Valve have released another gargantuan Dota 2 patch – about 600mb, from what Peter tells me – which adds absolutely no new heroes. Or, indeed, much of interest.
We do like amusing patch notes, though, and this contains a good one. For the Mac/Linux versions of the game: “Made the chat wheel work”.
As to the rest – well, there’s the usual smattering of bug fixes and a few bits of functionality. The hero loadout model is bigger in the main menu, so that’s nice. You’re now limited to a maximum of six matchmaking regions. You can’t view the wins/level of other players unless they’re either your friends, or have Share Match History on. Dota TV now supports the 360 controller. Oh, and matchmaking times are apparently down, through entirely nebulous methods.
So why’s the patch so big? I suspect it’s down to the Compendium, and the addition of various rewards related to it. If you create an International Fantasy Challenge team, your Smeevil courier gets a Mammoth mount; if you complete all the Main Event Predictions, your Smeevil courier gets a Bird mount. I would imagine that it’s the visuals for these couriers that have made up most of the patch.
You can view the full patch notes here, but there’s not much reason to – there isn’t a huge amount of good stuff in there. Instead, go have a look at the first part of the Beginner’s Guide I wrote! Although if any of this article makes sense to you, you probably don’t need to.