Dota 2 and IceFrog Welcome a New Hero

Dota 2 is about to have a new hero born on April 9^th. In effect, a new patch will be released after the Singapore Major and among the changes, there will be a new addition to the game. At the moment, we don’t know anything about this hero and I’m very curious what IceFrog has prepared this time. I suspect it’s going to be a hero for the carry role, because we haven’t had one in a long time. We’ve had plenty of offlaners, supports and even some midlane heroes, but no carries. So you should pretty much be prepared for a scary carry.

Other Patch Changes

Dota 2 patch 7.29, from what we’ve been told, is going to be a balanced-focused one. This basically means that lots of minor tweaks will be made in order to stop the abuse of some heroes and mechanics that have been made popular by some players after the previous patch was introduced.

Returning Players Experience

Valve seems to be confident that DOTA: Dragon’s Blood, the Netflix anime series featuring the game, is going to bring back a lot of former players to the game. For those players, the new patch will offer a new feature. This feature will basically allow for a much more significant recalibration.

Usually, when you recalibrate, your MMR doesn’t change by more than a few hundred points. So if your previous MMR was 3000, you’ll get somewhere around 2800 and 3200. But with this new feature, you should expect much a much bigger difference. And I’m afraid that it will be to the player’s detriment. Because if you haven’t played in a while, you’ll play worse than before. And therefore you might lose 500 – 1000 MMR during the recalibration.

Of course, all this is speculation, as we don’t know exactly how severe the feature is. But my expectation is that it will be designed to decrease players’ MMR significantly in order to place them in the bracket they should be in based on their current skill, not the one they had years ago.

Smurfs Can Now Get Banned

Smurfing is no longer taken lightly. If you smurf, you will most likely get caught and banned. This pretty much puts an end to account buying and boosting, which is a pretty large industry simply because people like to think they’re better than they are. If you’re a 5K player but you’re competing at 3,5K MMR, you should be wrecking those people with your superior skills. You won’t win every game, but on average you should be climbing at a respectable rate.

Of course, people just assume they’re much better than everyone at their level and completely overlook their weaknesses, mistakes, and the numerous times when they were the ones who ruined a game or got carried by others. The self-deception mechanism is a strong thing in team-based esports and Dota 2 is no exception. But the reality is that the better you are and the lower the MMR you need to play at, the better you should do if you truly are a much stronger player than what your current rank indicates.

 

Photo credit: Valve