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Dota 2’s New Frontiers update makes it worth returning to, but it’s still overwhelming for new playersTormentor? I hardly knew ‘or!
Tormentor? I hardly knew ‘or!
“Why am I so slow”, complains my partner, minutes into being cajoled into playingDota 2for the very first time. “Ah, you’ll need to buy boots,” I say, with the hard earned wisdom of someone who’s spent over 4,000 hours clicking on wizards. “I have boots,” she says, somewhat indignantly. “Those are slippers,” I reply. “What?” she asks, somewhat more indignantly. “They don’t give you move speed,” I respond. I see a flicker of anger in her eyes, as well as maybe, just maybe, a spark of interest.
Dota 2: The New Frontiers UpdateWatch on YouTube
Dota 2: The New Frontiers Update
When I interviewed coach and ex-pro Purgeback in the mists of time, I asked him if he had any advice for returning players. “Prepare to lose,” was his main tip, while trying to have fun regardless. This is a hard thing to do when you are losing at the videogame Dota 2, and a bigger map has not changed this. New minibosses have not changed this. Getting grumpy as you try to remember where the new Rosh pits are and whether it’s the right time of day for him to be in one on your side of the map has especially not changed this.
In theory, it’s a tasty patch. Disable times from stunning spells have been lowered across the board, targeting one of the most frustrating aspects of playing, i.e. not playing but instead futilely hammering your buttons until you die. Creeps are worth less gold as the game goes on, incentivising fightin’ rather than drawn out farmin’. In practice, the meta currently seems to be in a place where one player does not get the memo, and everyone else screams at them to join teamfights.
The new matchmaking ranking changes are interesting, notably in that they’ve plunged me down to the level of a Crusader. Valve have said they’ve tried to address the problem of people being stuck at a higher ranking than they should be. I used to be a big boy Ancient, so this grates, but it does mean I’m generally having an easier time against my opponents. I also like that your ranking is now associated with a confidence rating, and the game won’t officially assign you one until it’s at least 30% sure you’re where you should be.
That said, my ranked games so far have tended to follow a pattern where I do well in the early game, romping about doing murders, until my effectiveness falls off and we slowly lose because I’m getting too greedy and the enemy has too many heroes that scale well into the late game. In uncoordinated Dota, this has always been the dynamic: sustained team aggression is hard to pull off, especially with randomers. Playing this way is a pale shadow of what the game can be, when the power of friendship entwines with the much more real power of having a plan.
Yet yin must meet yang. Dota 2 can be fantastic at providing main character energy, but whenever that doesn’t happen, especially playing solo, it can feel limp or worse. There is a special kind of tedium associated with a drawn out Dota loss, as matches wade into sloggier and sloggier territory. It’s a game of highs and lows, but the lows are lower when you’re on your own and the highs aren’t nearly as high. Matches at my level do at least seem to end at around the 40-50 minute mark on average, which is an improvement on the 60-70 minute sludge-fests that often characterised the game when I last played.
For new players, now is definitely a better time to start playing than back then - but only to a point. There’s a certain logic to starting your Dota career with a big patch, while your inevitably more experienced opponents are thrown off as they adjust to the new stuff, like where the freshly introduced Wisdom runes spawn or the correct time to harvest healing fishies from the new lotus ponds. The problem is that the learning curve for adjusting to an update is a tiny, tiny fraction of the one you need to scale when you’re still learning how to play in the first place.
My partner encounters something she doesn’t understand every few seconds, asking me questions that I can’t help but respond to with jargon that references entire concepts she’s yet to learn. The words “stress” and “chore” have been used. That’s despite the way she’s still paddling in the new player mode, which was introduced years ago but is still the best place to start for beginners. It smoothes over some of the jagged edges and arcane complexities, giving you more gold, couriers that deliver your items near instantly and a much smaller and more manageable hero roster.
I can’t not mention the jeering. Toxicity is still a big deal, and the single best new tip I’d give new players is to mute the chat at the drop of a hat. I haven’t played a single game where most of my team weren’t being arseholes, and I benefit greatly from treating them as silent, erratic AIs who sometimes still ping me too much.
