Valve have apparently had enough of breaking the Dota 2 servers with Year Beast Brawl, so the latest patch aims to fix it. Well… sort of.
This latest hotfix does include a number of welcome tweaks to the mode. For instance: you can now actually search for regular ranked and unranked games when the Year Beast Brawl window is open, so if you have no interest in the event, you don’t have to wait 10 minutes just to play a normal game. Also, the Year Beast Brawl isn’t open for 10 minutes anymore; it’s now a 15-minute window. Also, you can now always see when the next Brawl is scheduled, instead of having to log in every now and then to check (the next one is in about an hour and 15 minutes, from time of writing this).
More importantly? “Improved login and matchmaking servers to sustain higher concurrent player counts and bursts of match formation.” Stress test over, everyone!
There are also lots of little tweaks. Bots don’t think the Crystal Maiden Arcana pet is a hero anymore, and Phantom Assassin’s cape is no longer MIA, and so on.
Oddly, there are also a bunch of fixes to Dota 2‘s pathfinding. You won’t stutter-step when chasing around towers, and paths shouldn’t have excessive turning anymore… but more interesting is the “experimental directional move command.” If you turn this on by enabling the dota_unit_allow_moveto_direction convar, Alt-Right Click will have your hero move with pathfinding disabled, basically making them just head straight in whatever direction you clicked. That could be incredibly useful when trying to precisely Force Staff yourself somewhere.
The 35MB patch is out now, and should be applied to Dota 2 whenever you next sign into Steam.
