Dota 2 received a new update that didn’t include any direct changes but introduced a new for way future patches to be implemented into the game.
After the arrival of Dota 2 Patch 7.24b, there’s no way we see another gameplay update at least before the conclusion of the ESL One Los Angeles Dota 2 Major. Despite that, the game received an update yesterday and it appears that the balance team needs bigger numbers to make sure some of the planned changes are justified.
The new update
The news came from the official Steam platform website:
“In this update we are introducing a new system for gathering data on the type of changes that are harder to evaluate or predict without very large number of games, such as gold bounty formula changes.We expect the number of times that we actually do this during the year to be very low, however when we do it it'll be during weekdays only at the lowest point of user activity, between 4 and 6PM Seattle time. In addition, we are adding a convar "dota_disable_experimental_gameplay" that can be used by players to disable it. Any gameplay changes will only be active in matchmaking games where no players have the convar set. The changes will never be active in lobby and league games.We recognize that in some cases players will back solve what changes were done, however we won't announce changes ourselves in part because we don't want players to overcompensate with knowledge of them and because generally we prefer to not reveal potential upcoming changes.Although the type of changes we are thinking about, like gold distribution, take much more than a game or two to show their full impact, we will still be able to get meaningful data and analysis on the direction and scale of changes.”
Wait, what?
If you’re feeling a bit confused by the whole statement, you’re definitely not alone. Let’s try to clarify it a bit:
- Valve needs more numbers to test potential changes since the beta environment doesn’t quite cut it sometimes.
- They’ll enable random changes to games in certain periods to see how that’ll affect the outcome of the games in question.
- Players will have a choice on whether to partake and can enable the dota_disable_experimental_gameplay console variation. Only players who don’t have it enabled will be included in the “study”.
- This will supposedly happen only a few times per year during weekdays in a 2-hour span and it won’t affect tournaments.
- The changes may vary from game to game and will range from gold gained per minute to pretty much anything else.
In a way, you can look at this change as beta testing going directly live for anyone who hasn’t signed out or a variation of Overwatch's experimental mode. Unlike the usual beta testing, though, the participants here wouldn’t even know they’re part of it. The change seems to be very welcome by the community as anyone who doesn’t like the idea can simply enter the command above.
What do you think about Valve’s decision to use the player base directly for upcoming changes?
