It looks like Valve wants to shake up the "DOTA 2" scene once again as lead developer IceFrog has announced that it wants to experiment a bit and take a different approach in balancing the popular free-to-play title. Instead of massive patches that get released every few months, IceFrog wants to try releasing a new update every other week.
"We want to try taking a different approach to how gameplay patches are released," IceFrog wrote in a Tweet. "Instead of big patches a couple of times a year, we'll be releasing small patches every 2 weeks on Thursdays. We'll be trying this out for about six months and then reevaluating."
One of the most important parts of this message is the note that this is an experiment and is still temporary. If, after six months, it is shown that this new method is less effective or less desired by the audience, then it is likely that they will go back to the old way of a huge patch every few months.
And it seems this new system is already in implementation. Valve recently released the Spring Cleaning 2018 Update for "DOTA 2." While it may look large on the surface level, keep in mind that majority of the changes in this update are fixes to pre-existing bugs and issues. For the actual gameplay changes itself, there is not a whole lot going on.
Out of the 115 heroes available in the game, only 23 received gameplay changes in this update, and most of those changes were small buffs or nerfs at best. This is a huge disparity compared with, say, the Dueling Fates update that added five new items and modified pretty much every hero in the game in some way and made massive changes to how internal systems worked.
Of course, Dueling Fates also came out nearly five months after the previous patch, a fact that caused some people to take a break from the game due to stagnation.
It will be interesting to see just how this change will affect "DOTA 2's" popularity and player base. And, in the worst case scenario, should this change be a total flop, players will only have to wait a few months before going back to the old ways.
