4Game

Maybe it's just me, but here's my little rant. It's still fun, it's still dota on the surface, but it's not the same since they sacrificed icefrog to make the TI prize pool bigger in 7.00. The game is now significantly more complex in terms of remembering items, matchups, timings, hero abilities; but conversely much simpler in the decisions players have.

-Shards, aghanims, and talents have some interesting abilities, but add excessive levels of complexity to the game – Out of game, I have a hard time keeping up with the changes, and in game, I have a hard time understanding the game state. They also add a lot of power creep to heroes in the sense that lane creeps, jungle, towers, etc. become trivialized very early in the game.

-Backpack, TP slot, Neutral items, and item upgrades (like blink, helm) give heroes effectively 2 free slots + remove the need to make decisions about your items. With 5 couriers, wards, and TP scrolls for free, the 5 role is basically deleted.

-New heroes further this problem by saturating the hero pool, especially in drafting. Having some overlap is good, but when you double the number of spells each hero has AND add more heroes, you are bound to get a lot of overlap. Now heroes need buffs to catch up, further intruding on eachother's niches. And so on.

Every hero sustaining through every lane means there's no choice between running trilane, dual lanes, or having a roamer. Every hero gets level 6 guaranteed by ten minutes, so there is less choice to be made about which hero to give resources to. When you hit late game, you no longer have to choose between having a TP, a blink, or having an item slot, you can just have all 3. Hell, you can get like 2-3 BKB uses in one fight easily now. When you hit ultra-late game, lol nevermind they got better 60 minute neutral drops GG gl next.

Yes, a lot of stuff that feels bad has been taken out: it sucks to have your only courier killed by a bounty hunter. It is also super fun buying a dust and hunting him down after. What's fun is having meaningful choices, NOT big mr peanut butter piledriving your carry from like 2 screens away every 30 seconds from level 6 onwards. If you're losing, you're still losing, and it still sucks, and all of the quality of life changes just make the enemy team that much further ahead anyways so… what's the point?

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Plus, the least fun part of dota has not been adressed in the slightest: being called slurs by strangers over voice chat. They even nerfed mutes to require more clicks…

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TL;DR – Less is more.