Dota 2 - New Heroes, Bots, and Spectator Mode

A couple awesome heroes! I'm not even on the beta and I can feel the excitement. I really like the urgency from the Dota 2, releasing two heroes at once is unheard of in the LoL community. Although this will be nice not paying for the hero when they do get released. 

Next on the list! Today's new update also enables bots.

Of coarse still being in the beta phase they too are still a work in progress. The bots will mainly be for practice purposes used to try out new heroes and builds. Sure nothing new, but the great thing about this feature is that you can control your allied bots...Brilliant!

You will be able to ping your minimap to send commands to your allied bots; If you ping an enemy tower, the bots will try to push the lane, and even ping on an enemy target to assist in a gank. As for now you can only pick the bots for a subset amount of heroes, they also know how to use all of the many items available in the shops.

The bots will also be able to communicate with you in-game by using the chat system. They will be able to strategize and think as you would. Here is a couple of things they will be able to do, more to come:

• Let you know when they are coming into your lane to help gank.

• Communicate to you if they are getting pushed back or losing a fight.

• Focus the high priority targets in team fights.

• Evaluate whether to push or defend a lane.

• Call for assistance to help down Roshan based on the situation.

They aren't stopping their, in the near future they will also be implementing these feature to the bots as well:

• Changeable difficulty settings, customize to your skill level.

• Deeper control over your allied bots, so you can command your team at a higher level. For instance, you might want your team's carry to not join a fight, and instead keep farming their lane. It's said they are capable of making this decision by themselves, but if you wanted to control the game as you wish, you can.

Holy shit, this makes the League of Legends bots seem like you are playing retarded pre-schoolers. 

Spectator System will be introduced! Hooray for Valve!

Just as I was hoping for, they are doing this game right! The Dota 2 team wanted to clarify on exactly what they want the Spectator system to be. They really understand the importance of watching and studying gameplay.

They want to cover both aspects of spectating, one is simply doing so to improve your skills and the other is to watch more professional commentated games in tournaments. Both improving self gameplay. They felt that spectating on games is so important they implemented a "Watch" button on Dota 2's main menu.

This feature will be so convenient and helpful to use because of it's filter capabilities. There are a few different filters you will find useful when searching for a game, such as one filtering a particular hero or player, or search for a certain skill level. It seems as if they want to make the learning curve for this game a bit easier to pick up on. They are giving you the ability to study, why not take advantage of that! This brings tears to my eyes!

Another feature they added was a Players Perspective camera mode. This mode allows you to select a player you are watching and it will be able to watch the game as if you were on their computer. You will see the players HUD, mouse cursor, camera motions, everything...This will give you the chance to see the mechanics of a high skilled player.

They also took their time to look at tournament matches. They realized it was hard for the commentators to keep track of all the action and a pain in the ass for the spectators if they didn't. This problem led them to create the Directed camera mode, they got Source TV to build a smart camera that knows what's about to happen, and tries to make sure it's in a good position to let everyone see the action unfold. This will give you the freedom to sit back and watch the game instead of watching the minimap to make sure you aren't missing anything!