What awaits Dota 2 players in 2021

As soon as 2021 came, the Dota 2 gaming community had some questions about, "What will Valve do this year?" To this question, the Valve developers in their Blog said that in the New Year, they are going to release a few more heroes, and will also provide a new approach with the update's release that will be distributed throughout the year.

The beginning of 2021 became quite scandalous for Dota 2. The start of the open qualifiers and the Decider Tournament turned out to be very problematic.

The first problem was the timing of the DPC season announcement. On December 31, 2020, the dates of the tournament were announced. And on January 4, 2021, the first matches of the open qualifiers and the Decider Tournament were started. This announcement presented most of the esports organizations and various rosters with problems since many players did not even have teams at the time of registration for participation in DPC tournaments. In addition, the tournament organizers faced the problem of lack of time to prepare for the tournament, although each TO had a month to prepare.

The second problem was the tournament bracket. Now you cannot go to Major tournament from open qualifiers. In addition, invites to the Decider Tournament also raised a lot of questions. For example, absolutely new rosters that have not played a single match received invites.

Already on January 18, the first matches of the Dota Pro Circuit 2021 winter season will start in all regions. And from March 25 to April 4, the first Major of the season will be held. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Valve must take control of the tournament. In addition to organizational issues, Valve is also responsible for helping players with visas and moving to the venue of the championship.

As for the gaming events,  Valve released the highly anticipated Diretide event on October 29, which players have been looking forward to every year since 2013. The Halloween event showed the company's intention to develop its project and delight players. The gaming community is hoping for some festive events from Valve. Although the holding of the "Frostivus" is already in doubt, the players are hoping to see the "New Bloom".

In addition to the successful start of Diretide, Valve has also released the promised new hero HoodWink. The developers in their blog announced that they are going to release several more new heroes, one of which will be released in the first quarter of 2021.

The gaming community was pleasantly surprised by such an announcement and after that they began to rapidly collect information on possible heroes. After examining the game data, the data miners came to the conclusion that the players will expect the announcement of three new heroes: Fenrir (Primal Beast), Freya (Valkyrie) and Puppet Master.

Since August 2020, data miners have discovered information on the yet-to-be-released HoodWink hero and three new characters.

Also with the release of patch 7.28, the gaming community began to collect information related to possible new heroes. For example, players found references to a certain beast (Fenrir) in the voice lines of some heroes:

Also in the game files there were many references to the Valkyrie's abilities.

Most of these abilities indicate that this will be a hero with a blade or sword as a weapon. In addition, from the voice line of Mars, can be found out that presumably, the new hero will be called Freyja, the Goddess associated with love and war from Scandinavian mythology. This fact is also indicated that earlier one of the Dota 2 players received the answer from a Valve support worker under the nickname Freya.

Players will soon see the release of the new «Overwatch» feature, which will allow them to personally review suspicious games in order to help the system find and fight offenders and intruders.

Also, an important promise from Valve was the announcement of a new system for dealing with violators. And since the gaming community in Dota 2 is considered to be overly toxic, the new «Overwatch» feature will help to combat aggressive chatting and intentional obstruction of normal play. For many years Valve tried to fight this with a system of complaints and a system of decency, but at some point, the situation moved from complete impunity to punishing everyone indiscriminately. Such a method could not distinguish between a bad or weak game, an accidental fail or deliberate sabotage.

The new «Overwatch» system will include players who can act as judges. The votes of such players will decide the fate of the suspect. Whether to punish the offender or not, the system will be determined by a majority vote.

Not everyone will be able to become an independent judge, the system will offer to consider the games of violators only to experienced users who have not had violations and high decency.

Seemingly, what is the problem with introducing this system into Dota 2, if its analogue has been working in CS: GO for a long time? This is the problem that Valve developers faced, as the release of Battle Pass 2020, which showed them how users found the matches they needed using a list of heroes and sides. As a result, this system may begin to contradict the principle of anonymity. Nevertheless, «Overwatch» was announced and perhaps the developers were able to solve all the controversial issues and problems.

Finally, the gaming community expects Valve to change the game's economy. With the latest patch 7.28, the game has a lot of new items and a new mechanic with aghanim shards, which greatly affected the gameplay. But as a result, this did not change the game's economy in any way.

From the patch 7.27, which was released on June 29, 2020, Valve has not released any updates that would affect the economy in the game. Clement «Puppey» Ivanov said in an interview on Epic League that over the past few months, due to the lack of changes in the economy, the support game has become non-variable.

Commentator Yaroslav «NS» Kuznetsov also spoke about the lack of changes in the economy, who was dissatisfied with Valve's attitude to the Dota 2 esports scene.

In total, 2021 should be a progressive and very interesting year for Dota 2. Valve announced in its blog that they are going to radically change its attitude with the release of updates and share their plans with the community. Over the past few months, players have been told about the many changes that need to happen to the game. In addition, the gaming community itself expects improvements for the game from the company. Whether Valve will keep their promises and whether the company will listen to players' requests will be known soon.