Dota 2 News

Dota 2 update for 1 December 2020

Dota 2 team Elephant sets astonishing new gold advantage record

Professional Dota 2 team Elephant has completely obliterated a competitive Dota record. On its run to winning Season 2 of the China Dota 2 Pro Cup, Elephant came up against EHOME in the lower bracket finals and set a pretty unbelievable new record for the biggest gold advantage ever seen in competitive Dota.

By the end of its third and final match with EHOME, Elephant had a gold advantage of 154,000, which completely smashes the previous record of around 93,000 gold that was set by Brazilian team Havan Liberty. This is the highest gold difference at both the end of a competitive Dota 2 match and the highest seen at any stage of a game in the esports' history, according to Dota 2 stats guru Ben Steenhuisen.

What's more incredible, according to Steenhuisen, is that no other records were close to being broken in the process of Elephant's victory. While 80 minutes is longer than average for a competitive Dota match, it was nowhere near some of the crazy two hours plus matches we've seen in the past.

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Dota 2's next Hero launch has been delayed

Earlier this year, Dota 2 developer Valve announced it was aiming to release the multiplayer game's next Hero by "the end of November", however that launch has now been pushed back to the month following. In a new dev post, the studio has explained that it needed a bit more time. As such, the new character will instead be heading to the MOBA game in mid-December, along with the next gameplay update.

"We wanted to give you another quick update about some of the upcoming things we're working on," the studio says in the post. "On the gameplay front, our original plan for the new Hero was November 30, however she needs a bit more time to cosy up for the winter. We will be releasing her, along with the 7.28 gameplay update, in mid-December." Beyond this, there aren't any details to lap up about who this Hero will be, exactly, other than that she'll be a she.

Players are no doubt excited to find out more, given - unlike MOBAs such as League of Legends - new character arrivals in Dota 2 are pretty few-and-far-between. So far in 2020, there have been no new additions to the roster, and just three new Heroes joined the game last year - Mars, Snapfire, and Void Spirit.

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Valve delays new Dota 2 hero, confirms start date for 2021 Dota Pro Circuit

Valve has revealed that the 2021 Dota Pro Circuit will kick off on January 18. This will see 16 teams within two divisions going head to head in each of the six Regional Leagues. The best of the bunch will then qualify for the first Major of the season. More info on the precise scheduling is soon expected to arrive.

While news on the Pro Circuit's return is encouraging, there's still no update on The International 10. The tournament, which currently has the biggest prize pool ever for an esports event, is still to be rescheduled after being postponed due to the pandemic.

In a brief update blog, the developer also reconfirmed that the new season starting on December 1 will feature a seasonal quest reset for players, a new treasure, and more fresh gameplay content to get stuck into.

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Valve employee apologises for manually banning a Dota 2 player

A Valve employee has apologised for misusing his power to manually suspend a Dota 2 player following an in-game disagreement.

As spotted by Dot Esports, Reddit user u/minijuanjohndoe posted yesterday claiming that he had been given to low-priority status by a Valve developer after the pair argued during a match. The employee then told minijuanjohndoe "do you know who you are talking to" before using his position at Valve to manually suspend him and list him as low-priority. It now transpires that the employee is Sean Vanaman, who works for the studio Campo Santo that was recently acquired by Valve. Vanaman has posted an apology to the player, reversed his suspension, and claims that Valve will now be removing the ability to manually ban players entirely following the incident.

"The team looked into this case, and concluded the user clearly did not deserve the ban," Vanaman writes. "Even if the user did deserve a ban however, we all think it's clear that manually banning users is not a good idea because of how hard it is to be objective in Dota games that you are in. My mistake in this case being a sterling example. As employees, we should have no special privilege when playing Dota."

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