Dota 2 continues to be one of the most important e-sports titles in the world. Not only are record sums paid out annually to the winning teams at the World Championship "The International". The number of spectators can also build on times before the corona pandemic, as last at the Arlington Major, reports "Esports Insider". But the scene has a problem.
Dota is already one of the most complex e-sports titles by design. From the very beginning, the players have 123 heroes, each with several abilities at their disposal, which can quickly become overwhelming. In addition, most of the heroes can also be used flexibly in different roles, which makes it difficult to learn generally valid facts about the characters at all.
At the same time, the game is in the tension of having to keep the active community. "If the game is updated continuously and the World Cup continues to take place, I have the feeling that the current players can be kept," says Kevin "Purge" Godec in an interview with the German Press Agency. However: according to "steamcharts", the number of people playing at the same time has been stagnating for years.
Dota 2: Always new updates
When Purge analyzes new game updates on its Youtube channel, the videos are sometimes over nine hours long - as they were about five months ago for patch 7.31. New mechanics are introduced or heroes are radically rebuilt.
This renewal brings more and more complexity, which can scare off newcomers. With a revised and expanded tutorial system, developer Valve is trying to counteract this.
"It's never too late to get new ones to play Dota. But it just depends on how far you are willing to go for it. Many of the previous players would not agree if the game mechanics are adapted to a wider target group and the game loses depth as a result, " says Shannon "SUNSfan" Scotten in the dpa interview. The commentator has developed a tool with a partner that makes it easier to learn Dota while watching.
Tools for newcomers to Dota 2
With the extension for the streaming platform Twitch, viewers can interact with control panels in the stream as if they were in the game themselves. Thus, all information about heroes, spells and items is available directly for reading.
In addition to a large number of streamers, ESL, Dreamhack and Valve have signed user agreements with SUNSfan for their tournaments. The major organizer in Arlington, PGL, was accused of copying the tool himself.
"At the last Dota World Cup, we had 16 million users, 198 million clicks and 883 million touches with our controls," says SUNSfan. "We get a lot of positive tweets and messages about our tool. Also from people who have played before and do not know everything new.»
Dota Tournament Stream Discontinued for Newcomers
Although there seems to be enough interest for such offers, some initiatives are also being discontinued. The newcomer stream for the Dota World Cup, in which Purge and SUNSfan were involved, was discontinued after attempts at the WMs in 2014 and 2015.
"The problem was that the newcomer stream was a separate experience from the main stream," says Purge. However, they were not equally supplied with content, which did not communicate the scope of the tournament equally. "This is of great importance." That's why they tried to include more such content in the following year.
However, SUNSfan is not worried about the future of the game: "Dota is late in its life cycle, but it has been very long. So who knows how long the game has left," he says. "It's just a slight drop and the numbers are still very solid, so there's still a lot that can be done.»
