A couple days ago Dota 2 fans were treated to the launch of Reborn, a web page devoted to the updating of… a lot of things.
The first part focused on the out-of-game experience, which includes the client and the way we can watch matches from within it. This is really important, as it serves as a foundation for how we experience Dota: it’s like a city that needs good logistics, because otherwise it becomes a convoluted mess.
As someone who’s played League of Legends since beta, one of my main gripes is that its client is pretty much held together with duct tape. It also lacks certain features that other games — well, let’s be real here, Dota — do really really well. This update reminded me how much I value a good infrastructure and how much I love little bells and whistles.
Here’s three things I like about what the first part of Reborn brings to the table:
1. Improved Viewing Experience
Let’s look at this image. Real time graphs. Minimap. Chat. Ad space for tournaments. Side UI elements that (hopefully) can be hidden. Third-party streams. Hopefully real-time item build/timing information. I’m pretty biased because all this stuff really makes my job easier, but it also makes it easier to step inside the mind of the pro as they’re playing.
Knowing when/how pros get their timings make emulating them easier; obviously I’m not going to be able to be like them completely, but suddenly you have a concrete idea of what’s slow, fast or in-line with how the good people are playing.
2. Hero Tinkering
I’m going to confess that sometimes I play Dota 2 like a dress-up game. I like to see cool combinations of cosmetics, and if I want to test a hero I rarely play, it can be a pain to load up a custom game, make sure cheats are enabled, only to disconnect and recreate because I want to try something else.
It looks like Dota’s going to make it easier to tinker with heroes, and I’m definitely all for that. I’m a huge fan of guides built in to the client (sometimes to a fault) and reading them before I’m in game and under a time pressure will be awesome. I’m also really curious about there being “more information to help you determine if a hero is right for you,” because a question I commonly ask my stacks is “what should I play?”
Sometimes you just need to be nudged in the right direction, and hopefully with the new information the game is going to be tracking on you (see below), it’ll be able to be accurate.
3. Playstyle Analytics
This is the big one for me. I’m not exactly a hardcore data geek, but I love looking at numbers and seeing my performance quantified — even if I suck, tell me where I’m sucking and where I can get better. Even if I don’t end up trying to fix things, at least I know where my strengths lie.
I think that’s why I’m kind of enjoying the 10 Hero Challenge in this year’s Compendium and the associated Coin Challenges; they give me a reason to step outside my comfort zone, and when I accomplish them, I almost always have a moment where I mentally remind myself that it wasn’t as bad as I thought.
Sometimes it’s really easy to take those challenges and be self-defeating. With the integration of deeper stats and visualizations, players might at least be able to gain confidence to where they excel so that their shortcomings don’t hit as hard.
It’s this kind of information that helps me invest in playing the game for a longer span of time because I won’t hit roadblocks as hard; if I want to stay and play Dota 2 (which I do), I will have more tools to get more out of the game and learn from mistakes.
In the end, I’m happy to see Dota 2 getting a massive upgrade because it makes me feel that Valve cares about their player base; sometimes it’s easy to just feel like you’re funneling money into the game, but at least large, sweeping improvements like this show that complaints aren’t being ignored.
In the Reddit reaction thread to this update, someone said that this literally took concerns from the past two years and fixed them all at once. Then someone else reminded people that this was the first of three parts to Reborn. I legitimately felt like a game I enjoy was both secure for the future and in good hands.
That’s something I’m really not used to.
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