Dota 2’s The International 12 group stages have begun and spectators are out in full force to watch the best teams in the world in action. But not all is right since spectators who prefer using the Dota TV client, which is the in-game feature to spectate matches, are reporting several issues that make their viewing difficult.
To fix these issues, Valve released a patch earlier today, Oct. 13, that addresses the significant problems spectators had to deal with. This 200 MB patch contained fixes to the Dota TV issue, taking care of the lagging and freezing issues that spectators reported earlier. Additionally, this patch sorted out the prediction errors as well, allowing spectators to predict using Dota TV’s tools once again.
In addition to these changes, the patch also addressed several minor bugs that reared their head during the first day of the group stages. Bugged interactions, like the one between Earth Spirit’s Rolling Boulder and Centaur’s Work Horse causing an infinite Rolling Boulder, were promptly fixed with this patch.
Since the first day of the group stages, the Dota TV client has been unstable for spectators. Reports of the game lagging and freezing were rampant among viewers, which made spectating these matches nearly impossible. Most frustrated fans left the client and started watching the streams directly through other viewing platforms like Twitch and YouTube.
Before every match begins, Dota TV allows players to place their predictions for the match winners and certain other milestones that might be hit during the match. These predictions close when the match is officially underway, which leaves very little time for spectators to lock in their choices, leading to additional disappointment.
If predictions are your reason to watch these games, you can also make them on Twitch using their Dota 2 integration tool, but even that feature has its own problems.
Due to these issues, spectators are pleased that the client is working as intended once again since most players prefer using Dota TV. This is because of the lack of visual quality drop and the in-game spoiler prevention tools that allow spectators to enjoy a match without worrying about being spoiled.
Now that the technical issues have been addressed, the second day of the group stages is set to begin. For all the latest TI updates, check out our Road to the International schedule, which will be updated with the results every day.
