After we delivered some exciting features at ESL One Birmingham, we went into hibernation: Bukka was mostly working on the new Artifaction.gg project, Matt was somewhere in the world doing his things (I still have no idea what he does) and I was the little kid in the candy shop working my first The International and doing my usual consulting.

Right after TI was done, the new circuit promised to be the most exciting season of Dota 2 yet and with that, we went back to doing what we do best: Innovating on all fronts of the in-game production.

We focused on fixing back-end logic for our features and made sure everything was working for 7.19 but still had time to get some major new features rolled out.

Bounty rune details

This is one of those features we wanted to do for a long time and really captures the essence of the layerth stack: Packing abstract information into something the viewer can easily grasp and understand. The value changes throughout the game so it’s inherently hard to intuitively understand just how impactful the bounty gold is.

Bounty runes spawning every 5 minutes are a major reason why Dota 2 is as exciting as it is in this current patch. The high incentive to take risks in order to secure the golden runes for their respective team saw a resurgence of skirmishes all across the map, at times being responsible for the entire networth lead of a team.

Bukka added some little extra tidbits like who was the current pickup leader for their teams (EternalEnvy really seems to like them, he picked up eleven in Game 2 vs Aster) and how quickly teams picked the runes up, but most of the design was focused on delivering the raw value.

Simple, yet effective.