Dota TV is a unique in-game feature that allows fans to spectate tournament matches within the Dota 2 client. Usually, it works quite well, but during the early days of The International 2023, fans have been having major issues.
The biggest problem is it has failed to keep up with demand. On the tournament’s first day, numerous fans reported severe lags and freezes that prevented them from spectating.
With TI 2023’s Road to The International starting today, Dota 2 players looking to follow the event inside the game client were in for a bit of a surprise. Dota TV failed to load during the first matches, and when the feature did eventually start working again, the feeds were plagued by continuous lagging and freezes.
As a result, many Dota 2 fans migrated to watching TI12 on Twitch and YouTube. While that’s also the go-to method of most viewers, there’s a good reason why some Dota 2 fans prefer following tournaments inside the Dota 2 client: Dota TV boasts spoiler-prevention tools, allowing fans across different time zones to pace their tournament viewing.
Additionally, the graphical quality surpasses that of any standard stream, and players can engage in Dota 2 match predictions to earn prediction points.
Dota TV bugs and errors prevented players from making predictions at the start of this week’s TI 2023 matches. Considering that’s half the appeal of watching matches in the client, players are eagerly awaiting Valve’s rollout to fix the problems.
There’s also a feature that allows players to make predictions on Twitch, but it is a hit or miss since it doesn’t consistently work.
Based on Dot Esports’ tests in Dota TV, the stutters look to be tied to TI 2023 only since we didn’t encounter any problems while spectating ranked matches. Having too many players spectating a single match simultaneously could be causing server-side issues.
TI 2023 is very likely to gain more and more Dota 2 viewers as the tournament goes on, so Valve is certainly on the clock to fix this one quickly.
