DOTA 2’s The New Frontiers Update Is The Largest Update It’s Seen For Years

gameranx.com:

Valve has revealed the details of the DOTA 2’s New Frontiers update. This is the biggest update to the game that it has seen in years, including literally.

The New Frontiers name alludes to the widest change it features: a new map with 40 % more terrain. The map has been designed so that the lanes should still be the same distance to each other as before. Rather, the extra room gives players more resources to find, as well as breathing room for broader strategies. This could lead to longer games as well, but also, those games could be more evenly contested.

The second most meaningful change New Frontiers is matchmaking, and this news is probably most welcome to its highest skilled veteran players. Valve is switching over from its old Elo algorithm, to an entirely new algorithm called Glikco.

Of course, we don’t know the finer details of how this new algorithm will work, but Valve says that you can treat its debut as the start of a new matchmaking season. And both algorithms will run simultaneously for some time, so that Valve can ascertain that Glicko is doing a better job than Elo.

There are even more changes coming with New Frontiers. In fact, there are so many changes that Valve recommends players just jump back into the game to learn the finder details, because it will be easier and faster to find out that way. With that said, we’ll summarize a few highlights:

Roshan the Immortal has two new pits to spawn from, in the northwest and southeast corners of the new map. His drops have also changed, with his third death dropping either a Refresher Shard or Scepter depending on which pit he is in.

There are now two gates that connect each map corner to the safe lane towers. Players can just teleport to any map edge they