With Dota 2 patch 7.32 destined to be the longest patch in six years, we take a look at the trend of patch lengths and touch upon Valve's communication. Again.
If you’re a regular Dota 2 player, at least four or five times a year, the question “When is the next patch arriving?” enters your mind. And in more than half of those times, the only way out is acceptance that the patch won’t be arriving any time soon. The typical times in the year when thoughts of a new patch occupy a significant portion of your frontal lobe are after DPC Majors and on the conclusion of every year’s iteration of The International championships.
The reason the hopes for a new patch are most likely bound to end in disappointment can be elicited from the Dota 2 patch lengths. The graph below shows the patch lengths for Dota 2 since Dota 2 patch 6.87, which was released in April 2016. So the data shown below is nearly seven years old. Considering Dota 2 patch 7.33 will be released a day after the DPC Lima Major ends, which is a reasonable assumption since Valve have pretty much said so, patch 7.32 will end up being the longest patch in recent memory. The patch will have lasted for 195 days; well over half a year.
It isn’t just the average pub enjoyer that is feeling patch fatigue (which is evident from the frequency of posts on r/Dota2), but it is also the elites at the top of the pyramid. Janne “Gorgc” Stefanovski, who is possibly the most popular Dota 2 streamer currently, has been asking for a new patch for a while and said this is the first time in six years a patch has caused him to burn out.
When Division I Leagues of the 2023 DPC Winter Tour ended, a good chunk of the Dota 2 community thought that Dota 2 patch 7.33 along with the new hero Muerta were destined to brace the game before the Division II DPC Leagues began. But alas, that wasn’t the case. Amongst all the hopefuls was TI11 winner, Oliver “Skiter” Lepko.
But is there anything unique in the post TI patch taking a long time? Not really. That has always been the tradition. After The International ends, the next big patch arrives approximately four months later. Why then, does this particular stretch after TI11 feel like we have been trapped in the place where Lucifer the Doom(bringer) resides? (that’s the seventh level of hell according to Dota 2 lore, in case anyone is confused). The answer lies in the patches before Dota 2 patch 7.32.
Throughout the ages, there has been one long patch every year. Look at patches 6.88, 7.06, 7.19, and 7.22. These were all TI patches, and they were reasonably longer than their adjacent patches. The issue with the current TI patch (patch 7.32) is that it is just part of a tall group of patches that have preceded it. The rolling average of three patches has been increasing in the past few years, and currently, the last three patches have all been somewhere around the 180 day mark.
That would have been acceptable though, if each patch brought with it major changes to the gameplay. But that is another aspect that has been lacking in recent patches – no major changes to the way the game is played. The last game shattering patch was Dota 2 patch 7.28, which introduced Aghanim’s Shards. But since then, it has just been hero changes for the most part. No major map changes, no changes to buildings like Outposts, same old Roshan pit, barely any changes to gold and experience formulas (economy was touched a bit in patch 7.32). The last post TI patch, patch 7.30, which was supposed to be the big meta shaker, just introduced Primal Beast along with a lot of hero changes. This is why the game feels stale. The timings, the objectives, the way the game is played felt the same nearly for the past two years.
Hero releases are a band aid to hide the necessity of major meta changes, but even those haven’t been up to the mark in the past year. At TI8, Valve introduced Grimstroke in the middle of The International. Last year after TI10, Valve released Marci in October 2021 to keep things a bit fresh. This year at TI11, Muerta was announced as being available in the game in early 2023, but there is no sign of her as the Lima Major comes close. This is probably one of the few times players will be waiting to welcome the undead, but that welcome will also be delayed till after the Lima Major ends. So along with the longest patch in recent history, we are also in one of the longest periods without the release of a new hero. It is only natural that players feel burned out playing the same patch. You can nerf Sniper and elevate Lina to take his position as the broken ranged right clicker, but that won’t keep the thrill levels up for most people.
Communication
This brings us to the part on communication. The Dota 2 community has long asked Valve to be transparent about their plans so that players aren’t left yearning for something that isn’t even on the horizon. Sure we have a date for the release of Dota 2 patch 7.33 now, but the community would have appreciated it a lot more a month or before. A few years ago, Valve acknowledged the issue and promised to improve on their communication, but that promise has been as absent as the passage of time inside Chronosphere.
Just last year, when the first DPC Major of the season was cancelled due to Covid-19, Valve’s lack of communication had teams seething, and rightfully so. A few months before that, it was the debacle of ESL allowing an in game coach for online games for two of the six DPC Leagues, with Valve not putting out anything regarding that.
Dota 2 is a special game to many, and it has withstood the test of time because of the unique changes IceFrog and the development team have made over the years. The issue is, the community has come to expect a standard, which Valve have been failing to match for the last couple of years. The ray of hope in this situation is Skiter mentioning in an interview that the reason this happened was IceFrog was on a different project for the past few months, and now he is back to Dota 2. This was confirmed by SUNSFan and Synderen on their podcast ‘We Say Things’, who mentioned IceFrog was working on a game called Neon Prime (not necessarily the official name of the project). Hopefully, there is truth to that, and IceFrog delivers a huge patch in the form of patch 7.33 soon. But going ahead, many in the community would appreciate more communication on Valve on the release dates of major patches, so as to keep hope at bay, and use the brain for more objective purposes.
