on the next sale, who knows?  Either way, it's a cool service and gives me that incentive to sink a couple more hours into DotA and TF2.