TL's Item Trading Thread - Page 234

Normal: In the beginning, there were just normal items divided into common, uncommon, rare, and mythical levels (with legendary added later above mythical). Most of these items can be obtained both by dropping in-game or purchasing from the Dota store. There are a few items that for no apparent reason were only in the store, and a few that only drop in game. New normal items get added steadily.

Stranges and Unusual Couriers: Sometime early last summer, treasure chests were added as droppable items. Each series of these chests has a specific hero as a theme, and only contains items for that hero. ALL items from these chests are strange. Starting with chest series #3, some of these chests also can contain strange modifiers as rares. Chests also have a small chance to contain an unusual courier. Unusual couriers can have a variety of effects and colors. There are also some event-specific chests that contain tagged items instead of stranges, and community chests that contain newly added items from the community workshop instead of stranges. There are also special unusual courier effects for many of these event and community chests.

The above items are obtainable by in-game drops or Dota store purchases (in the case of strange items and unusual couriers, you need both a droppable chest and a purchasable treasure key). This is not the case for the remaining item types, though Valve seems to be experimenting with putting some genuine items in the Dota store at least temporarily (Wyvernguard Edge was stocked in a quantity of 500 just a couple of days ago).

Genuine: these are promotional items to reward people who make purchases of goods outside of the normal cosmetic equipment. The first (and for a great while the only) genuine items were the small number that come with t-shirts or plush/inflatable couriers from the Valve store (Wyvernguard Edge, Bow of the Howling Wind, Recluse Reef Denizen, Dolfrat and Roshinante, Braze the Zonkey) and an item that comes with the Dota 2 branded Steelseries mouse (Kantusa the Script Sword). They come as an activatable code with your purchase. These items are worth a significant fraction of the total purchase price because you have to spend a fair amount to get them, and people outside the US would have to pay a lot for shipping. The newest such item is the Battlefury that comes with the Dota branded Plantronics Gamecom 780 headset, but this item is for some reason not yet officially genuine (I expect it to become so). More recently (beginning in December with the Defense 3), some tournament tickets began including a promotional courier bundled with the ticket purchase. These couriers are all genuine, and tend to be worth ~half the cost of the tournament ticket+courier bundle.

Next we have the limited availability items. Valve seems to have changed their minds about how to label these, but I think that from now on all such items will be tagged "Immortal".

Ancient: There is only one Ancient item: the Defense 2 War Dog. The Defense 2 was the first tournament to include items as a reward for purchasing the ticket. Everyone who bought a ticket for the tournament was given a non-tradable Defense 2 chest and a Defense 2 key with which to open it. The chest could drop a large variety of normal cosmetic equipment but had a tiny chance of dropping the Defense 2 War Dog, which would never be obtainable by any other means. After this item Valve seems to have retired "Ancient" as a class of item, instead using "Immortal" as the official tag to indicate that an item will only be obtainable for a limited time.

Immortal and Vintage: The International 2 last summer had limited-time promotional couriers tied to the event, much like the Defense 2 War Dog, but this time around they bore the "Immortal" tag. These couriers are Lockjaw the Boxhound, Drodo the Druffin, and Murrissey the Smeevil. Most were be obtained as rare drops from the limited-time event chests that dropped during the International. Valve also introduced a new way to get items by spectating games in the Dota client, awarding an Immortal courier randomly to a spectator when a notable even occured in-game (first blood, triple kill, etc). As mentioned above, Immortal seems to have superseded "Ancient". Since the International 2, there have been two more limited-time-only couriers that were thus tagged Immortal: the Golden Baby Roshan awarded to winners of the Greeviling challenge at the Diretide Halloween event, and Golden Greevils dropped from the rarely-appearing Giftsnatcher during the Frostivus Christmas event.

There is only one Vintage item in Dota 2: Timebreaker. It was a normal uncommon item for Faceless Void, but it was discovered last summer that the design had been plagiarized from another game. The Timebreaker was removed from the store and the in-game drop tables, and all the ones already in the hands of players were replaced with a redesigned version that was tagged "Vintage Immortal". This was a carryover from TF2, in which any item obtained before the game went free to play was given the "Vintage" tag, with Vintages no longer able to be obtained after that date. In this case the Timebreaker was removed, so unlike TF2 there can't be both normal and Vintage versions of the same item. Obviously the circumstances around the Timebreaker were exceptional, so I think Valve realized afterward that there wasn't much reason to carry over the Vintage tag. Similar items (normal equips that get removed from the game) have since then been changed to Immortal rather than Vintage Immortal. The only such items so far are the Dragonclaw Hook and the entire Alpine Stalker set for Ursa. The Alpine set was removed from the Dota store soon after being added due to outcry on the dev forums. The set had had poor ratings in the community workshop, mainly due to complaints that it didn't fit the lore of the game. The reason the Dragonclaw Hook was removed is as far as I know still unknown. The Alpine set and the Dragonclaw hook went for a number of months before officially receiving their Immortal tag in March, but with that change it seems quite likely that the "Vintage" tag is, like "Ancient", a thing of the past.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about another tag!

Tournament: After the International 2 concluded, Valve decided to continue using the spectator-rewarding drop system pioneered for the Immortal tournament couriers, but now with normal items as the drops instead. Any item you receive as a drop for spectating a game in the client is tagged with the description of the event in the game that triggered the drop, as well as a timestamped link to the replay of the game so you can watch it yourself