Dota 2 Releases its Holiday Themed Wraith Night and Announces Upcoming Matchmaking Upgrades

By Legit Staff

The developers over at Valve and Dota 2 learned from their Halloween debacle of not releasing their Halloween themed content, Diretide, on time and have since released Wraith Night to celebrate the winter holidays. For those of you not aware, when Diretide was not released as promised, users took to Metacritic and angrily dropped the score by over 2 points.

DOTA 2 Wraith-Night

Wraith Night is essentially a hero defense mini-game which sees the player and 4 allied friends defending the Wraith King from wave after wave of rampaging enemies. In addition to the major event content, there is new treasure associated with the event as well. The update has also made a few changes to the main game, with the Wraith King replacing the Skeleton King hero. The change is just a cosmetic and titular one as none of the abilities are different, but it is nonetheless nice to see overlap between the holiday content lore and the game itself.

But for those players that do not care about the newest seasonal mini game and the treasure that accompanies it (treasure just being character skins), there are some major changes to the competitive side. The Wraith Night update has introduced a new hero, the Legion Commander. The hero offers some extremely unique abilities, such as a challenging an opposing hero to a single combat duel and some extremely high damage output.

The most exciting announcement out of all of this however, is that the Dota 2 team has been doing some much needed work on a new matchmaking system that now, finally, includes in- game rankings. Here are some of the upcoming changes announced on their blog:

  • Ranked matchmaking is unlocked after approximately 150 games.
  • All players in the party must have unlocked the mode.
  • Currently, only All Pick, Captains Mode, and Captains Draft are available.
  • You may not participate in ranked matchmaking while in the low priority pool.
  • Coaches are not allowed in ranked matchmaking.
  • Matches played in normal matchmaking do not impact your ranked matchmaking MMR, and vice versa.
  • Your ranked MMR is visible only to you and your friends. The MMR used for normal matchmaking is not visible.
  • When you first start using ranked matchmaking, you will enter a calibration phase of 10 games. During this time, your ranked MMR will not be visible.

There is no indication when that update is coming, but hopefully it is sooner than later. Until then, the Wraith Night mini game should keep at least some of the Dota 2 community entertained.