Gaming
What happens when you patch in some drastic balance changes in the middle of a tournament?
It’s no big secret that Dota 2’s latest patch, 6.82, is one of the biggest changes since the game left Beta 18 months ago. The balancing act of keeping 108 heroes on a level playing field is one that can almost always tip the scales slightly too far in the opposite direction.
After the emergence of certain playstyles in this summer’s The International 4, Valve were undoubtedly about to make some hefty alterations to the game’s code. But when those alterations come during the final stages of a major international tournament, it pays to run the numbers twice, as pro caster and Team Zephyr’s Kevin “Purge” Godec tells Red Bull.
One of the main expectations for 6.82 to address was the issue of the “deathball” style of play. The term, coined during TI4, refers to a modified hard-push strategy which aims to take towers quickly but through early kills rather than traditional pushing heroes. The use of mid-game heroes also ensures that every player is online with their respective ultimates early on, at which point the team groups up into a five-man ball of death to roll over tower after tower.
Every strat has its day, and each its own counter, but deathball’s day was long and unending, and eventually its counters dwindled. Teams stopped attempting other strategies, like split-pushing (moving in from all flanks), once the stakes got too high, resulting in an uninspiring International final that many fans blamed on the emergence of deathball as The One True Strat. “The gold and XP calculations were changed in the first place because TI4 finals were too boring, I would guess – and it's entirely a guess,” Purge told Red Bull. “Once one team got way ahead with their tower pushing, it seemed difficult to comeback. That’s not fun to watch and play.”
Some games throughout the tournament simply devolved into races to see who could take towers fastest, neither team showing any interest in actually facing off. For example, the Vici Gaming vs DK game, where first blood happened during the attack on bottom barracks.
So, what do you do to stop the unstoppable force? Rejig everything at once, of course. The developers at Valve are clearly not fans of the iterative approach. New XP and gold equations for hero deaths, three reworked characters, a new rune, tower fortifications refresh after tier ones are destroyed, tier ones are even worth less gold, ROSHAN IS NOT WHERE WE LEFT HIM. Everything is different, and in a game where there are already so many numbers, item effects and hero abilities to keep in your head, these not-even-minor changes would take some time to get used to. But for a number of professional teams, there was no time because i-league was happening. Four days before the grand finals of a $300,000+ tournament, Valve moved all of the goalposts.
Naturally, a number of players were somewhat... perplexed by these changes, shall we say. You can read some of their responses to the patch below. The majority of the ire is directed towards killstreak-ending gold rewards, a change made to give a losing team a fighting chance if they’re being rolled over by, say, a ball-shaped object of death.
The comebacks afforded by this tweaked calculation have been a great source of enjoyment for many fans, but handing almost 3k gold over to a single hero at once could possibly be damaging to a professional game. Thankfully, the gold formula has been adjusted already in a follow-up patch, 6.82b, but throughout the i-league finals they remained in place.
The effects were mostly minimal, thankfully. There was no miraculous comeback in the Grand Final between Vici Gaming and TongFu.Old Boys, VG taking a clean 3-0 sweep. But some earlier rounds could have gone differently, according to Purge.
“The timing of the patch during i-league finals changed some things. The most important factor was that there were matches leading up to the finals that contained the gold swings,” Purge told Red Bull. “I think Rave would have had a better chance of beating the chinese veterans team [TongFu.Old Boys] if the gold swings were not in place. They got large advantages both games and had difficulty closing them out. I'm not sure if it was necessarily going to influence things though.” It’s still early days for 6.82b, but much of the other changes have opened some interesting avenues for players to look into, while closing some of the less interesting ones for spectators.
“Deathball became harder to execute correctly [after 6.82]. In the games that I played after the gold comeback was added, I felt like no matter how much gold you were ahead, you only get a barracks if you teamfight properly,” Purge told Red Bull. “This was a good thing because you have to play better to win, but I thought it was a bad thing because it took away a lot of the casualness that you get from playing dota pubs. It made sense why I lost, because I did stupid things, but I think it's clear that it made pubs less fun, which is the ultimate point of Dota.”
It remains to be seen what becomes of deathball in the pro scene, but similarly disruptive patches in the past have always spawned a new style of play. And in most cases it’s always refreshing for the audience at home. As for the new comeback mechanic, Purge isn’t too worried about its effect on Dota. “If you end up throwing a fight, and you give your opponents a bunch of levels and a slight-moderate amount of gold, it's not the end of the world. Items are far more important in the late game. I'm happy with where things are right now.”
Want to experience the best of RedBull.com on the move? Get the app at RedBull.com/app.
.png)
