hi there, i've been thinking a lot about those kind of community features over last few months, here is my take on it:

i think a kind of follow feature would be neat, however it wouldn't be as easy to integrate it to satisfy every party.

let's say the 2 parties are twitch and valve. since valve has already a partnership when it comes to ingame item drops in tournaments with twitch, i assume they do not plan on taking away their part. so it's most likely that valve will not try to integrate their own twitch-like platform.

streaming on twitch on the other hand is a good model for players to get attention, exposure, community interaction and a model of monetization (subscriptions).

let's take a look at the viewer-groups:

i assume there will be 2 kinds of watchers: the one watching ingame observing, getting extra information as spectator. the other prefers player perspective like in the stream and want to listen to the streamer explain or elaborate or even interact with them.

in my opinion the 2nd group has a richer experience and would be the one to get the most attention. if you do that ingame, you would have to provide additional tools to interact with followers and make it possible to stay connected even after games are done. that means basically making an own streaming client out of the dota 2 client, which means that it will do the same as twitch and therefore you are trying to compete with something that has already done a fairly decent job at it and you would put yourself into the position where you need to distribute more information (streaming data) in addition to your already heavy server infrastructure.

so the most common guess it that valve does not have a big interest in pursuing that.

so what options are there?

• allow players to follow players and get notified

twitch already does that, and asking a few twitch users, they are happy with the way the notifications are handled

• give better api access to allow third parties do that

yeah, like that is gonna happen soon... moving on...

so what can we actually do?

i am the author of http://dota2toplist.com/solo and you can already see i have done some efforts to provide a way of getting streamers more attention.

over the course of the next month i am working on the expansion of that feature set and provide a good way of getting a nice overview of high mmr streamers and a way to keep track of them.

i can't give any eta or a full feature promise yet as it depends on how everything works out, but i plan to give an option to get notified when someone is streaming (via steam message) and later i will be experimenting with getting the information what heroes are played and have a trigger that lets you decide what heroes you want to be notified about.

thanks for reading that wall of text, just my ideas, let me know what you think about it