Everyone knows the patch comic — you know, the one where Icefrog serves up a steaming plate of crap and after complaining for a while the Dota 2 community eats it anyway. I think it’s a pretty apt description. Icefrog can serve whatever he wants and we’ll have to play it or leave. But it’s not quite the one-way street that the comic suggests. Tome of Aghanim got removed already, didn’t it? So here’s me, asking Valve to toss both Third Eye and Repair Kit in the bin — and oh, to maybe revamp the entire system.
I get the idea behind the neutral items. Unpredictability. Cool abilities. Free stuff! Taken separately these concepts are fun. But just like you can’t buy a product that is cheap and fast and high quality unless you’re cool with child labor, you can’t have things that are unpredictable and cool and free in Dota 2 unless you’re cool with lowering the impact of skill on the game. (Which is bad news especially for the pros, who are investing precious years of their life into an esport that only rewards them if they win a lot.)
So, what’s wrong with Neutral Items?
People familiar with me might’ve already seen my twitter thread where I said that the ultimate skill in Dota is not adaptation, but anticipation. To (over-)simplify the matter: a good player buys a BKB after he loses a teamfight because he got disabled and killed. A great player buys the BKB before this happens and never loses that one fight at all. A great player is dominant — he forces others to adjust to his style, to fear him, to abandon their own plans in favor of countering his. If the good player fights the great player, he will always be one step behind, making the optimal (and expected) moves, adapting all the way until his ancient falls. It is not a winning strategy but a bid for survival.
Anticipation requires knowledge of possible scenarios. It requires experience to determine which of these scenarios are most likely to occur, and which ones are most dangerous. Finally, and most importantly: it requires the investment of resources and time into preventing something that is not guaranteed to happen.
Now take the Neutral Item. It is completely random, meaning that you can’t itemize or skill towards or against it. The enemy’s items are invisible until their reveal — you have no clue if they rolled synergy or suck until their Orb of Destruction PA is making kebab out of your supports. And the event of them getting an item is almost impossible to prevent by design; if you’re far enough ahead to control all of their jungle camps the game was all but over anyway.
The worst part is — upsets because of this RNG are going to be rare. It’s quite likely that both teams get items of roughly equal usefulness and value. There’s only ¼ chance that your Death Prophet game is going to run out of vital momentum because of a Repair Kit drop. But that means that it will be all the more unfair when it does happen. Remember 17% memes? Spirit Breaker’s bash wasn’t changed to pseudo-random because it was overpowered but because it was unreliable. The random over- or underperformance was all in the hands of RNGsus, and it made the hero unfair.
Similarly, Neutral Items are unfair. They cannot be anticipated. And because this skill makes the most difference at the highest levels of Dota, where players will be using items to their maximum potential and mistakes are rare, the unfairness of the situation hits them the hardest.
We will see an important pro match decided by a jungle drop — it’s just a matter of time. And while the intention of the system might be to add fun and unpredictability, I don’t think that there’s any fun in gambling with people’s livelihoods and dreams. There has to be a better way.
Solutions, then. Let’s go back to where I said that we couldn’t have all three of unpredictable and cool and free, and walk through the combinations.
Unpredictable+Cool works. It’s the system we’ve got — just the regular item shop. Nothing’s stopping Icefrog from slapping a price tag on all this fancy new stuff. Nothing is stopping you from buying MoM and a Basher on your Witch Doctor either. Sure, you might lose the game. You might get punished for your sins in the afterlife. But it was your decision.
Cool + Free = there will be Neutral Item “builds” just like there are regular item builds. You’d have to hope that the items being free incentivizes teams to be more creative. In this way a lot of the items we have currently get to stay, though. I’ve seen plenty of suggestions for how to make this system happen: through recipes, tokens, rerolls… Since I’m most concerned with the pro scene, I’d like to see an item draft after the hero draft. This makes all items a choice, adding the possibility of mindgames and counterplay. Neutral Items will have been neatly included in the core gameplay and can be controlled — as much as anything in this damn game can be controlled, anyway.
Unpredictable + Free = nerf nerf nerf. The impact of the unpredictability should be low. This means that most of the interesting actives and unique abilities need to go. Items that synergize super well with single heroes also need to hit the curb. (Let’s just say that I think Timeless Relic shouldn’t exist in the same universe as Rubick.)
Next to that: items should not be good at bursting targets or at preventing targets from being bursted. The biggest turnarounds occur when heroes die when they weren’t supposed to, or when heroes survive when they weren’t supposed to. A 4v5 is a much different fight from a 5v5 with 1 hero on low HP. Biggest offenders in this category are Orb of Destruction and Prince’s Knife (lol ur ded) and Greater Faerie Fire & Magic Lamp (lol im not).
Which one of these two solutions is the “best” depends on the intentions behind the Neutral Item system. Was it to add unpredictability? To add variety? To test drive items and abilities? We don’t know, and I don’t want to presume. All I know is that the way the items are implemented now is either too random or too powerful. When the novelty wears off the system will start to feel unfair — and sooner or later, a pro team is going to lose a big qualifier or a lower bracket final to an enemy item roll.
I would rather see us anticipate this than adapt to it later.
