It's been a busy year for Dota. We welcomed a new hero into our ranks (and a long-awaited one finally made his debut); we crowned another team of world champions at this year's TI in Copenhagen; we reworked every hero with new game-changing innates and facets; and we even managed to cram in a four-act multi-month narrative epic about talking birds.

And so, as the year winds to a close, we find ourselves filled once again to the absolute brim with the spirit of Frostivus. And that means a sackful of festive gifts for everyone for the duration of the Frostivus event, from now until January 15th.

“What kind of gifts?” one might festively wonder. Well, for starters: For the rest of the season, your hero will begin each game wearing a stylish Frostivus hat.

But don't think of it as a fashion statement. Think of it as a trophy case. Because you can also steal hats from enemy heroes and get them as gifts from your allies with the new Spirit of Frostivus ability. You can also get them the old fashioned way (murder/larceny), by stealing them off the skulls of heroes you've just killed, off the Tormentors, or if you really know what you're doing, even off Roshan's craggy dead head.

And every single hat you take, you can wear on top of all the others in a majestic, murderous hat-stack of glory. Plus since the post-game MVP screen now includes hat tallies, you'll have definitive proof of your hat superiority in the days to come.

So now you've got a tower of Frostivus hats on your head. But can you truly enjoy them without knowing their exhaustive backstory? The answer, as we discovered, is yes. "They're just colored hats," you say. "Who cares where they came from?"

Well, six months ago would have been a great time to mention that, because we wrote a six hundred thousand word legendarium about it called The Hatmarillion. But everybody refused to read it, so we wrote a ten-page kid's book version of The Hatmarillion that takes about a minute to read, and everyone seemed to like that one better. Launch Dota and enjoy the story for yourself! (Frostivus trivia: You'll be able to read it THIRTY TIMES in the time it takes you to get through this blog post!)

But wait! There's still more Frostivus spirit in the air! Unfortunately, it has been broken down into its chemical components and needs to be reconstituted into a seasonal compound. We've gathered up a pile of all the supplies you'll need to craft rewards in the new Frostivus Forge. The next step? The actual crafting part.

All you'll need to do is accomplish a variety of in-game hijinks like “snowball an enemy before you kill them”, “steal a hat”, or “high five an enemy” to earn unique supplies that feed your forge and craft new rewards. Each item requires a different recipe to craft, and you can unlock higher tiers by completing rewards in the lower tiers first. Seasonal Chat Wheels? Check. A new bell-shaped tormentor that you lets you play music? Obviously it has one of those. A drunken wizard riding a suspiciously-donkey-shaped reindeer courier? Why, it wouldn’t be a holiday without them!

You know what else it wouldn’t be a holiday without? A box full of surprises! So we’re also unveiling the Winter 2024 Heroes’ Hoard, an all-new treasure featuring 17 item sets for a host of heroes.

But that's not all. To ensure this treasure's brims were truly tested, we stuffed in some new Immortal items amongst the sets. Then we added some new taunts. And a pet wolf for everyone's favorite pint-sized brawler. And when we realized the new Windranger set looked great when equipped with her Arcana, we included that, too. This treasure is available in the Crownfall store, so you can use your Crownfall Coins towards the purchase.

King Kringle broke his ban hammer off in some well-deserving asses last year. He's spent the year constantly reforging and testing it on various smurfs and in-game baddies, and now he's ready to rechristen it with the blood of the naughty.

While we usually do most of our bans and penalties behind the scenes, it's become something of a Frostivus tradition for us to pull back the curtain a little bit and talk about this ongoing work. And so: This holiday season, we hope you look forward to some cleaner, friendlier, fairer games, free of the 65,594 smurf accounts we've taken action against this week.

Besides the smurfs, we've also dropped the hammer on a significant number of high-MMR griefers, players who try to have fun at the expense of others, exploiting bugs, trading wins, and otherwise undermining the competitive challenge that is at the heart of every game of Dota.

As always, we'd like to thank everyone that submitted a report over the year. All that data helps us find the players that are making games of Dota worse and take action. Dota is a better game because of you.

A Dota blog post is much like a towering stack of Frostivus hats, in that it always has something at the bottom. This time, that something is Dota's very own winter sale on Crownfall content, running now through January 3rd.

Unlock new story nodes with discounts on the Midgate, Druud, and Icewrack Pathfinder Packs, deck your heroes out in the sets from Skywrath from Crownfall Treasures I-III, or complete the transformations of Shen and Dragonus with the Vengeful Spirit and Skywrath Mage Arcanas. (If you still have a bunch of Crownfall Coins, you can use them to discount most Crownfall Store items further, even if the items are already discounted as part of the sale!)

You’ve still got time to dig into all that Crownfall has to offer as we ring in a new year, but the saga of Skywrath will finally come to a close on January 15th, so if you’ve still got more of the four acts to explore, best get cracking.