This year we are moving to Benaroya Hall, located here in beautiful sunny Seattle. It will be held during the last weekend of August, from the 31st to September 2nd.

For those that want to catch up on last year’s event, the archive is located here.

We will be releasing information on how to acquire tickets in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for details.

You can’t go in alone, here – take these:

• The Prodota2 League and Gigabyte’s Dota Masters league started last week.
• We don’t usually drink rum, but when we do, we enjoy the Brewmaster approved smooth flavors of Admiral Kunkka’s Tidebringer Rum.
• The Starladder finals VODs are up.

You can find the latest changelog is here, no wait: here, nope: here!

When looking at feedback that we’ve gotten related to our interface, the first concerns we decided to address were:

• Inefficient use of space across all resolutions
• Having to jump through hoops to interact with the courier and glyph
• A lack of aesthetic coherency with the rest of the game visuals

To more efficiently use space in wider resolutions, we’ve made adjustments to the layout of the stats section. This also allowed us to include Move Speed as one of the stats readily available to players.

The Courier UI now exposes the state of the little guy, and allows item delivery with just a single click. Glyph state is also clearly exposed and easier to reach when you most need it.

And finally we’ve also updated the look of our item icons.

As always, we would love to hear what you think of the changes, so feel free to leave feedback over in our UI forums.

Also released today is the Dota 2 replay parsing tool. This tool allows technically minded community members to extract data straight out of game replays. You can check out the technical documentation here. We can’t wait to see what kind of awesome data visualizations people come up with.

Meanwhile the community’s as busy as always, peep this:

• The Star Series is happening right now! Check out Purge’s stream for all the action, or if you’re just interested in seeing where he sleeps.
• And look at this thing!

Changelog? Yep, we got that changelog.

These community highlights just stumbled onto this blog:

• Gigabyte and Beyond The Summit announced the Dota 2 Masters tournament. With the top Asian teams competing it will be hard to find a game lacking any action.
• The VOD for The Arena’s finals between Mousesports and CLG is now available.

Update notes can be found here. Please read responsibly.

This week we see the return of Random Draft mode. In this mode only 20 heroes are available and players take turns picking.

A wild pack of community highlights has been spotted!

• The Corsair sponsored Vengeance Cup taking place during Dreamhack Summer 2012 has been announced.
• The ProDota2 league is set to start tomorrow, Friday April 13th. Our friends over at GosuGamers have you covered with a nice write up about it.
• Episode 1 of TheGDStudio’s Learn To Play Dota 2 series is out. Better tell your loved ones you’ll be busy for the next 3 hours.

We’ll see you again next week, you might want to get a designated driver by then.

Changelog is available here.

Community things:

• It’s Gosu’s Monthly Madness tournament finals are tomorrow, March 29th. You don’t want to miss this, we hear it could be more than we can bear.
• Bear witness to Team Dignitas’ Ultimate Guide to Warding. This should be required teaching in clawsrooms across the globe.
• Great Explorer Nullf has compiled the eating habits of the legendary Tidehunter in one handy chart. This might give you paws before deciding to head to the beach.

Bear in mind that there will not be an update next week as we will be hibernating during that time.

Today’s bearlog is available here.

Bear.

One thing to check out in today’s update is the new Hero Performance Rating section in your Persona page. Your performance ratings show how well you play each hero compared to other players of similar skill.

These stats are only available to you. Your ratings will become more accurate the more you play, so get cracking!

This week we are also increasing the number of invites being sent out. In addition, we’ll be giving the most active Dota 2 players some more copies to gift to friends. This will be done on a regional basis based on available capacity, starting with US West.

Oh, these might be relevant to your interests:

• A showmatch between WE and Captain Planet this Saturday the 24th on ECAL.tv
• This week’s Dota 2 Top 10 plays.
• AnGeul created a teaser for the Asian Dota Masters tournament.

Finally, today’s changelog is available here.

In today’s update you will find your usual collection of fixes and new features including parity with Dota’s 6.74 release and the ability to share unit control with your team mates.

Thanks to everyone that jumped on the Test Build and helped us test this update.

The full changelog is available here.

We’re changing the way we release updates once more and will be updating the Test Build on Wednesdays. It will then be promoted to the Dota 2 release build the next day if no major issues are found.

Now for some community news:

• The Razer Dota 2 Tournament, organized by Rapture Gaming and e-Club, starts today and runs through the weekend.
• Also starting this weekend, the latest Star Series featuring the best teams from Europe and North America begins this Sunday, .

Today’s changelog is available here.

We are looking forward to The Defense Grand Final this weekend, between Na’Vi and Quantic Gaming. Head over to joindota.com for more details and times. You can also find this over there.

As per our new release schedule, the Test Build has also been updated. You can check out its changelog here.