Dota 2 Spring Cleaning: Things we want to see implemented

“Is it spring already?” asked Enchantress politely.

It’s that time of the year when Valve calls upon the Dota 2 community for known bugs and quality of life (QOL) features. To quote Eric from Valve,

“Hi, I’m Eric on the Dota dev team. We’re looking at doing a Spring Cleaning update in the near term, and we’d like the community’s help in determining what makes the most sense to focus on. The kinds of things we’re interest in hearing about include:

• Gameplay Bugs
• Cosmetic Bugs
• UI Bugs (in the HUD and in the dashboard)
• Text/tooltip Bugs
• Small Quality of Life feature requests

We’d appreciate if players could post their suggestions in this thread, and upvote those suggestions that they feel are the most useful or highest priority.”

As such, it didn’t take long for players to amass 3000 comments in the Reddit thread, suggesting brilliant ideas, found bugs, and gratitude towards the Dota 2 janitors.

Muting players

A two-step dropdown option for muting function is arguably the worst user experience (UX) implementation that Valve decided to add into the game.

Originally, a player only needs to press the mute button located on the side of player names. It’s simplistic and without fault. Yet, in a recent update, the mute button was slipped into a dropdown-like button instead, forcing players to perform two steps for every mute.

With over 6,000 upvotes on Reddit, it’s evident that nobody appreciates the unnecessary change.

A “smarter” courier

Kickstarting the list with Quality of Life (QOL) suggestions would make our gaming experience more bearable than losing MMR. Now, we do appreciate couriers’ hard work in delivering our items, however, they aren’t the brightest artificial intelligence (AI) around.

A common mishap that players encounter is when their courier delivers components of an item to their hero. However, upon combining to its complete item, the courier moves the item into the backpack instead. Not only is this a nuisance to move it into your active inventory, but incidents like these often lead to game-losing scenarios.

For instance, imagine a fight is ongoing, and you needed to use the Black King Bar you just had your trusty courier deliver to you. Only to realize it’s not usable for five seconds because that’s the cooldown to move an item from backpack to your active inventory.

Warding just got harder

Ironically, the sentry ward not showing its area of effect after the recent patch is a gameplay bug. This makes dewarding difficult and frustrating for players, who don’t know the exact range. Which in return, costs more to purchase sentries when they fail to find the enemy ward.

Dota 2 Wards are not showing area of effect

On the other hand, it’s a throwback to the days when AOE markers didn’t exist, so old-school players will surely enjoy the advantage now. Regardless, the feature has made support players’ lives more convenient, so hopefully, it gets fixed soon. Otherwise, it might be a good time to get some Dota 2 Warding basics.

General Performance issues

For most players, who don’t own a $10,000 gaming rig, the general performance of Dota 2 clients has worsened. This may be due to the heavy loadout of events and ambient particles when you launch the client. Players reportedly experience frozen loading screen and dip in frames-per-second (FPS) during their gameplay.

The cluster of skills causing FPS drop

To make matters worse, modern cosmetics have bombastic effects that further deteriorate performance, typically in teamfights, where skills are thrown around. Worst yet, players can get disconnected from the game due to the overloaded screen.

Broken cosmetics

Speaking of pesky cosmetics, Valve isn’t exactly known for its polished cosmetics, especially its exclusive Immortal-grade skins. These immortals, which are only available via battle passes, come with ability customization.

While the shiny effects are fancy, immortal items quickly lose their charm when Icefrog decides to change a hero skill. For instance, Omniknight’s Paragon’s Rebuke skin, which has custom Repel skill, lost its effect after introducing the Heavenly Grace skill.

Additionally, cosmetics clipping onto one another due to an Arcana skin’s posture change is an issue that Dota 2 skin collectors often raised.

DotaPlus’s Relics feature are not up to date

DotaPlus subscription grants players with stats tracking on their favorite heroes, called Relics. Relics record in-game stats, such as the number of Juggernaut’s Omnislash bounces, serves as bragging rights for Juggernaut enthusiasts. However, Relics with hero skill tracking often become obsolete after the skill is replaced during a patch.

DotaPlus – Relics Page

This also brings us to the recently-introduced Aghanim’s Shard upgrades that every hero has. Since its introduction, multiple tooltips on these Aghanim’s Shard skills are not well described, and players often find themselves confused with what the ability does.

Alongside notable bugs and QOL suggestions that should be addressed, there will be minor bugs which are rampant. Hence, do the community a favor by suggesting bugs that you have encountered on the Dota 2 subreddit.