The new goals are:

$2,000,000 – A custom HUD skin for all Compendium owners

$2,200,000 – A Taunt item with a brand new animation for all Compendium owners

$2,400,000 – Vote on participants in an 8 player Solo Championship (1 vs 1) at The International

$3,200,000 – Choose the next hero we release

Don’t miss Day 3 of Western Qualifiers starting tomorrow at 14:30 CEST. Tomorrow’s games will feature Evil Geniuses, mousesports, ICCup and Qpad Red Pandas. You can watch the game in the client or at The GDStudio.

Given how much faster the community is reaching the stretch goals we set up, we’ve decided to add some more, based on the many conversations we’ve seen the community having around the compendium. In particular, the big gap between the 2nd and 3rd is something we’re addressing. More on that tomorrow.

Don’t forget that the Western Qualifiers for the International 2013 started this morning over at TheGDStudio. Good luck to all the teams involved!

Don’t forget that Battle Bonuses improve the Battle Point earning rate of every player in the game with you, so if you’ve got one, make sure you drag some friends in to share in that sweet, sweet bonus.

The next Compendium Stretch Goal is additional mounts for the International 2013 Smeevil courier. Good luck!

Each year we spend some of the planning time for The International trying to figure out ways to improve the connection between fans and the players in the tournament. We know that the majority of our viewers will be watching the tournament unfold over the internet, so we’d like to make it easier for an online fan to dig deeper into the event, the teams, and the players. In addition to wanting more detail, we know fans also love to compete with each other at predicting tournament results. This year we’re taking our first shot at addressing all of the these concepts, with an additional step that we hope will result in the tournament itself getting bigger and better as a direct result of fan enthusiasm.

Today we’re announcing The International Interactive Compendium, a virtual book that will keep you fully up to date with the state of The International, and allow you to play games with other fans for fun and bragging rights. In addition to making you eligible for special virtual item drops throughout the tournament, it’ll also allow you to vote on tournament-related community polls, such as the selection of which player should receive awards based on their play in the tournament. After the tournament is over, you’ll be able to browse your friends’ Compendiums to see how successful they were in their predictions.

Finally, to directly tie fan interest in Compendiums to the players themselves, we’re going to redirect 25% of the revenue directly into the prize pool. That means the total $1.6 million prize pool for The International is now just the starting point. The Compendium will be available in the Dota Store tomorrow morning at 10:00am PDT. For those of you planning to attend The International in person, your ticket purchase will include a Compendium.

The International tickets will go on sale on Tuesday, May 7th, at 10:00am PDT. They will be sold directly through the Dota 2 Store. This year we’ll be putting all tickets up for sale at once, so set your alarm clocks.

We’ve also updated the The International Qualifiers with the 16 competing teams. Divided into East and West, these teams will compete for the 3 remaining slots in The International. The West Qualifier will be hosted by GDStudio from May 13th through the 19th, and the East Qualifier by BeyondTheSummit from May 20th through the 26th. All qualifier matches will also be available for free through DotaTV, right inside your Dota client.

Updates notes go here.

The first team invited to The International are the returning champions, Invictus Gaming. Twelve more teams will be announced over the coming days. Just like in last year’s event, the winners of the East and West Qualifiers will each receive an invite. As you’ve probably noticed, that only adds to 15 teams. Right before The International begins, the Wild Card event will determine the final spot in a match between the runner-ups of each qualifier.

The West Qualifier will be hosted by GDStudio from May 13th through the 19th and the East Qualifier by BeyondTheSummit from May 20th through the 26th. All matches will also be available for free through DotaTV.

For those interested in attending in person, we will be providing more info soon.

Today we’ve shipped some changes to the report system as part of our ongoing initiatives in the community space. We’d like to do what we can to discourage some of the negativity that can go on during games as well as encourage folks to exhibit more cooperative behavior with other members of the community.

To that end, we’ve implemented the following changes:

– We’re restricting the number of report fields per report to a single field in the hopes of increasing some of the clarity for the specific behavior being reported.

– In concert with the above change, we’ve combined the ‘text’ and ‘voice’ abuse fields in the report dialog into a single ‘communication’ field.

– We’re implementing a stricter system of communication (both text and voice) bans for abusive players. The system takes into account reports, in-game behavior, and other factors to determine whether or not a ban is warranted. These bans will be for voice and text communication channels only; they will not affect matchmaking, and they will not place players in the low-priority pool. The bans escalate according to the following scale:

• 1st ban: 1 day
• 2nd ban: 2 days
• 3rd (and subsequent) bans: 1 week

– We’re changing the number of report submissions per week to 4 to act as an initial baseline, as we fine-tune the system.

– We’ve removed a couple of lesser-used features (like spectators being able to report) that our data has shown not to correlate with accurate reports of bad behavior.

These changes are the beginning of a series of ongoing efforts to make the gameplay experience for all members of the DOTA community as enjoyable as possible. We’re going to be constantly monitoring and improving the system (and running many more experiments) as we go along, and we’re hopeful you’ll find these changes result in an improved experience in-game.

Patch notes are available here.

Something we’re very excited about this week is Anuxi’s Treasure of the Shaper Divine Chest. Look at all that stuff! This marks the first Chest entirely composed of items created by a single Workshop Contributor. We cannot wait to see what else comes out of the Dota 2 Workshop community.

In Tournament news, The Defense 3 Grand Finals are this weekend and if you happen to be one of the Immortal Highlanders that are still around since the start of the tournament then you are in for a treat! Virtus Pro faces Fnatic in a Best of Five that is sure to produce many memorable moments that should last until the next Defense ends or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first.

Good news to you G-1 League fans! The fine fellows over 17173 have added Inky the Hexapus courier to their tournament pass. Early adopters should find Inky awaiting in their inventories when they log in — make sure to bring a treat.

Finally, are you in Serbia? Do you like Dota 2? Do you have what it takes?! *insert guitar riff here* KGB-HQ is running a 32 team tournament at their cafe in Belgrade, Serbia. Interested? You can find more info here.

This changelog fell off the back of Axe’s van.

And your usual crew of broadcasters will be there to keep you company in-game and on their websites, with Chinese commentary by  820, Miss, Danche, BBC and Haitao, English by LD, Tobi and Godz and Russian by your Russian God V1lat.

In this week’s update you will also find Leshrac’s first item set and Lina’s hot new hair style.

The Machinima guys just posted the first part of their Dota 2 Pro series, this episode focuses on Dendi.

Make sure you have a lot of bandwidth available before you click on this massive changelog.

If you’re a new player, you’ll be automatically guided towards the first tutorial adventure, where you play Davion, The Dragon Knight. If you’ve already been playing Dota, you’ll find it under the Quests tab of the Play screen. Once you’ve completed it, please drop by the New Player Experience forum and tell us what you think.

We’re sure that you’ll think of a million things that we’re not teaching new players yet, and you’ll be right. This is just the first step, and we felt it was important to ship it so that you could help us figure out the right next step. Bringing new players into Dota is something we’ll be doing in collaboration with you, combining single player tutorial adventures with features like the recently released Hero Guides.

This week update also allow players to preview the content of all chests before unlocking them. You can also preview the contents in full 3D!

We’ve also added the ability to specify a custom status on your Rich Presence area. You can find this in your Career Profile panel.

See you next week!