DOTA fans, heads up.  The official site for Defense of the Ancients 2 has gone up and with it, IceFrog answers quite a lot of questions from you guys (the DOTA-community).

Valve and IceFrog touts several features of the upcoming game like In-Game Voice Chat, Leaver AI Replacement, a Matchmaking system, In-Game Rewards (it’s a Valve game so I imagine…. HATS? :)) and a Coaching System that will allow veterans to teach newbies.  Of course, being a Valve game, things like your login, account details, payment, etc, will be handled via Steam.

No further details have been announced but this bit is quite interesting:

“You can join a game your friend is in, see what your favorite clan is doing, or simply pick a skill level and a hero you like and it will find you one to watch. We also have a system in place that automatically distributes the load to multiple servers so that the game itself won’t be affected by users joining to spectate. Our distribution network will allow us to support any number of users that want to watch, by dynamically assigning more servers to the task.”

I agree that the game isn’t Valve’s alley but they have the best guy in the industry (in terms of DOTA at least) working for them so I have high hopes for this one. Oh and if you’re wondering about how Blizzard feels with Valve applying for the DoTA trademark and creating a standalone game, Blizzard game design lead Rob Pardo said in an interview with Eurogamer that it “doesn’t seem the right thing to do”. Defence of the Ancients came out of the Blizzard WarCraft 3 community. More on that from the Eurogamer post.

Here’s some of the glorious artwork for you to enjoy 🙂

Defense of the Ancients 2 is set for a 2011 release.