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The original was posted on /r/dota2 by /u/fierywinds1q on 2024-06-27 20:04:08+00:00.
Dota has been getting a lot of great updates with cool features, but there are just more and more quality-of-life issues with the game that needs attention.
Each of these issues on their own are minor issues, but as a whole, they combine to make the game no longer feel “clean” to play. The game feels a bit clunky and tedious at times because of all these issues.
Visual clutter
Visual clutter is slowly building up to the point where it’s becoming obnoxious. Long ago, there was the bunch of white text on the left side of the screen (dota coach icon, dotabuff quests etc). Okay that wasn’t too bad.
Then neutral items were added and for some reason, the neutral item notifications are GIGANTIC and can’t be clicked away, they’re SO DISPROPORTIONATELY BIG compared to how relatively unimportant that information is. Someone killed roshan or killed your teammate? Really small text on the left side of your screen. Enemy team took a tormenter? No sound effect, really small text on left side of screen. Someone got a rampage? Slightly bigger text in the middle of the screen. But someone found another tier2 neutral item token while you already have one equipped, HOLY SHIT BIG NEWS BETTER HAVE THIS GIANT POPUP THAT CANNOT BE CLICKED AWAY BLOCK YOUR SCREEN FOR 10 SECONDS.
Currently, players are constantly getting spammed with the following notifications on the right side bar, a lot of which are really useless, and if there were an option to turn off 100% of all these crap notifications, I bet a lot of players would turn it off. You get notification spammed for:
- Every single neutral item token found
- You get ANOTHER notification after all neutral item tokens of a tier have been found, stating 5/5 neutral tokens found (like who the fk cares?)
- You get MORE neutral item notifications every time your teammate returns their own neutral item to base (you can’t pick up or use your teammate’s neutral item anymore, who the fk cares, why do we need a notification every time a teammate returns THEIR OWN neutral item to base???)
- You get a notification for every talent taken by teammates (why can’t the game just let us check talents when we want to instead of getting a notification for every single talent?)
- You get a notification for every medium to big item bought by teammates (again, we can already check teammate inventories, the notification is redundant)
- You get a notification for EVERY observer ward, sentry ward and smoke purchased
- You get a notification for random miscellaneous nonsense like tips, rubick every single spell stolen gives a notification and a whole load of other crap
Now before you say it’s not such a huge problem, you have to remember. Most of you probably play normal mode. In Turbo mode, this is actually 10x worse than normal mode. The pace of the game is so fast that you get a constant spam of shitty popups on the right side of your screen. I think I can confidently say 99% of Turbo players by now have completely tuned out the deluge of non-stop crap appearing as notifications on their right side bar because there’s JUST SO MANY and it’s CONSTANT. So the ironic thing is, the bigger and more annoying the notifications, the more players just completely ignore and tune out all of them.
The fix is simple. Allow us to turn off all right side bar notifications optionally.
Wait that’s not the end.
Then now we have facets. Now every time you try to alt ping a hero at the top, you will probably hover their facet and summon another popup to block your screen:
The fix is simple, let us optionally disable the giant popup, we can check hero facets on the heroes themselves by clicking on them if we want to.
Remember that all these things in isolation are really not that bad. They’re quite minor stuff. But combining everything? It kinda makes the game feel “unclean” and clunky.
And then recently, they decided to revive the concept of effigies so effigies are going to be more common. So now you have another thing on the screen where if you dare misclick it’s going to summon another giant popup to block your screen.
And the question is, why can’t that giant popup just appear at where the red arrows point in the image below, just like it does for every other thing in the game you left click on?
Ability to click freely
Next issue is the ability to click freely.
So in an ideal world, you’d be able to click freely to move your hero and attack move your hero. After all, moving and attack moving are the most fundamental aspects of the game, you literally do it a thousand times every single game.
In another game red alert 3, they had this issue where if you right clicked on impassable terrain to move, your units wouldn’t even try to move close to it, they would completely ignore the move command because it was impassable terrain. That made the game feel horrible to play because 5% of your clicks every game are just ignored and you have to be very careful and precise and micromanage how you right click in a very fast-paced game. That’s just tedious crap that is poor game design. Thankfully, Dota doesn’t have this issue, because imagine clicking on a clump of trees or a cliff and your hero just goes like “na, I’m ignoring your command because I can’t go up that cliff”
BUT, dota is starting to have some issues.
First of all, they added lotus pools. And for some reason, you can’t issue a move command on empty lotus pools! The move command gets ignored. The fix is simple, your hero should simply try to move next to it, JUST LIKE YOUR HERO DOES FOR ALL OTHER IMPASSABLE TERRAIN. There’s no reason for the command to get ignored here.
Second of all, you also can’t issue a move command on enemy team outposts (unless you’ve taken their t2 tower and can channel the outpost). Your move command just gets ignored.
Thirdly, you can’t issue a move command on enemy invulnerable buildings.
And then, there are also people that issue attack move commands a lot to move around the map, and there are A LOT of things that block attack move commands, like the following:
- Watchers
- Twin gates
- Lotus pool
- Secret shop
- Outposts
- Random invulnerable couriers flying by in Turbo
- Neutral item tokens on the ground
- Neutral items themselves, and other items on the ground like gem, rapier etc
All the terrain and stuff above also block patrol commands too, the patrol command is simply not registered and is ignored when you click it on those terrain or things.
Again, all these issues on their own are insignificant but combined, they make the game really irritating having all kinds of stupid crap to dodge when you’re trying to click just to move around. If your clicks get ignored 2% of the time, that’s still needlessly annoying 2% of the time.
Back when I played naga siren in Turbo, microing illusions really quickly to send them to different parts of the map, and controlling different groups of illusions at different places, sometimes I’d realise after 10 seconds that my illusions didn’t respond to my attack move command 10 seconds ago. After a while, I realised that clicking quickly, sometimes I accidentally clicked attack move on invulnerably flying couriers (in turbo there are a lot of them flying around) which made the attack move command fail to be registered.
Most normal players aren’t going to think this much. They’ll just shrug and feel like the game is a little unresponsive today and continue playing, but it’s still annoying. The clunkiness, unsmoothness effect can be felt even though most players may not even consciously realise what the issue is most of the time.
Sometimes, players realise the issue and make reddit threads like this:
or like this:
But those reddit threads are buried. Why? Because INDIVIDUALLY, the issues are relatively small issues. But collectively, when you combine all the crap, it becomes quite annoying
The fix for this is super simple too:
If a right click command is issued on an object that can’t be interacted with (e.g. an outpost that you cannot channel yet, or an enemy barracks you can’t attack yet), a move command towards said object is issued.
If an attack move (or attack) command is issued on an object that can’t be interacted with, an attack move command towards said object is issued.
Then there are also other small issues with being able to click freely.
Everyone knows about misclicking right clicks on the minimap, hence there’s a setting for minimap protection. But for some reason, right clicking a few times on a hero portrait at the top by accident will move your camera towards that hero. Why is this necessary when left click already serves the exact same function? So when you’re right clicking to move to the top part of the screen, sometimes you can randomly make your camera jump to some hero whose portrait you accide…
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/1dq0o3u/dota_really_needs_a_springcleaning_update_to_fix/