Dota 2 patch adds Linux and Mac support, plus customisable chat wheel

dota 2 - chat wheel

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Sadly, this Dota 2 patch isn’t as interesting as the one that brought us Abaddon last week, but there are a few neat features nonetheless. Of most importance to those running desktop computers that don’t use Windows: the game now natively supports both Linux and Mac systems. Hello, Mac users! Welcome to gaming!

If you’ve been playing Dota 2 for awhile, though, then the rest of the patch notes are probably a bit handier. There have been some bug fixes and changes, obviously. Abaddon’s Borrowed Time ability and its healing are now more noticeable, so hopefully Lina will stop hitting him with Laguna Blade a few seconds after he pops it. Earthshaker’s got a pretty new model.

More importantly, matchmaking has received a bunch of improvements; people who decline a game are now unable to search for another for 45 seconds, for instance. Parties are more likely to be matched against similar-sized parties. The matchmaking service now pays attention to the minimum experience level of the players on the team, and not just the average. There’s more, too, but the upshot is that you should get into fewer steamroller-y games, and people can’t just constantly join the queue and hit Decline for kicks. Do people do that? The bastards.

But there’s one thing in this patch that I really love, and that’s this: the chat wheel is now customisable. You can change the sayings in each of the slots to whatever you pick, from a list of… ooh, lots. These are divided into eight categories (Positioning, Status, Enemy, Lane, Items, Neutrals, Misc, and Flavor) and they encompass most things you’ll conceivably need in a match, from “Jungling” and “Roshan”, through “Check runes please” and “Can someone upgrade the courier?”, to “Fight by the tower” and – my personal favourite – “I immediately regret my decision.” I suspect I’ll be making good use of that, along with “Don’t give up!” and “Relax, you’re doing fine.”

This will hopefully make communicating with teammates in other languages a bit easier, as well as giving the opportunity to strategise a little with those who’ve been communication-banned, but we’ll have to wait and see how many people actually make use of this new functionality.

It’s a reasonably sizeable patch, presumably due to Earthshaker’s new model, but it shouldn’t take too long to grab. Check out the full patch notes here.


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Tim McDonald
Tim has been playing PC games for longer than he's willing to admit. He's written for a number of publications, but has been with PC Invasion - in all its various incarnations - for over a decade. When not writing about games, Tim can occasionally be found speedrunning terrible ones, making people angry in Dota 2, or playing something obscure and random. He's also weirdly proud of his status as (probably) the Isle of Man's only professional games journalist.