f13.net

Seeing a lot of stories suggesting Valve are going to unveil DOTA2 at Gamescom, and that it is inexplicably still on target for the originally announced Q4 2011 launch.

LoL never really grabbed me, but I can see the attraction, and having it redone by Valve seems pretty awesome.

I just stopped playing LoL, so I'm looking forward to see what comes out. I think very few actual details have been released about the game.

I appreciate the genre a lot, but its never captured me.  I might be willing to give Valve's iteration a go though, especially if the price is right.

I'm still waiting for a version where killing your own creeps to deny xp by clicking on them at exactly the right time isn't a pro skill.   Someone let me know when that happens.

Its called league of legends  :drill:

In all seriousness, the last moba i played besides league was funcoms game my friend was shrilling for, small characters tossing skill shots at each other. didn't hold me.

That's odd I thought I tried it once and it did but now that I read they say it doesn't.   Guess I'll have to download it and try it again.   I'm curious about how DOT2 is going to turn out considering all the rumors about how much of a retard IceFrog is.

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/news/youve-grown-league-legends-massive-game

Wrong thread?  :headscratch:

I'm definitely looking forward to Dota2, if for no other reason I think LoL needs some decent competition and it might take enough load off their servers that I won't have to deal with 30 minute queue times.

You'll have to elaborate on that one.

I've heard these rumors as well. But I can't elaborate because I don't remember details.

It was back when EALouse was doing that blogging at first.   Some guy at Valve made a blog about how IceFrog is a dick and some other stuff I could care less about.   The only important bit was that supposedly he is very hostile to feedback and doesn't listen or whatever.   Valve upper management was supposedly just letting him get away with it too.

Ya, the blog is here (http://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/2010/10/truth.html).  Made a bit of a splash, but it mostly just seems to be one guy spewing venom.  Icefrog has been kind of a quiet figure, so not a lot of people can say much to defend him.  I could have sworn we had a chat about it here, but I can't find it now.

There was also some minor wankery around the DOTA trademark, some kind of dispite with the LoL devs (who worked on DotA allstars) over the rights to the license and the status of the Warcraft 3 version of the game.  Allegedly that's part of why the game is officially called "Dota 2" rather than Defense of the Ancients 2.

Ah yes, so the baseless make-belief crap. Carry on.

There should be a wealth of information coming out around the middle of August, as apparently there is going to be a big LAN even someplace in Europe which will showcase a lot of DotA2 stuff.

I hope DotA 2 works out because League of Legends has terriple input lag and generally sucks.

Sadly it looks like it has to be F2P at this point. I wouldn't mind if they gave me the option of buying the whole game, but if they don't, I doubt I'm going to grind for heroes I've already played in regular DotA. That's just not the type of thing I play a MOBA for, its like grinding for new units in Starcraft. Or maybe it'll be OK if the prices aren't LOL-esque where you have to pay $300 or so if you want all the heroes and runes.

If its not F2P, sign me up. The community features look badass.

I just want the cost to play the game (i.e. the heroes) to not be out of this world.

From a casual pov, LOL's system is pretty right on the money I think.

HoN lets players have access to most of the champs for free in the new F2P version as far as I can tell from the little I've played. Given that DOTA2 and HoN are both DOTA stright up DOTA clones I imagine Valve will have to do something similar.

New heroes in LoL are rediculously expensive, each one costing around 7 USD on average. Compared to the old heroes, the first 40 heroes can be bought with 2 packs that cost around 50 USD in total I think (so just over a buck per). The hero rotation is 10 heroes per week, and around half of those heroes are beginner heroes that are constantly in the rotation.

I don't have access to the financials, but on the surface it seems like they're making an absolute killing. Riot has grown from something like 50 to 300 employees in the past 3 years and they got bought over by a massive Chinese fund called Tencent Holdings which apparently has the 3rd largest online market capitalisation.

Valve just announced the first DOTA2 tourney (http://blog.dota2.com/2011/08/announcing-the-international/); grand prize a cool million dollars.

Nice.

You haven't even started estimating skins.

Um...cannot every hero be bought using IP, which is earned by simply playing the game?

Everything that counts in the game can be had for free...

I didn't mean to give the impression that heroes couldn't be bough with IP. I was just trying to give a ballpark figure of what the game "costs".

Average IP for a full game is currently around 100 I think, varying on how many games you play a day (every first win / day ~ 160 IP). Average IP cost of new heroes is over 5k, so it takes over 50 games played to have enough IP for one hero. In addition you probably need to have a set of runes to play on the same level as everybody else. A cheap, full, competitive set of runes (3 pages) costs around 15k IP.

TLDR: You can get everything you need in the game by just playing, but it would take a serious amount of time, which I can't even imagine. Basically thousands of games.

:headscratch:

I haven't experienced this "terriple" input lag you speak of. I also don't find the champion cost "rediculous" since they can be bought with IP earned in-game, and I don't know anyone who regularly rotates through 50+ champions. Most people seem to stick to playing 5-6 'main' champions, and IP arrives at a fast enough rate that you can still experiment with new champions (or wait for them to be free for a week). I've spent ~$50 on LoL after almost two years, and most of that was on skins. If I remember correctly, I've actually only bought 4 champions with RP, and two of them were on sale when I did.  I own over half of the champions in the game. The other half I haven't bought because I didn't want them, as most people will probably find themselves gravitating towards some champions and away from others.

The simultaneously getting a big generation of buzz, and it acts an an appeal to the competitive community saying "look at this shit, its legit."  Definitely a HUGE prize that is too big, but as a way to get into the moba market, not a bad strategy.

LoL is their main competition and as far as I can tell they didn't invite any LoL teams which seems like a huge swing and a miss. It seems like they are actually going straight for the DOTA crowd instead of the LoL crowd.

I don't think it matters, a tournament will only have the most uber players and 99% of the LoL crowd are average joes.

LOL is pretty grindy for pure IP. If your only buying with IP you have to
1. Buy a decent champ 6300 - 4300 IP average. At one game a day thast 2-3 weeks, at 3 games a day its 2 weeks.
2. Buying the runes, for that champion, assuming you goggled a build you have have anywhere between 4000 ip to 8000 ip for one set of blue, red, or yellows. The average physical carry rune set is (and considering that you have a choice between Attack Speed, Crit, Crit Damage, Straight Physical Damage, and Armor Pen) not including crit damage (800 per rune) is 14000. Mage rune set (again considering magic regen, straight mana, magic pen, and straight ability power), is 14000 more or less not including cooldown (800).

So each champ is runes + champ cost is about 14000+4300(ruling out the 6300 champs), which is 18300. Now remember it takes 2 weeks on 3 games (assuming you win one game) a day to get 6300 range. So one champ is 6 weeks of play to bring to competitive level. Oh remember 1 game of LOL is 45 minutes, average. Times 3 is 135 minutes or 2 hours. Want to double your grind? Ok 250 IP bonus, you need 2 games, assuming you win, to make 200 IP (woot), so thats 4 games which 3 hours + 2 = 5 hours to double your grind. Oh and thats for one champion. To have a modest win record you must know at least 4.

So all of the good champions cost 4300-6300 IP? Not even close to accurate. Champion cost has no bearing on how good the champion is. Ashe, Nunu, Kayle, Alister, TF, Amumu, Annie. There is a quick list of 7 of the most popular champions in the game, champions that are often ban picks because they are powerful, that cost 1350 or less IP.

I eventually did buy runes. I have an AP set and an AD set, with the only difference being magic pen or armor pen runes. You don't need to spend 14000 on runes per champion, you don't even need runes to compete. One of my friends still hasn't bought any runes after over 600 games, and he does completely fine in games. Your idiotic "18300" per champion estimate also completely ignores that many champions are going to use the exact same runes. Even if you did buy the perfect runes for your Trundle, he'll probably use the exact same runes as almost every other AD jungler you could possibly buy.

err yeah. I'd say most people would end up buying a champ at the 4300 range because of the champ rotation and the new shiny easier to use champ that comes out every week. yes there are plenty of champs that are 1300 or less. master yi is 450. And no runes matter. alot. Its night and day without runes. But meh, it was far less grindy without the new ip system.

You people guys are total OCD. RAWR! Gotta collect them all!There absolutely no reason to do this to have fun.  I hate to break it to you but if you are only playing 3 games a day you are never going to be at a level that having everything unlocked might make an once of difference.

Personally, I enjoy the variety and the opportunity to at least try champions out.  I don't see what that has to do with how good you are at a game. With the current rotation system, some champions can go 2 months before you get to try them out. There's a fair amount of variety in the champions you can buy in the packs, but buying any of the "new" champions can be prohibitely expensive, and the average price of new champions has been rising steadily for a long time.

I would have rather had LoL the game with HoN's pricing, but you can't have everything.

Runes don't matter much. They really only make a difference early-game, and from 1-29 nobody bothers using them. They certainly don't matter enough that someone needs to spend another 14000 IP to switch their armor pen runes to attack speed for a new champion. You'd really only want to fine-tune that much if you were in very high competitive play. For most players where obvious mistakes decide the game, it's a completely negligible difference. That said, I would actually prefer if runes were removed from the game (or made entirely free), but I don't think they are the time sink you make them out to be for any reasonable person.

Suddenly "buying a decent champion for 4300-6300" means "buying the most recent champion because I like teh shiney"?  :oh_i_see: This is ignoring that new champions are often not "easier to use". See: recent complaints from forum retards about how the newest champion isn't better than X (Leona, etc.), or champions that were once new like Karma or Lee Sin that are very difficult to play (and not because they are under-tuned).

LoL actually has a pretty great business model imo.

There's about as much grind in a game like LoL as there is in SC or CoD. Either you like the game or you don't. I can't see why you'd stomach a bunch of games to get points so you can be more effective at this game that you don't even like.

Just raged at some nooob akali who doesn't know she does stupid dps at no cost with stealth but meh. No I love LoL I also know its grindy, I also know that i don't have 5 hours to spend on a video game, so i'm going to own at best 40% of the champs in the game at any given time eventually. I do know that if my account gets wiped than i'm kinda done with LoL, unless kicking lowbies is as fun as everyone figures it is. And yes runes matter because when your not derp derp pugging you will get rol rol rollled. Yes they are champs that are 450-1350, plenty of them, but riot hasn't released one in 2 years. Unless they plan on dropping some prices, there model of releasing a 6300 champ and maybe dropping them to 4800 is not a good sign. Fact is Riots business model is subconsciously evil, but it delivers on both ends, no matter what type of player you are.

Runes can make a huge difference, jungling being the obvious example. Not having a decent set of runes is an easy way to lose to people who are at the same skill level as you.

I'm not completely against a F2P model, but look at the prices I mentioned in one of my earlier posts. The cost difference between the early champions and the current crop of champions is immense. If Dota 2 goes F2P it's not hard to be cheaper than LoL, there's a huge gap.

Time for more rehab.

I liked the pay 30$ and get everything approach HoN has had. Personally, I don't have time to play more than 1-2h per day but I've been playing HoN since its beta and got every single cent worth of gaming out of it.
DotA is just a concept perfect for guys like me who like some short distraction in an involving PvP centered Game (before I cancelled my WoW account I only logged in to get some Battlegrounds in- now you know why I cancelled). So I'd love to see a Pay2Play model from the very beginning for a reasonable one time price. They may even get a once a year payment out of me if need be as long as it's reasonable (not more than 30$).

Dota2 trailer (http://www.dota2.com/trailer) up on YouTube. Very shiny.

Gameplay or gtfo.

I realise it's Valve, so I will be amazed if it isn't very polished

Beta Signup (http://www.dota2.com/tournaments/international/)

Tournament stream starts at 1am PST tomorrow.  Replays should be up at the site too.

http://www.dota2.com/tournaments/international/ (http://www.dota2.com/tournaments/international/)

Looks almost exactly like HoN to me.

For the people wondering, looks like there is creep denial.

Creep denial, and those little "pet" mule scout things as well. I don't know why I'm surprised, Icefrog and all, but I still thought they might learn from the better of the two DoTA rehashes instead of going for the failboat that is HoN.

I'm not sure they can be that popular if the game is DOTA copied.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziVx7-pGpIc&feature=player_embedded

 :ye_gods:

I'm not sure why the ye gods face?  I was watching the tournament live earlier and while I don't tend to like moba games anyway so it didn't look enticing to me it seemed like a reasonable execution of the genre.

Yup. The moment I saw it, i stopped caring about beta access.

Maybe there can be a mode without creep denial for regular folk and a toggle for the true believers.

Agreed, although I'm sure people will come defend it.  I feel like creep denial makes laning much more tedious and boring.  The more time and effort I can focus on actually fighting and harrassing my opponent instead of watching npc health bars the better.

The last match of the day was pretty fun to watch. It's definitely worth watching if you like the genre.

Because it looked tremendously boring, generic and muddy?

Watched a few games and the most fun I had was seeing how they changed heroes from their original War3 models.


I've never played DotA or any of it's spinoffs, so spectating is such a lost cause.

Is it normal to spend 11 minutes just getting teams?

There should be an easy mode which will have no creep denying and no gold lost upon death.

I think the smart thing would've been making that standard and making another mode for the traditional players  :grin:

They do.  The mode is called "League of Legends".

Looks pretty much exactly like DOTA with improved graphics.

All interest dead.

Zoning > creep denial on all fronts.   I used to feel guilty for disliking this mechanic since it is a "skill".   LoL has removed any doubt I've ever had though.   Zoning is far more interesting as a high end skill and is far easier for casual players to grasp and use in a limited fashion.

As someone who has played Dota (a loooong time ago) but never LoL, what's zoning?

It's easy to explain as controlling the space around the mobs to stop farming or even push the enemy out of XP range. 

You have that in DoTA some of course but LoL has a couple differences that make it much more prevalent.   The creep waves won't aggro you unless you auto attack.   There are also fairly large bushes on the corner lanes where you can become invisible to drop creep aggro and make the enemy cautious about where you are at.  LoL also allows a single hero to kill creeps in the jungle from lvl 1 for XP and thus the opponents must be wary of where that hero can come from.   Abilities are much cheaper and can be used more often early on as well.

You could honestly probably combine the two styles somewhat but I don't see how anyone could argue that LoL doesn't have a high enough skill cap already anyways.   Adding more skill cap is just going to take away from the value of something else.

To me, DOTA gameplay looks stale after playing LoL. Even if DOTA has a higher skill cap, who really wants to play with that sort of community?

This game looks waaaaaaaaay too similar to HoN for me to beleive it will garner anything but the most hardcore, and rabid fans. Creep denial and gold loss on death may make the game more hardcore, but they make it no fun at all.

Notice the two languages the cast was in besides English(for obvious reasons) and German (local to the event).  The original DOTA is still huge in Russia and China - those markets are going to pay dividends to Valve on DOTA 2 would be my guess.  A Chinese DOTA team just sold for 6 million dollars a few weeks back.

This has to be some crack dev team wearing the valve publisher name....cause no way is valve just reskinning dota and charging people for it... jesus, do they seriously want a slice off the stale hon/dota pie that much....

Though people in Russia and China willing to give fist full of dollars for a dota clone thats not english only seems to be a good motivator.

All the heroes in that video looked exactly like ones from DotA. Why would you copy the heroes instead of making new ones?

 You have to realize, as big as LoL is, there is still a huge population around the world of people playing the original DotA.  I think this game is supposed to appeal to that crowd, while finally making DOTA a stand alone product rather than a WC3 mod.  Its called DoTA 2, but it might be better thought of as DOTA 2.0, if that distinction makes sense.

Because the goal of DOTA2 is to remake DOTA with newer graphics and better matchmaking/community stuff.

This game is going to be the EVE to LoL's WoW (sorry for all the acronyms). That would make HoN the equivalent of, oh, I dunno, Tabula Rasa.

Shadowbane.

EVE and WoW are fundamentally different games, though (even TR, from what I hear, is fairly different).  I don't see that difference here, even with denying and gold loss.  I's say it's more like comparing EQ2 to WoW.  Both are based off of the same source and offer the same basic gameplay, but one is the direct sequel to the original and the other is already massively popular.

I was using market share as the metric.

Don't all these games have shit communities? I mean I kind of feel like you're asking "Why would I post on Stratics when I could go to the VN Boards!"

Ya, but it's kinda like saying everything under 10 degrees celcius is cold. LoL's community may be cold at -5, but HoN's is downright inhospitable at -213 or so.

I play mostly bot games and it's rather like a group formed by the RDF in WoW during WotLK. Victory is almost guaranteed and there's virtually no jackassery (or any talk at all, really).

Either way, it's definitely out of character for Valve.

How so?  Counter Strike has probably the shittiest community of any game I ever played, but they still bought up that team/mod.

It boggles my mind why would you play at all. But to each his own and at leat you dont contribute to the pool of !@&#^@&^ in game (myself included)


Really? I mean I played CS since 0.6 beta and never had "community" issues. I mean seriously - you buy gun ,start shooting stuff. You can quit server and join another anytime. You dont need to chat either. I never knew what a shit community is till I started playing MMO. LoL elevated the "cesspool" to a whole new level though

We simply don't have a similar experience playing CS then.  I started playing very early as well, and I think the community got WAY worse after it went retail, and never looked back, its been pretty bad ever since, and every once in a while I'll go back and reinstall CS:S and usually within about 10 minutes I remember why I don't like the game anymore, despite it being a mechanically solid shooter - the community makes me want to rip my eyes out.

They bought Counter-Strike and released CS:S, which has several "features" (hitbox and aiming changes, etc..) in it to make it more casual friendly.  It's rare that Valve creates and releases a game that is for a hardcore only crowd.

Even then, there is a massive difference between the hardcore-ness of (even the original) counter strike and DOTA

Valve seems to have some serious love for what they achieved with TF2 so I have to agree.  For them to go the opposite direction in DOTA 2 makes no sense.

IMho CS itself became worse after CS:S, but as of community... -Its a straight up FPS,  with almost no downtime and very forgiving penalties for dying, As a result it is very solo friendly and is played stress free. You can even carry whole team and even if you do not you still have a good time - getting frags and killing . MOBA games?  -you are entirely team dependent, you cant leave match early if some afks , trolls ,etc. In lol minimum time investement is 20 minutes. In CS if something annoys me too much I simply leave server and join another one  -all under 30 sec. In LoL  I am stuck.  I find myself raging more than I should.

And as of community -  for CS/TF2 I always had a few favorite servers which had decent population (no tkers/trolls)

They made exactly the game anyone who enjoys dota wanted.  Dota itself is still a great game hindered only by the limitations of being a mod for War3.  I could make the same analogy for Starcraft 1 to Starcraft 2.

I am VERY impressed with the DotaTV aspect of this game.  The majority of the replays that are being posted are not being recorded by someone controlling the camera around the minimap.  That is AI driving the viewpoint unless it is being commentated.  It is significantly better than most e-sports caster at catching the action.

Of course the problem is unless your already knee deep in the DotA style games, you have no idea how significant any of the action is.

That's been my problem spectating these games, It's just a jumbled mess, little better then a WoW Arena match.



Maybe there are enough people playing DotA regardless where they won't need to worry about the casual viewer.

That replay feature is unbelievable. Enjoyed it more than the shoutcasting.

This is Valve; they should be aiming for more than the old DOTA community.

My vote as well. People were ready to cry foul when Valve released L4D2, this isn't sounding too good beyond the leet observe mode.

There are estimates that DOTA players outnumber LoL + HoN players, they just are mostly not english speaking.

Sure, but DOTA is also an 8 year old map/game. Ideally they'd want to have DOTAs initial playerbase and LoL's growth. Additionally, the revenue you can get per person matters as well, not just the size of your playerbase.

Maybe it's just me, but if HoN didn't grab those players, DOTA2 isn't going to grab those players. Valve is smart enough to know that, or should be. HoN has all the parts of DoTA people hate as well. Denying, mule pets, ect;
Out of the two, HoN was the more "hardcore". And we saw how well that did.

There may very well be more DoTA players than LoL + HoN players combined (I doubt this) but even if there are, they are going to continue to be DoTA players. Unless they are making DoTA2 an exact copy of DoTA, they aren't going to get that group of hardcore players who are still playing an 8+ year old game to jump ship and cross over.

Icefrog has gone on record many, many times saying that DOTA2 is a "carbon copy" (exact words) of DOTA the First, but with UI improvements, better community and spectator options, and a tutorial/coaching mode as a bone thrown to newbies. Creep denial, animation canceling, orb walking, fog of war fuckery, all those little things that were glitches in the WC3 engine that became part of high-level gameplay are all retained as normal gameplay.

Lack of deny and courier are by far the 2 most frustrating aspects of League for me.  Lane control is huge and these are probably the 2 biggest factors to it.

Aha! You're one of them!

Seriously though DOTA 2 seems like it would be awesome....if you preferred DOTA or HoN to LoL. It seems to be getting a pretty bad response from LoL players though who aren't DOTA nostalgic.

Welp. So much for my interest in this game then. I played HoN. No need to bother with this.

Same here, I'll stick with LoL.  I'm actually pretty happy that all the things I thought were boring/sucked with DOTA are being kept in DOTA2 as it makes my choice dead easy.

As far as a business, my take is that even if they get the full DOTA playerbase... these have people playing the same game for half a dozen years and have shelled out only the War3 box cost, why would Valve imagine that these folks are going to suddenly start buying hats?  Business model does not compute.

Is Steam popular in China?

Will it be more popular when DotA 2 comes out on Steam and the supposed millions of DotA players move over?

People will *always* buy hats. They went for years without a cash shop in TF2, why would these people be any different?

Watching the matches has made me really want tower denial in LoL. I haven't seen that creep denial is all that exciting, or even common (about one creep per wave from the matches I watched), but the ability to deny towers is an interesting mechanic to encourage players to move around the map more. I like the use of money for tp/fort/revive.

I can't see leaving LoL entirely, but I'm definitely looking forward to mixing dota into my gaming rotation.

edit: Speaking of hats... http://www.neutralcreeps.com/2011/08/dota-2-hats-for-team-fortress-2.html

I cracked up laughing when I heard that one of Sniper's taunts upon killing another hero was "Thanks for standing still, wanker!"

That's a mistake. Whether or not one personally enjoys things like denying and animation cancelling (hi, PA!) it's stuff that LoL has forcefully moved the game model past. Going back to denies would be like wandering back to an earlier era of gameplay (like going from WOTLK back to vanilla raiding) and expecting the same model to have the same sway.

Graphics polish won't fix that. On the positive side, DOTA2 will at least murder the shit out of what's left of HoN, so there's that.

Always look on the bright side.

I'm still more than a little flabbergasted that a company that has pushed forward what we consider launch polish and general game design and accessibility would do something so backwards and... just bad. I simply do not understand.

That's because you and Samprimary, and a whole other bunch of f13ers think everything that which LoL has done, is for the best and an improvement. Others (a large number of whom, by the looks of things) disagree. Later games have done some things well, but they are a far cry from being unequivocally considered 'better'.

Hardcore players always think that way and they are always wrong.

Which of course explains why DotA is such a massive failure, and no-one likes it.

Dude, no one is denying DOTA 2 is going to be popular. But it's going to be AoC, or WAR popular, with people making excuses why it's subs are so low, and saying X amount of subs (not sure what the direct translation would be here) is really good for the genre, but they will be secretly disappointed that it doesn't even come close to dethroning the leader.

Oh really, is that how it's going to turn out? I'm impressed. Though you do confuse me a bit by saying that DotA2 will need to dethrone DotA. It's really just a refinement and slight evolution of the original.

Ummmm, not DOTA, LoL.

The thing about DOTA2 being an exact port of the first DOTA is that it comes with a pre-built audience of millions (mostly Chinese and Russian), and I've seen few to no people who still play DOTA say they're not going to switch to 2; there is literally no downside to doing so.

My main concern is that the community and culture of "we want the game to both be hard to learn and nearly impossible to master because we're manly men and fuck all you carebears" around the game (that seemingly extends from Icefrog all the way down) is going to seriously hamper growth beyond that already-existing fan base. I fear that a high-profile game like DOTA2 on a high-profile service like Steam from a high-profile developer like Valve will get a lot of people interested in it who will play it, realize that the minimum skill level to not be such an actual detriment to your team that your inclusion alone is enough to guarantee a loss before the game even starts is through the roof, and then put it down and likely never touch another MOBA again.

Is that really such a terrible thing? If they don't enjoy it, or aren't interested in investing the time to improve at it, why is it a problem if they stop playing? Its been proven that there's a more than substantial player base that DO enjoy the game for what it is. The game is inherently compeditive, there is a skill base needed to play and that should be acknowledged.

That being said there is supposed to be two modes of game creation supported, one for casual play and one for compeditive. It'd be nice if the new matchmaking system does an alright job of keeping people in games of appropriate skill levels, at least enough to not turn newcomers off a whole genre of gameplay.

Only if you want to worry about things like your employees getting paid without charging those "hardcore" enough to play some ridiculous amount.

How do you figure that?

Wait, what? You can't seriously want to argue this can you? What are you actually asking here? Did you forget green text? Do you want some numbers, stats?

No no, by all means, go ahead. I'd love to see some numbers for worldwide DotA and LoL stats.

LoL is in beta in China and hasn't even had it's first tournament their yet.  Worldwide numbers are still up in the air considering that.   The only numbers for DotA are pretty vague anyways considering most people download the map via battle.net.   Then on LoL's side we just have their "registered" users numbers.

Basically we can look at Riot clearly swimming in cash though and DotA continues to be popular obviously.   The real question is how much money is Valve going to make without the Western casual market going crazy over their super hardcore hats?

Edit: Totally just reiterated what Amaron was saying.

In summation though:
I don't think poor people care about hats.

I am terribly sorry, I went out for dinner and I kinda got drunk, missing your post in time.

This is kind of hard because Riot provides us with stats, and DOTA kind of can't but here it goes.


The thing is, even if DOTA had ten times the number of users LoL has, it wouldn't matter one lick because they are a mod, while LoL actually makes money off of their product. I predict DOTA 2 will simply not be as profitable (for the reasons we have listed), as LoL, the market leader.

So hang on, are you saying that a game's worth is measured in the amount of money it makes? Earlier you seemed to be saying that it's about the overall popularity. Because if we are going by popularity, the numbers for DotA as indicated by the discussion here (http://www.playdota.com/forums/blogs/icefrog/892/q-session-4/) compared to what you've cited for LoL, are quite staggering. I'll quote the relevant part:


However, if you mean to say that the amount of money which LoL makes is an indicator of the richness, value, depth and overall level of fun in something, then I am afraid you and I and everyone else on this website ought to prepare ourselves for a lifetime of eating McDonalds.

That's a pre LoL quote from years ago.   Back when I played people would just leave DotA games open on War3 to let people download the map after an update.  The rest of the time you'd usually have to go to the website.  Blizzard is the company with all the really useful data.   With them making their own DotA they aren't going to give the info up.

That was posted in 2010. But I suppose you are right, it probably is a conspiracy by Blizzard to conceal the failing state of DotA.

My post was concerning you asking how LoL was the genre leader.

As for personal taste.

So how is it the genre leader?

I would call it the genre leader because it's a much better game, completely disregarding any popularity/revenue debate.

You're reading stuff into my posts that isn't there.   All I've said is we have no really useful numbers.   All we really know is DotA is really popular but not as popular as LoL in the west.  Even by Icefrogs best estimates that's true.  That's why LoL is the genre leader.  I'm not sure where you came up with that bizarre conspiracy in all of this though?   I thought I was supposed to be the crazy one here.

This is just a silly thing to argue. I'm not biting.

Moving on to other things, I saw mention of various game modes that will be in DoTA2 on release.

DotA 2 Game Modes:


Now these are just the game modes that will be in at the time of release, and I'm sure there will be more to come after.
While there is no mention of a "no deny" mode, only a no exp lose from denying, I'm betting/hoping at some point (likely very soon after release) that such a mode is added.

The ability for various gamemodes to be played and added easily could be a saving grace here for DoTA2 as far as the more casual crowd is concerned. Then again, it could just add segregation and it being too difficult to find a game server. But, we'll see I guess.

If nothing else no denial is a day one SourceMod plugin for sure.

Are they allowing mods?  I tried looking this up but had no luck.

This is complete supposition on my part, but I figure they are going to use the same system for Dota2 that they recently rolled out for TF2. Servers can opt to be "quickplay" servers by adhering to a set of rules and registering the servers under their owner's Steam account. Some settings penalize your score with the central authority, and some cause you to be removed from the quickplay list entirely until they are turned off(like no crits.)

My mental picture of the whole thing is you can create a plain vanilla Dota server and make it on the quickplay list, or you can host a server with any crazy maps and plugins you desire and people have to hunt you out. Or maybe turning on certain variables just causes the game to not count towards whatever variant of ELO they have. However they do it I'd be pretty shocked to see their new f2p game not follow in the footsteps of their current f2p title.

Oh so you're talking about server setting type stuff.   You said mod so I was imagining actual mods.   I'd be very excited if it was modable since the software seems very good at least.

Well it is Valve, so here's to hoping. Doesn't seem like something they are against, looking at their track record, if it wasn't moddable that would be breaking from the norm for them. So I'm going to remain high optimistic on the matter.

SourceMods can be full game mods; the Saxton Hale and prophunt game types are both SourceMod plugins. I did kind of conflate the two. Sorry about that. Having followed TF2 pretty closely I've noticed Valve will usually add variables for contentious settings like crits in TF2. I don't think it will take long for them to do the same for denial.

Suffice to say this should be a pretty hackable game. Gabe Newell has talked frequently about involving the community in asset creation, both skins and other stuff. I suspect we'll see a pretty active creative community around Dota2.

Sounds like too many modes to me.

Will split the player base and/or a lot of the modes will be neglected / unbalanced / etc. When they have tournaments which mode(s) are they going to use?

It's also kind of silly to call that "easy mode." Why not just call it "if you play this you're a retard mode"? TO be clear about what I mean here, just the name indicates Valve turning their nose up at the mode.

Hey don't look at me, I wasn't the one talking about charts.

The way game modes work in DotA, for those of you who don't know, is this: (now this is assuming that the game will operate in the same way) you start a 'game', invite people or have people join, then once it loads the game creator types in which game mode they would like to play. It is usually advertised in the game name, on the join screen. So you start, join a game, it loads and you type in -cm (captain's mode, typical comp format), and off you go.

Most of the ones listed are already in the original game, with the exception of Fortress Mode I believe. Easy Mode is in, the only difference being that currently you gain xp & gold at a doubled rate from normal. -apem games (that is, All Pick Easy Mode) are probably the most popular format, in actuality.

Free Mode: No cool downs with no mana cost on skills.

What does that mean exactly? Does it literally mean no CDs on any moves, or am I reading that wrong?

Yep. It used to be called wtf mode, iirc. So all spells have no cooldowns and no costs.

Sounds pretty retarded.

FYI most of those game modes are already in dota.

You League kids sure are bitter about dota2 being a clone of the first game with a real game client.  Show me on the doll where dota touched you?

Kind of my thoughts on it as well. But then again, the player base might be substantial enough that it won't perhaps matter.

Did they announce that DoTA2 was going to be f2p? I know they made an announcement they are working on a f2p title and everyone was speculating it was going to be DoTA2, but did they outright come out and say it? A very brief Google failed to provide an answer, or I looked right over it.

No business model yet.

-wtf was awesome; I jumped through all the port-forwarding hoops required to host games in WC3 just so I could play -wtf more often.

It's pretty easy to tell who in this thread actually participated in the DOTA community and who did not.

They called it easy mode in DOTA and people still played it. (Though easy mode in DOTA only made people level faster, last I played; it didn't interact with the denial mechanics.) Yes some percentage of people get all snooty, but the name itself certainly didn't deter enough people from playing it that you could easily find a game if you wanted.

The game will almost certainly be balanced for normal mode or a specific tournament mode, because that's pretty much the goal of DOTA -- competitive 'e-sport' balance. I think people making comparisons to TF2 and expecting feature sets (mods, etc.) based off Valve's track record may be sorely disappointed. My feeling is that this is still DOTA, and Valve is footing the bill, not remaking the development philosophy of the game.

And honestly, what sets DOTA apart from LoL is that, frankly, IceFrog and whoever works with him are just a lot better at balancing a competitive game, and take doing so a lot more seriously. LoL's release-heros-nonstop-for-cash model resulted (at least when I played it) in a nearly impossible-to-balance environment in which the game was constantly flooded with poorly-tested and default-overpowered heros designed to encourage players to buy them ASAP in order to take advantage of the fact. Does this make LoL a worse game? Not really, from the casual player point of view. But it does make it a worse sport, for whatever that's worth -- and for DOTA, that's obviously worth a lot.

I also find DOTA's heros a lot more interesting, but it's hard to separate that from their iconic they-came-first status.

--

The concern about denial mechanics also seems really overblown -- except insofar as people are just treating them as a stand-in for a whole general attitude on the part of the developers. As someone pointed out, 'zoning' exists in LoL as well as DOTA, and successful zoning is far, far more crippling to the opponent than creep denial. As is, you know, killing the other guy, which is what actually happens in both games when you have two players of vastly different skill levels. The learning curve in LoL is plenty harsh, and most of the improvements over DOTA have to do with better item-buying suggestions, sensible key-binding, etc. Losing gold on death is certainly a far worse rule than creep denial, from the point of view of avoiding new players being completely frustrated.

In any case, I found both communities to be so poisonously aggravating that the game mechanics kind of faded to the background. A game can have a difficult learning curve, but if its full of people -- who are on your team -- calling you a faggot and rage-quitting whenever you dare to do something wrong, the precise shape of the curve doesn't really matter. Because guess what -- they never stop doing it, no matter how good you get.

One of the key LoL design decisions is that it is intended to be (generally) balanced for both balanced and competitive player, which is something from my understanding that is not the case in DOTA. The end result is that there are champions which are fairly clearly unplayable at high levels so that they're not frustrating at lower levels.

 :uhrr:  

....


This would be a stronger point if you didn't begin your post by being needlessly antagonistic. It sounds like your problem with the communities is that they are full of people like yourself...

Ok, at this point I'm actually laughing out loud. Can you possibly be any more of a whiny bitch? What, is valid criticism too hardcore for you?

This thread is going places. :awesome_for_real:

Well, okay, I guess I could have phrased my opening remark differently, but it's true. Concern that the extra game modes will somehow dilute or unfocus the player pool or otherwise undermine the game's balance don't really make sense if you are aware that DOTA already has all those game modes (and several more) and this doesn't happen. I had intended to append that directly to my statement to make the connection clearer -- it wasn't intended as some kind of blanket dismissal.

Amaron, as for your  :uhrr:, I don't know what to say. Better is a relative quality. And LoL was, when I played it, basically terrible when it came to balancing -- and it was very, very clear that this was the result of their business model. It's been a lot longer since I played DOTA so maybe I just wasn't paying as much attention back then, but at the very least there was no external market pressure requiring the release of new heros at an unbalanceable rate -- the structure of the game allowed for more attention to existing problems, instead of devoting resources to creating new ones before the old ones had even been addressed.

My :uhrr: is because at least when I played IceFrog's ability to balance anything was a complete joke.   Maybe he got better in the last few years?   The reason competitive DotA worked was because of bans and because it doesn't matter if a lot of the heroes suck in a MOBA.   That's why RIOT can keep releasing new heroes as well actually.    They have a bunch of staple heroes that can be used for real competitive play and any hero that sticks out gets hit with the nerf stick instantly.   The one or two that slip through the cracks get banned and then the rest of the bans get used for heroes you just don't want to fight.

I guess it depends on which balance you care about.  If you want your favorite hero to be viable then yea RIOT's model is not for you.   For competitive play though it's fine if they release an endless stream of too-situational-or-sucky heroes.

Fair enough; the more I think about it, the less willing I am to claim IceFrog's superiority in this regard, though I still feel like overall DOTA felt like a more balanced game. On the other hand, my LoL experience is just a lot fresher in my mind, and the incompetence of Riot in general was fairly remarkable -- and extended well beyond game balance issues. As you point out, though, the genre itself is fairly forgiving when it comes to competitive play, due to bans, etc.

Maybe it's the DOTA style of gameplay that causes the community to devolve into barbarism, rather then the gameplay being attractive to barbarians.  I submit this thread as evidence.

I think it needs way more all-caps misspelled gay slurs to become evidence of that.

Sounds like you tried playing LoL, got your ass handed to you, then went back with a bleeding anus to DOTA.

Can I take back my last post?

Uh, seriously, what?

This. I was a nice guy before I started playing LoL.

Dota "balance" is that half the cast is unplayable and the other half has some champions that are picked 10x as often as others.

You could see this exact pattern in the Dota 2 tournament. LoL has had quite a bit of champion diversity in recent tournaments, and LoL has a lot of champions so you figure that if you have 15 different magic damage carry guys a few would rise to the top. But in recent tournaments there has been Brand, Orianna, Cass, Kass, Annie, Gragas, Fiddlesticks,  Anivia, Malzahar (maybe not since nerfs though), etc. That's quite a lot of diversity among characters who fill the same basic role. Similarly for ranged AD there has been MF, Kog, Tristana, Ez, Ashe, Corki, Urgot...again all champs that on paper fill the same role.

To really suss out which game is more balanced you'd have to develop some actual criteria but the idea that Dota is much better balanced than LoL strikes me as almost certainly false.

Ugh, no. Hero picks are as they are because when one is playing for money (or just to win), players will naturally gravitate towards heroes with lowest risk and highest reward. When your game has ~90 picks to choose from, all quite different from one-another, a lot are going to be overlooked because their skillset doesn't gel with other safe heroes, or they requite too much risk for relatively similar levels of reward.

Also, the first 5-7 minutes of this game (http://www.dota2.com/tournaments/international/game/27/) do a good job of explaining some of these things, along with the ban system.

Um, am I looking at the same link? All I see is a video of people taking their sweet ass time with picks/bans, and then not playing terribly aggressively.

7 minutes into the link. 2 champs out of 5 and 2 bans out of 4 for one side, and 3 and 2 on the other. Exciting. No audio.
I'm illuminated.

So, the imbalanced ones?

No, the safe ones.  :why_so_serious:

Watched to the end. Is there no constant gold accrual? The Dire team just got stomped as if they had no idea what they were doing. They were not farming well at all, and were getting stomped by the little droid guy.

itt: we learn how to click on the Audio Commentary buttons in Youtube.


Oh god I hope I get you in my division next season. Please oh please oh please oh please =3

itt: we learn how to link to the English audio commentary off the bat
 (http://www.dota2.com/tournaments/international/game/27/?p=0&v=1)
fake edit: Yay! I'm like Megrim now.  :drill:

This is like performance art. 

The predictable/safe ones, more like. I don't really play MOBAs but in almost every other competitive format with picks like this that I've been involved with, the motivated-to-win players tend to gravitate towards things that are reliable rather than things with high risk/reward. Things that reduce randomness, or match up well in the metagame, etc. I didn't pick dwarves in Blood Bowl because they're particularly overpowered, I picked them because they minimize randomness and don't have a ton of bad matchups. The same thing happens in MtG, happened in DDM, etc.

It would be pretty surprising to me if it was different in MOBAs, but I admit I'm out in theory land here and don't have direct experience with them really.

The commentators on these videos are fucking terrible. They are barely intelligible and they seem to talk utter cryptic bollocks the times they are audible.

This - that feed was horrendous to listen to. I lasted about 30 seconds.

Thanks for the feedback guise! I'll have to keep it in mind to find casters that suit the f13 aesthetic next time.

In MOBAs you generally have one high risk/reward character chosen per team, who is then protected by the other members of the team in order to attempt to mitigate the risk while cashing in on the later-game reward. This is particularly true in DOTA, where the degree to which each team can protect and support their 'hard carry' often decides the game, but it happens in LoL as well, with certain characters being paired with support heros who are good babysitters. Of course in terms of overall strategy, there is still generally a conservative approach like you describe, but since we're talking about individual character design -- the risk/reward distribution for individual heros will vary across a team as part of a larger strategy.

In any case, since this thread has rekindled my interest in the genre, I spent some time watching both the DOTA2 replays and some recent 'replays' from competitive LoL play, and the contrast was a lot greater than I expected. I couldn't say if it's the map construction, the game mechanics, or the hero design or what but the DOTA games mostly feel like they have a lot more going on, especially in the early game. (On the other hand, DOTA games seem to have a sort of longer mid-game lull, whereas in LoL the action seems to ramp up to a definitive endgame a lot faster.) But even simple things in DOTA like destructible trees and what feels like a slightly larger map seems to result in a significantly more aggressive early game playstyle, whereas in LoL the first 15-20 minutes are generally spent watching fairly straightforward lane matchups -- interspersed with some ambushes and the like, to be sure, but much less inter-lane movement than in DOTA.

It's interesting because when I think about more casual (but still high-level, expert) play in both games, I think the games play a lot more similarly -- but when it comes to coordinated competitive play, the DOTA teams seem to have developped significantly more complex tactics and strategies. I know when I was playing LoL there was a serious lack of organized team play (premade 5v5s), and 'solo queue' play pretty much dominated the culture, even amongst the best players -- I'm not sure how much that has changed recently, but it's hard to tell how much that may have contributed, apart from any actual differences between the two games.

The commentary is definitely not aimed towards people who don't already play the game. I haven't played DOTA in years and it took me awhile to figure out half the stuff they were talking about. On the other hand, the commentary track versions tend to have superior camera movement/focus, instead of randomly showing you 10-15s of a hero walking out from his base. And they bring up some snazzy graphics sometimes.

I felt the exact opposite, actually - DOTA2 to me looked pretty dull for the most part. Perhaps it's a product of "competitive" play, but that DOTA replay looked painfullly conservative to me.

In a certain sense there may have been more going on - there's no denial in LOL, no need to worry about port scrolls, there's only 1 shop in LOL.

The DOTA map certainly felt larger, but I don't think that made a huge difference - just a lot of unused space.

How I was feeling watching it as well. There was a point or two there with opposing champs walking down the river side by side without a single engagement between them, save maybe a swat with an autoattack. Alot of laning.
Pacing is just different. LoL seems to focus more on ganks and harassment of enemy champs compared to what I was seeing in the couple matches of DoTA2 I've watched.

But yeah, alot of what Ice Cream Emperor is saying feels right to me on the same note. Tactics, teamplay, that does seem to take a little more of a focal point in DoTA.

You also have to keep in mind that DotA has had years to develop competitively, whereas LoL is still quite new so its not an entirely fair comparison. A ton of little things have been added over time to gradually balance out the game, and to help distill the difference between a good team, and the winning team (for example, the limited number of wards available to a team).

I actually went back and played some DotA recently (after spending the better part of this year playing LoL) and one thing which stood out almost immediately was how much more important crisp decision making matters. In LoL there is so much Ghost/Flash/Exhaust spam, that killing an enemy hero even after you've jumped him, is mind-numbingly hard. One is actually rewarded for careful set-up and positional play instead of going "welp, we've burned his summoner spells, I guess we'll come back for a second pass after his wards expire". That and the increased amount of direct disables help a lot too. All-in-all this tends to speed the game up, because if you can disable and kill an enemy team member you've gained a clear advantage and have set that player back.

On the other hand, after getting used to LoL's (frankly superiour) ui, I was struggling to keep control of my hero for a few games. Its amazing how much of a difference being able to press 'Space' and center on your hero makes.

 * Edit: also keep in mind when you are watching, that these are very high level games. The reason you don't typically see a great deal of harass is because even the slightest over-extension can mean a death and lost gold. When you have a fine line between two evenly matched teams, often the deciding factor is who makes the first few mistakes - not who tries to do something creative.

Other than "Ugh,no" every single thing above indicates that the game is in fact unbalanced.

Edit: As far as other stuff is concerned, Dota does have a more active early game but also has tremendous lulls in action. In the Dota2 tournament after a couple towers on each side went down there were huge stretches of essentially nothing happening. In LoL at that point you would be getting dragon fights, Baron fights and more towers. Average game length feels about the same to me.

Yes yes, keep saying it. Someday it'll magically be true.

lol's fault — they got rid of the 'passive play' encouragements and streamlined the process of getting to teamfight endgames. Now by comparison dota's (and hon's) conventions tend to grate.

Apparently at high ELO LoL is conservative as well...but screw that, I just like to play the game, it's not a sport.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I just wanted to clear up some of the misconceptions which people seem to have, in thinking that comp gameplay is all tryhard fucktardery. It reality this is just a well-made, well honed game which can be enjoyed at all levels.

Yeah, I was gonna say. I just watched the better part of the IEM LoL tournament (http://"http://www.own3d.tv/video/187620/IEM_GC_Cologne_LoL___Grand_Final_Part_1") and the games were extremely conservative -- like, first blood at 20 minutes, 98%-of-gameplay-is-farming conservative. The variety of engagements in the DOTA2 games (in terms of ganks, counter-ganks, teamfights, etc.) I watched was much greater, though as mentioned they generally have their own periods of farm-drudgery.

But as someone mentioned, the lethality of ganks in DOTA is much higher, especially in the early game -- and the much-maligned 'lose gold on death' actually means that a few early kills (on the right hero) can significantly change the shape of the game. In LoL an early kill or two, while still an advantage, is not really worth putting yourself out for -- basically, the early game has less risk and less reward, and therefore less variance in play. Which is nice for casual play, because small skill differences do not snowball as radically, but makes high-level play kind of samey.

A well-honed, well-made game that stinks of design flaws that are artifacts of the Warcraft III engine :(

Sorry bro, it's not your fault, or any players fault that Valve drank the Icefrog stupidsauce.

You misspelled geniussauce.

(https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-wNEvFwxDYGs/TlZRUSnJZ3I/AAAAAAAASDc/3yCKePPccVI/s800/icefrog.jpg)

I liked LoL enough to never play HoN. I still like it enough to not play DOTA2, especially after watching the vids.

I think Riot does a pretty damn good job of balancing, especially considering the number of champs in game. When one of my champs gets nerfed, I almost always think 'not unexpected, he was a little OP'.

Anyway, cya in LoL guys.

The weird thing is, I liked LoL enough to try HoN with friends. It was wretched. Now that I hear there is easy mode, I may also try DOTA 2 if it is F2P.

Why do you keep disagreeing with me when everything you wrote indicates that the game is in fact unbalanced and you've basically conceded the point?

I'm genuinely confused. Again, you yourself wrote that some champions are picked way more often than others and have greater reward for less risk. That's "balanced" to you?

We need a shrugging smiley. At the end of the day I guess we'll see what happens with this new version.

Its not that they have a greater reward for less risk, its that they have a smaller margin between risk and reward. In other words they don't have a power advantage, they're just harder to fuck up with in terms of abilities and/or meta.

Does that make sense?

Think of it like Starcraft - an aggressive low economy one base all in play is high risk high reward,   On the other hand, doing a safe build with a focus on economy is much safer, but you aren't going to win immediately either.  Both types of builds can be balanced within the larger strategy meta game though.

I don't play DOTA, but it sounds like a similar thing he is describing with the Champions.

Are there stats for the number of heroes picked competitively in LoL vs. Dota?

I'm not sure it follows that having some bad heroes that nobody ever picks means a game is unbalanced. Probably 80% of the cards in MTG are never played outside of sealed/draft, but that doesn't make it an unbalanced game. This is a deckbuilding genre at its core it seems to me. All games like that have bad "cards", that's the way it works pretty much by definition.

This weekends MLG has LoL as an event.

http://pro.majorleaguegaming.com/live/league_of_legends


If people want to compare the DotA2 tourney to a LoL one I guess?

Agreed. There are (at least) two main ways to achieve balance: you can have a very small number of inputs, and meticulously test all possible combinations of play, or you can create so many inputs and possible combinations that it is functionally impossible to determine what, if any, optimal plays exist. (And then, of course, tweak things as various dominant strategies emerge.) MOBAs clearly operate in the latter paradigm, so judging their balance -- or the skill of those people responsible for balancing them -- is more about how quickly and how appropriately they react to emergent strategies/tactics. My totally subjective impression when I played DOTA was that while I did not agree with all the balancing decisions that were made, my impression was that these were the result of divergent opinions about what the game should be like, not incompetence in execution.

Whereas, again totally subjectively, LoL's fuckups mostly felt like incompetence -- their vision of the game was obviously much closer to my preferred casual playstyle, but their ability to bring that about seemed to be constantly undermined by their own business model and/or their own shitty code and/or poor decision making. Now since they're apparently making a lot of money, I optimistically imagine that they have used that money to hire more people, and that those people are more competent, and so things have improved. In some cases this has clearly happened -- I see from watching a Livestream that you can actually preset masteries now, for example, which didn't used to be the case.

But I also notice that most of the non-support heros people play now are unfamiliar to me, suggesting that the power creep that acts as the engine to their business model has continued apace.

Such as who? Ashe is still one of the most popular champions, as much as I detest her.

LoL definitely does suffer from development slowness and/or screwups.

This confuses me.   I'm not sure where you got the crazy idea that they have power creep.   Most of the staples are super cheap release heroes like Ashe ,Trist ,Alistar ,Annie, etc.   Four of the 450 ip (basically freebies) heroes were big staples of the tournament.   There were also plenty of old heroes that were new to you I'm sure but not new in general.   I actually had the thought during the tournament that the heroes represented were definitely not what the marketing department would choose.

I only saw one Ashe and one Trist in the games I watched, but it is possible that I focused more on the new heros simply because they were unfamiliar to me. There was a whole lot of Nocturne, Brand, some woman with a gun and an ability called 'piltdown' somethingorother, and a few others I didn't recognize. My comment on power creep had more to do with my experience when playing the game, so probably that biased my reading of the hero distribution in the games I watched.

Brand, Nocturne and Caitlin (Piltover Peacemaker) aren't all that new, especially Caitlin. And Caitlin was considered underpowered for a long time as was Brand. Nobody in the US used Brand until Euro players started doing well with him.

At this point it's less power creep than it is waxing and waning. There are a few heroes who are always good and a few who have not been viable for quite a while but for the most part the overall power level seems about constant. If you look at say Corki and Ashe both were staple picks for a long long time, and both were nerfed recently, Corki quite substantially, after not being changed in quite some time. If there was really power creep those heroes should have needed buffs to keep up rather than nerfs.

Annie was supposed to be one of Riot's model balanced champions but they still needed to give her AP ratios a slight boost a couple of patches ago. Ashe is supposed to be one of the model carries, but I think her high utility and poor early game made her suited for the support/carry meta which allowed her deficiencies to be easily covered hence the necessary nerf.

Recently there hasn't been so much power creep and more wild inconsistency from Riot. Orianna is very powerful, Yorick was weak, Leona was weak and didn't fit into the meta, Jarvan has been hit by nerf arfter nerf, Nocturne had to be nerfed significantly, Cass has always been viewed as weak etc.

But not all of this is Riot's fault. Sometimes Riot is further ahead of the curve than the players. Think about how long it took before people realised how powerful Irelia was.

Well there were a lot of interesting picks and some of the games certainly had more "new" heroes.   They kept using skins off and on too so that was probably also confusing.

lol's power balance is by now efficient enough that in order for a hero to be top tier, it has to be a function of what emergent gameplay meta they're operating in.

The problem i see is that all the general, simple, core types of abilities are covered in abundance, so the new heroes' often have powers which are getting weirder and weirder.

I've heard this has been pushed back to a 2012 release. Anyone here more in the know who can confirm that?

Arise! So the DoTA2 client got leaked. And there is Half-life 2: EP3 code in the files. Doesn't really shine much light on EP3 other than revealing the names of some new weapons: An icegun, a flamethrower and something called a weaponizer. Good to know they are indeed working on the title still anyhow.

Biggest news really as far as DoTA2 is concerned, is code and references for an ingame itemshop was also found, which pretty much verifies that this is going to be the F2P title they have been working on.

http://lambdageneration.com/posts/dota-2-client-leaked-including-actual-hl2-episode-three-code/ (http://lambdageneration.com/posts/dota-2-client-leaked-including-actual-hl2-episode-three-code/)

Lol some of those icons are  :awesome_for_real:

Link for the lazy (http://www.dota2.cyborgmatt.com/spellicons/)

Yes, yes they are.

(http://www.dota2.cyborgmatt.com/spellicons/clinkz_death_pact.png)

 :awesome_for_real:

There is amazing art in there.

Well it is Valve isn't it?

Valve has decided to rejigger their release plans and try to get the current version out ASAP.

http://blog.dota2.com/

NDA has been lifted as well if i understand correctly.

Yeah there's a few gameplay streams up now that the NDA is down.  Never played DotA but this does look like quite a bit of fun.

WTF is DOTA 2 (beta?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q2LKGfhVwg&feature=feedu

Hour long footage and first impressions.

I'm here to shamelessly beg for one of someone's friend key if any of you lucky bastards managed to get in with the group today.

http://blog.dota2.com/2011/11/your-time-has-come/

Anyone else in yet? I got an invite last night from a friend.

Nah, still waiting.

I'm starting to suspect my computer is now Too Old For Betas. That or my luck is poor.

They'll probably want data from old rigs as well, because they'll want to make sure that a range of computers can run it.

That's what I keep telling myself!

FWIW, it runs really well on old machines. I think it's running better than LoL on my box which is about 6 years old.

Sooo... anyone have spare invites yet?

Check you email, I just got an invite.  :drill:

Yep, just got in as well.

Nope, didn't get one =(

Fudge.

I may have said this already, but you are REALLY not missing anything. My brother got me and himself into beta, we managed one game, and collectively regretted even that. This coming from two fairly avid DotA players (back in the day). Everything is exactly the same, and just a massive step backwards from what Riot has done with the genre. Example: As in WC3, usable items are still bound to the NUMERIC KEYPAD. Yes, the one nowhere near either of your hands or any other useful keys.

Is there an NDA still in place?

Believe it or not I actually had the exact mental image of you coming here to bitch me out about that. So I Googled it.
Would you like me to Google it for you? (http://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=en&sugexp=epsu2&qe=ZG90YSAyIG5kYQ&qesig=r_mJ-xxa1Gb27NtqudtDAg&pkc=AFgZ2tnVE3CTj_5eenc8ZB6hBVi9xG1oDxaev-QBJwImBBd-f_2Q9DoNCut5eb-o6vmLlhfiwGzwbYDTjTvUjIM4V2AOViQKtg&cp=10&gs_id=2&xhr=t&q=dota+2+nda&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&site=webhp&source=hp&pbx=1&oq=dota+2+nda&aq=0p&aqi=p-p1g-b1&aql=f&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=6591c046a4656da9&biw=1333&bih=679&ion=1)  :why_so_serious:

EDIT: I have no problem with your inquiry and respect f13s NDA policy. I merely find my prediction becoming reality amusing.

This was my first take  as well. Played 1 game by myself to get a feel, played 1 match with what seemed like all other recent beta invitees as Ghostrider, closed out fired up LoL. I'll definitely dig deeper in this weekend, but my inital impression was not great. Maybe it was the champs I tried, but I found the pacing to be much slower. Also, I kept expecting towers to act like LoL towers. Still not sure on their agro mechanics, but I was sad that they started flinging at me when I was in the middle of like 4 of my creeps.

After Dominion in LoL I can't play as originally intended. Much too slow and creep denial slows things down even further

Pretty much everything in the game can be custom keybound to your hearts content.  
Yes... We all know this game is not for League players.  Personally I find League to be incredibly frustrating to play.  To each his own.

Edit: Also the NDA has been lifted on this for quite some time.

My question is who is this game for?

We already have both DOTA and HON, this is now essentially the third version of the same game. It seems like the target audience is HON players who want a graphics upgrade.

Hon has taken over quite a unique identity over the last year and is VERY different than dota despite starting out as a 100% clone.  I would say the target audience is the estimated 20 million dota players out there who want a modern client with things like reconnect and matchmaking.  I expect the fact that it bears the Valve brand will attract some new players as well.

The inevitable lawsuit:

http://kotaku.com/5883938/blizzard-is-suing-valve

Blizzard's case would appear to be very strong, to me.

I'd say it's kind of a stretch to say Blizzard ever promoted DotA.  Even more of a stretch that people would confuse DotA2 with Warcraft III.  Idk maybe there's more to it, but this doesn't seem like a very strong case.

What happened to the Riot objection anyway?  Was that shot down or something?

Was there any ever an EULA of any kind which stated that mods for WCIII were in any way Blizzard property?

In fact, I thought a big reason that SC2 galaxy editor had a bunch of this kind of language was precisely because Blizzard WISHED they had some rights to DOTA when they didn't.

Oh well, we'll see what happens.  In the end, its too late.  Everyone knows the game Valve is make is the heir apparent, and has the original developer.  If they have to change the name, it'll at most create sour grapes among DOTA fans towards Blizzard.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/game/maps-and-mods/mods/dota <-- announced before DOTA 2 I think?

In any case I believe Blizzard is only trying to stop them from trademarking DOTA, not stop them from using it? I'm not totally clear on all the legalese.

EDIT: And yes, it appears the EULA for the World Editor for War3 would apply here.

I don't understand why ANYONE but the original creator is trying to trademark the name DOTA. If we had trademark law that made any goddamn sense, both Valve and Blizzard would have to come to him for permission to use the term. Yes, I know he works for Valve now, but that shouldn't mean they can trademark shit he created without giving him a little taste of the action.

DOTA was made by Eul, Guinsoo (Riot) then turned it into All-stars, and when he left for LoL Icefrog (Dota 2) took over.

Edit: Google proves I'm an idiot and you're right. Eul does work for Valve.

Blizzard doesn't appear to be trying to trademark it, just stop Valve from doing so.

My understanding is that Blizzard doesn't want the DOTA title copyrighted so that it is accessible by all. They aren't fighting to claim it, just to stop Valve from having sole access.

Well, if that's the case, I can support that... except with the creator working at Valve, it seems like Valve probably has a viable (if regrettable) claim to copyright.

The EULA for the Warcraft 3 editor tool stuff that was used to create it is the obstacle there from what I can tell.

Got a beta invite for this last night.  :ye_gods: Feels about right.

Only played 3 games vs. bots, but I already feel like my thousand+ games of League were playing a lazy tutorial and now I'm playing the real game on hard mode.  It's the same game, and a completely different game at the same time.  So many common habits from League just get you killed in DotA.  Not decided yet if I'm actually enjoying that or not, but I am much more willing to give it a try than I was before.  (although I still hate the deny mechanic)   But the fact that in beta the DotA 2 interface and matchmaking and such feels way ahead of the 2 year old PvP.net is promising.

Hoax and I both are going to be be playing occasionally if anyone wants to join us, don't know else on F13 is playing.

I actually came to the conclusion that DOTA is no longer for me (after playing for years in the WC version).  LOL turned me into a big casual, and the DOTA2 beta showed me that I actually much prefer the lazy habits picked up by LOL.

Then I went back to LOL and couldn't play that anymore.  So now I just stare at those links in my Steam library.

I will say the interface and lobby system is one of the best I've seen.

I have beta access but I've played a grand total of one game.  I just don't really have time for another game right now.  I guess I could be coaxed into logging in for a game now and again.

Can you guys actually elaborate on what the differences actually are? Pretend you are talking to someone whose never played either game and only watched like 3 games total ever.

(I also got a beta invite, and have been playing with my n00b roomate.)

The ceiling is just way higher, all the way from the small-scale mechanics - timing last hits, managing creep aggro - through the medium scale - laning combinations, managing mana & ability use, resource exploitation, map navigation, item choice - on through to the strategic level.

On top of that it just has a much less streamlined risk/reward setup. Getting killed screws you up considerably more, and the ability to deny creeps means that lane dominance can have an even greater snowballing effect -- so early game ganks are more effective and also much easier to pull off. In theory this should lead to more conservative play but in my experience so far observing games and such -- the whole shape of the game feels much more varied than LoL, and there are far more ganks and skirmishes and kills overall. The mid-game of most of the matches I have watched is about ten times more active than the comparable period in a high-level LoL game, where people almost literally do not leave lane except for dragon fights, and only one champion on each team ganks with any regularity.

LoL just feels like a vastly more standardized, abstracted, top-down-designed version of the same game, which results in a more easily-comprehensible but also shallower strategic (and tactical) game. DOTA is very clearly built from the ground up, complete with all the WC3 engine idiosyncracies that have been incorporated into the gameplay (for better and worse.)

Of course both communities are horrible, horrible, horrible.

Oh but also LoL's shop UI is like 800% better. Though probably at least 500% of that is me being used to it, I still can't believe DOTA still has recipes and shit. Hidebound, much.

I refuse to play it simply because of Denial. Period.

I am done with MOBA and the playerbase is vile.

I just don't want to learn another MOBA and this just sounds a lot more complex than I want.  And denial.. I just don't want to deal with this mechanic. Additionally, I have money invested into LoL (not a lot, but still). 

I can deal with the communities.  Lake of Ill Omen to WoW gen chat has turned bad mannered children into mere background noise most of the time.  But there are days when you wonder why you put up with some kid going apeshit on you because you didn't help top that one time and it totally cost him the game.  Then again, I was pretty high-strung and vile at times as a teenager, so it's easy to put into perspective. 

I'm getting old. 

Legitimate non trolling question here:
Whats the LOL alternative to denial for lane control purposes?
Like how do you manipulate the point where the creeps crash to push the lane or to pull it back to your tower?  I played maybe 50 or so games of League and I never figured out a way to control the lane to farm safely.

If you want the lane to move forward, kill creeps faster. If you want the lane to move backward, only poke for last hits. If you want to deny the enemy last hits, make them pay for those hits by poking them every time they come within range.

There's no real way to force the enemy to let you fight under your own tower other than not attacking their creeps at all losing the money war. So typically, both sides fight to keep the creeps in the middle until they have the power to make a sustained attack.

Here's my noobler advice.  Take with massive dose of skepticism, since this is probably one of the least polished parts of my game.

Well, if you want to creeps to push toward your tower, just last hit.  If they opt to do this as well, you're going to have somewhat of a stalemate unless someone is zoned out of last hitting altogether.

Want the opponents creeps to stop a certain point? Tank them until your creeps get there.

Want to push your lane?  Autoattack a lot.  Clear waves with abilities.  Viola.  Some champs like Morde/Morgana/Rumble will naturally push their lane with how they farm creeps.  I tend to push too much in top lane lately and thus tend to get ganked A LOT.  I need to work on this (more intelligent warding and minimap awareness might help here  :awesome_for_real:).  However, it's nice to push your wave to the turret so they lose CS and are unable to base.

Mechanics aside, the pace of DOTA 2 just isn't especially fun. The early-game is all about getting as much gold as possible and playing conservatively. You won't have a lot of mana to use abilities early on, so champions just use regular attacks to last-hit or deny. Using your abilities to try and harass will quickly cause you to be out of mana and unable to actually assist if a gank is attempted. The first half of the game is about managing your lane, not managing your opponents.

Since the early-game is drawn out quite a bit more, the entire game takes longer. The average LoL match on SR takes 20-40 minutes. The average DOTA2 match seemed to take about twice as long.

I really can't see DOTA2 catching on in the way that LoL has in the West.

Denial is what keeps me from fully jumping into it.  I'm finding I think I prefer DotA as a whole, but I hate everything about the deny mechanic so much.

There is almost no chance. Riot would have to really keep fucking up and find some new ways to fuck up and the Dota2 esports scene would have to gain some really high profile exposure and even than I find it really hard to imagine the game almost makes a point of being incredibly unfriendly for your first 20-200 games and a lot of the time its hard to figure out if there is a good reason for it.

Denial is an essential mechanic that adds a lot of strategy and skill to the early game / lane phase.

My current gripe is that when you go to place a ward nothing tells you the range of placing the ward. Sure in X games I'll just know the range and I'll know all the ward spots but given that nothing is gained by making it really fucking hard for newbies to ward. There just isn't a good reason to provide such horrible feedback about how and where to place them.

I saw a party invite from you guys when I got out of a game last night, and peeked in on your game for a moment. You were both wrecking face mid.

Got any champ recommendations? I'm basically just picking whatever seemed completely OP in my previous game. As such, I've played a few as sniper, a few as skeleton king, and I was trying out... shoot. I forget his name. He's kind of like warwick, but he carries double arm blades? He was one my side one game and absolutely melted the other team. I was not able to make him do that yet.

It was my first game not vs. bots, the people we played against were worse than the bots.  :oh_i_see:  Hoax was cleaning house with upgraded Lich ult (very easy character to play) and I was having a great time with Tidehunter ult and Blink Dagger (another easy character to play imo).  I'm just getting to the point where I feel I get the basic mechanics enough that I need to start playing against people before I get too many bad habits from bot games.

Bloodseeker.

It appears that around the 10-20 win mark you reach a point where nobody knows enough or is coordinated enough to stop carries with great kits like AM, Void, Riki, BH etc from going 20/5 and the entire game devolves into who has the better player on the better hero. This is pretty much how I remember wc3 dota feeling too.

Meanwhile every game of the last 10 or so the team without the guy on the S/A Tier carry has some chucklefuck on fucking Ursa or Juggs or something similarly weak.

PSA for fellow mega noobs: Don't fucking play Ursa unless you are 100% going to gimmick it out and solo Rosh 4 times in the game and jungle while supporting a strong solo laner top or bot. Don't play Juggernaut at all. He's a weak melee carry that is bad in lane doesn't kill combo very well and is ideal for highly coordinated pushing teams that will take advantage of his healing ward. You aren't that good and aren't that smart. There are 5-10 other melee carries that carry harder easier with better all around kits.

Juggernaut is great, he delivers a lot of AoE magic damage and is deadly in lane with a stun or slow...? But if you don't push that early advantage, than yes, he's shit. It's all about the first blood, getting some good boots, and chasing people down time and time again for the kill.

I believe you are wrong. I also find the claim he does lots of aoe magic damage to be highly amusing. Spin should never hit two people and his ult is pretty terrible in most full team fight situations. Compare Jugg's ult to that of AM or Void. Hell even Razor.

Juggy is very strong earlygame.  He has probably the easiest first blood in the entire game.  The strategy with him is to crush the shit out of his lane with his "i win" buttons and build early momentum to carry through the endgame where he gets weaker.

Well now, got my invite. Played a few bot games to get the feel for it. Zeus is still hilarious.

Current beta players got two invites. Check your Steam inventory.

Note, you had to actually play the game. That is to say, you can't have gotten a beta, accepted it, found out there was no mode with Denying turned off, and then proceeded to not play it because clearly Valve wants to limit their audience instead of outright destroying LoL.

tl;dr: I'm in the beta, got no passes to give out.

I hate denial and thus I lack objectivity on the subject.  /disclaimer

I don't understand how a F2P PvP game hopes to make money by ignoring advancements popular changes in the genre.  I know this has been said before, but I'm still truly baffled - why is Valve solely courting a player base that is currently playing a free game with no shop?  Said another way, why is Valve ignoring the business lessons learned from HoN?

I was actually hoping to see a mode that rewarded pushing from level 1 because LoL SR is feeling increasingly boring for the first 10 minutes (actually, I've stopped playing SR and just play Dominion now).

Nope, I got two coupons for 50% off Assassin's Creed Revelations though.  :uhrr:


This is exactly what got me to give DotA 2 a real chance where I previously didn't care.  I was just getting so bored of "AP Mid, Sustain Bruiser Top, Jungle, AD/Support Bot, farm for 20 minutes." EVERY. SINGLE. GAME.  That and I never cared for Dominion.  The only thing I still really enjoyed was the occasional good game of ARAM.

Now that I've put some time into DotA I barely even notice denial anymore.  That really surprises me because I use to be strongly in the camp that said they'd never play DotA because denial is such a terrible mechanic.

If anyone has a beta invite to give out, I'm interested. Steam name HaemishM.

Denial is an important part of lane control.  Get over the hate, its awesome.

I just don't like it as a design decision and it's a big, big hurdle for me even giving DOTA2 a legitimate shot. Like it or not, the bored LoL player is a huge opportunity for them and this mechanic is going to turn a lot of people off.

Plus, I'm not even sure we should have that much lane control.  Do your AE abilities hit your creeps as well?

Deny uses the same exact motor skills as last hitting a creep.  Where is the hurdle?

You cannot aoe deny a creep no.  There are a few skills in the game that as a side effect deny (Enigma's conversions, or Lich's sacrafice for instance).  These would be comparable to Gangplank's old Raise Moral skill back when it used to kill (deny) an allied creep.

Denial isn't fun, and it makes the game not enjoyable for the majority of people.  That's the reason for all the hate.

Unless I see lots very glowing reviews from everybody here, not going to even try it.  LoL is still very fun for me.

I would say that chances are good if someone really enjoys LoL and really likes most things about it, they will hate DotA.

I think I prefer DotA now but I was also getting very annoyed and fed up with many things about League.  (I say think because I'm comparing <20 DotA games to probably close to 2,000 LoL games.)

My two cents would be that if you are looking for a fun casual game to you play League, if you enjoy taking it more seriously and trying to win you play DotA.

For your average bored LoL player, denial is a non-factor in a standard public game. You'll be looking at around 15-20 creep denials spread across both teams in total for a match.

In my book, the thing that willl cause LoL players to quit in frustration fastest is gold loss on death.

I disagree, I hardly noticed gold loss in most cases.  For me thing worst thing upon switching was how easily you died.  So often you League you screw up and it just doesn't matter.  Someone pokes you for some damage, you eat a few skills, you flash away, whatever.  In DotA you eat a skill, you are stunned for 5 seconds and you are dead before you can move because the second person in lane also stuns you.  It's a really jarring change to go from being able to take harass and stay in lane to drying horribly in a lane any time you get out of position.

Oh god, I had forgotten about the gold loss thing.  And 5 second stuns?

This game is as Vanguard is to WoW.  If it pulls away the crazy hardcore raiding cat-asses from LoL, it can only help make LoL better.
Out of curiosity, what was annoying with in LoL?  Could also just be burn out.  The amount of games you've played is crazy.  I think I'm at 275 wins, and I've been playing it off and on since Beta (obviously with many months breaks scattered around.  I'm over 50% on win ratio).

That's pretty much my point. You couple the ramp-up in harass with the realisation that they'll never be able to afford anything to stop it and you have a player that will not be trying again anytime soon.

True, I guess we were just making the same point from different angles.  :oh_i_see:


I've played pretty solid since beta (obviously).

I'm sick of how Riot handles balance, every patch they make huge often un-needed changes.  Instead of tweaking one skill on a champ that is suddenly doing good, they just sweep in and do a remake and nerf the champ into being useless.  I got tired of after two years we still have no good replay or spectator system, in general PvP.net is a joke considering how big and successful the game is. (Replays and spectating in DotA 2 is a fantastic system).  I'm sick of how often new champs come out regardless of if it's balanced or ready or not.  It seems that the trend is becoming to release a really good champ, let them sell for a week or two and then nerf them in line with the rest of the champions.  As stated before I really, really got sick of playing the exact same SR game every single game.  If anyone starts to play something that breaks that mold or pushes stuff in a different direction Riot has just been taking that as a cue to nerf that champion because obviously they are broken then.

I could see possibly coming back to LoL, I don't think it's a bad game by any means.  But for now I'm just no interested in it and probably wouldn't be playing even if I didn't transition to DotA.

This is a MUCH bigger issue than denial.  There has been some work to mitigate it to an extent.  Somewhere along the way they split the gold out into two categories.  Gold from hero kills/assists, and gold from everything else.  You no longer lose gold from hero kills which helps a bit.

I want to try this, but the thought of gold loss on death means I'd probably be penniless and hated by all my teammates.  :awesome_for_real:

You can spend the gold before you back (the items are stored for you to pickup), so as long as you aren't saving up for a huge purchase or making sure you can buy back in their is no reason to lose large amounts when you die.

Ahhh, I see. Is that what the whole "mule pets" minons you buy is for? You purchase an item in lane and the mule brings it to you?

Yep.

I actually watched a few DotA2 streams this week and as a spectator thing, it seems fairly compelling to me. Having never actually played a 'MOBA' all of the subtleties are lost on me, but the basic core concepts of the game were readily apparent and the spectator tools seem amazing. The dude casting was 'Tobi Won Kenobi' who was entertaining if a little jargon heavy. The games art style is great, but the spells are a little busy at times. The big 5v5 cluster fucks were REALLY hard to keep track of.


I need to watch some competitive LoL matches to see how it compares.

Just got the invite and jumped in for a few games. My background is starting with HoN and swearing I'd never play a MOBA again to getting hooked on LoL. Denial in DOTA2 is a pain but tolerable. Gold loss on death is stopping the game from being fun.

Being partially colourblind is a big issue with the game for me - it's busy and the avatars don't stand out as friend or foe (hence gold loss on death being an issue :D ). I'll be interested to see how it stands up against Blizzard DOTA and whether Blizzard are going to hone and twist the genre like Riot did or just polish/pretty it like S2 and Valve (in my very limited experience so far) seems to have done.

If you understand both games so you aren't lost, competitive LoL is very, very boring to watch compared to DotA imo.

Blizzard DOTA doesn't seem like an actual thing. Like, I don't expect Blizzard DOTA tournaments or teams the way you see DOTA2 and LoL ones.


-edit-

How do LoL spectator tools compare to DOTA2? DOTA2 is really slick from a spectator pov, the charts and graphs and even the magic marker whiteboard on the minimap.

LoL just got spectator mode. Has to be in game at the start still, I think, and it's buggy as hell.   No replay system either.  

The main caster (on own3d) I've seen for DOTA2 is annoying as hell though.  Just shouts gobbleygook into the mic as loud and excitedly as he possibly can.  Makes the action even harder to follow.

Competitive LoL is hit or miss.  Never watch game 3 of a tournament, it'll be the most passive thing you'll ever see.  If you want to see an exciting match, try to catch M5 playing.  They're probably the most aggressive and creative team out there right now. 

No replays is kinda shitty.

Does LoL allow reconnects for players? That's something I saw in DOTA2, players losing connection but being able to reconnect without much hassle at all. It's something that now that I've seen it, it seems completely obvious and necessary and I seriously don't understand why SC2 doesn't fucking work this way too.

Yah, you can reconnect, although I'd say the client doesn't handle disconnects the best.   If you're outside of the tournament realm, there's no pause.  One of the last major tournaments had some longish pauses in a semi-final match due to hardware failure.  Online tournaments on the regular tournaments have run into disconnects causing losses as a player was gone for quite some time.

It's kind of a bone of contention with the LoL community that they release new champs every 2 weeks, new skins, weekly to bi-weekly balance adjustments, yet still haven't put in a drop in spectator mode or a basic replay system.  The client, too, is still a bucket of ass, no matter how far it's come.   We know they aren't the same teams, but you have to wonder if they're even prioritizing this stuff or just taking our money and laughing.

edit: The replay thing is a BIG annoyance for me.  I really liked watching my own replays in SC2.  It helped me a lot.  The third party replay application that someone hacked together is a piece of shit.

In my experience DoTA is a much, much more passive game to watch. The early game is much more farming-focused and gold matters considerably more. This means the carry on the team will usually spend 90% of the game farming minions, where as in LoL you see much more frequent skirmishes: partially because of lower penalties for dying, partially because killing champions is more effective than farming minions after early game.

Its also part of the balance, in a sense, and the reason why recipes are still in the game. Money management. You can save up for one big item, which, if you get it will probably shift the game in your favour, but picking up many smaller ones is far safer.

I'm a total noob at DOTA2 but I still liked this tournament game :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E2NcQ0U9Og (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E2NcQ0U9Og)

I watched a few other top lvl games and I don't see how denial is such a big deal.  Of course the commentators are not focusing the camera on farming since it's not very exiting.

It both denies them gold, and helps keep the lane pushed to the spot you want it.

That's actually one of the games I saw recently too. Where the venommancer guy went 0-20 on k/d  :awesome_for_real:

I understand what it is but not how some think it`s ruining the game.  It seems to have a very low impact on the overall game.

It has a massive impact on the game, you absolutely must take part in it, and it's positively boring. It's not only a WCIII design remnant, it's one of the very very few cases where Valve's tunnel vision in terms of some design choices and staying true to the roots of something a bit too much shows through.

Go play DOTA2 and you'll very, very quickly understand how much it matters. By extension, last-hitting matters about a million times more also. Meh.

That makes me wonder if that is why I made such a huge change to not having deny bother me compared to what I always expected.  Once I come to realize that beyond the obvious basics (don't die) last-hitting is the most important thing for the first 20 minutes or so of a 5v5 League match the shift to DotA is a minor one.

I think it depends on if you're talking about the impact it has on making the game fun to play versus interesting to watch.

I'd compare it to something like having to tap a button to run in a FPS or something.  If you don't mind it, it's fine, but if you find it an annoying mechanic, it can completely kill the game, because you spend so much of your time doing it.  To a casual viewer, though, there's not much impact because it's largely invisible gameplay.  Denying fifty creeps can change the shape of the game, but just denying one is no big deal, so people tend not to notice it, compared to flashy events like ganks and pushes.  It has an impact on things like pacing and positioning, as was noted previously, but again, that's something the average viewer isn't going to associate with denial because it's fairly subtle.

Protip: if you land a team with instalock Juggs, Morph and Void? Get the fuck out asap. Just ruuuuunnn!

The Morphling hero just seems crazy in general. Everything it does is an escape mechanism it looks like.

Couple of things regarding denying from various spots in this thread.

Denying a creep does the following things:
- Removes the ability for any opposing hero to get gold for the last hit
- Removes a portion of the experience for any enemy heroes
- Prevents the creep denied from doing any more damage to the enemy creep thus making your lane less likely to advance position

You can attack your own creep when they are under 50% health.  Often times attacking them under 50% is more important than actually timing the last hit for the deny.  Attacking them as soon as they are under 50% health means they will die faster and you can actually in a lot of cases pull a lane thats pushed too far back to a safe distance (ie closer to your own tower).  This is by far the most lacking part of League of Legends for me.  There is no way for me to impact where the lane is in order to farm safely.

On average most mid level teams (lets face it if you play League you are at best here) will have about 30 denies total with around 10 or so each on a support hero.  That works out to about 1/2 to 3/4 of a creep denied per minute.

Additionally you can deny an allied hero if they have any kind of damage over time spell.  This is useful because the other team will get both no xp and no gold for the kill.  Its somewhat rare to see but is definitely executed at the high level.  In your average non pro game you'll see this about once every 3 months or so.

Tower denying is also a thing and its pretty important.  Killing towers is a pretty significant source of gold income.  By denying a tower you are taking away a significant amount of gold from the other team.

Saying that its a holdover mechanic from Warcraft 3 is the equivalent of saying "I do not understand the impact of this emergent gameplay thus it must be legacy and broken."

He's not wrong. The high skill cap for some of these weird emergent systems are why Dota is what it is, for better or for worse. It's not new player friendly in any way, though.

Calling the abuse of a holdover mechanic that couldn't have been designed out of the game when the mod was made "emergent gameplay" is not understanding the idea of emergent gameplay. Not to mention, good designers account for what a pack of assholes is deciding to label as Emergent Gameplay in gaming.

Competitive team-based games are absolutely no place for such a thing. We can cite other examples of decisions made, but this isn't the equivalent of Valve purposefully making sure rocket jumping and grenade jumping was in TF2.

Not to mention the Ancients staking abuse/strategy.

Thanks to Mr. Hat, I got an invite to this and tried it at lunch. HOLY SHIT. This is WAY beyond LOL for skill level. The interface feels sluggish, or it's just me not knowing WTF I was doing. I died a SHITTON. This will take some study.

How is this different than LoL?  :why_so_serious:

It took me 5 or 6 games before I even won a vs bot game.  :uhrr:  They kept kicking my ass in lane.

I died a lot quicker even when I wasn't being overly aggressive and sticking my dick in a grinder.  :awesome_for_real:

Neither of these things are required to go in and have fun in TF2.  If you want to play the game at a competitive level then yeah probably.  The exact same thing applies to dota and denies.  

Neither of them are required, but they do ADD fun.

Your precious shit legacy mechanic is in no way emergent does not. Yes, the high level play would change without it, but the barrier for entry into that little cuntwaffle community would be lowered immensely.

So to the guys who've played both. If Valve put in a "No Deny Casual Mode", would DotA2 be superior to LoL and crush it outright, or is LoL still holding all the momentum of the player base?

League feels more simple to me. I'm not any good at DOTA 2, but I find myself appreciating what I perceive to be more depth. To make a comparison, I recognize that Magic is much more complicated and interesting game once you understand how all the different mechanics can interact with each other,  or the timing of how things go onto and resolve off the stack. I never quite understood all that, but I recognized it was there and probably made it a more interesting game then the Pokemon TCG.

Got in and played around with it. It's like they went out of their way to introduce QoL problems just to make it more like it was in WC3. Giving commands to your hero automatically deselects enemies? Your hero will allow itself to be blocked by slower-moving pets instead of simply pathing around them? Range indicators appear when you hover over abilities but not when you activate them? Buying items while dead doesn't automatically place them into your inventory? You can't buy when your hero isn't selected? Whyyyyyyyyyy?

DotA 2 will never touch Leagues numbers, a lot about league is more casual friendly than just the deny mechanic.


Yeah, this kind of stuff is what's horrible about DotA 2 right now imo.  I can see character icons on the mini map, but only if I hold alt?  Whyyyyyyyyyy?

Hassle is skill and suffering is achievement.

You could, possibly, look at the options menu. And see what options you can enable. But that might be too hardcore.  :why_so_serious:

They added an option to make it always show icons.  For some stupid reason they decided not to make it the default.

Please explain to me why rocket jumping is acceptable emergent game play but deny is not?

Emergent gameplay in a goofy shooter played with random people is entirely different than "emergent gameplay" in a game designed to be a competitive tournament game. Emergent gameplay in the latter is stuff like tearing your Chaos Orb card up and sprinkling it all over the table in MTG. Stuff like that gets designed out, not put up on a little pedestal, assuming good designers are involved.

Thank you so much for reminding me of long lost Chaos orb.  Now its mechanics like that they need to re-introduce!

I never made the DOTA2/Eve connection, but I suppose I should have a long time ago.

In the two games I've played, I've barely noticed denial. Maybe if I get more adept at it, I might but I doubt it.

For comparison, LOL feels like a more STREAMLINED version of DOTA. It's most certainly an easier game to get into, the interface, while not great, is a whole lot easier to read. The DOTA 2 UI is fuckstupid godawful shittastic. I have yet to be able to find anything that lets me shrink the donkey cock big bottom and top frames, which makes me feel like I'm playing the game through a fucking pinhole. Animations feel slow so actions feel slow. Not being able to teleport back to spawn for shopping is irritating and the courier mechanic is yet one more thing to micromanage. The shop interface is really obtuse and hard to figure out if you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the item database. Almost everything about the interface feels like a step backward in evolutionary time from League of Legends.

It is certainly more complex, with lots more things to concern yourself with. I didn't even realize you could level attributes until last night when I leveled and could put no more points into abilities. The graphic style difference between LOL and DOTA2 makes the map a bit harder to read, as everything is a bit fuzzier and more "realistic" (though neither are going for photorealism). I was kind of weirded out by the ability to abandon the match on an individual basis. At one point last night, I looked up and discovered that a 5v5 game had turned into a 2v2 game and I hadn't even noticed. We ended up melting the other team and destroying their base for my first win, but it felt really weird.

All of that is because Valve made dota2 instead of trying to make a Valve game.

Someone definitely needs to be punched in the balls for the UI.

Watching most of you guys try out Dota2 for the first time reminds me of trying out League.  Pretty much the same frustrations on my part coming in as an experienced dota1 player.  I am guessing most of this (on both sides) is just that we already knew something and were used to it and can't understand why anyone would think to do it differently.

I tried DOTA long before League was even a figment in anyone's mind's eye.

It was shit then for the same reasons I'm saying now for its sequel. Valve is not making a Valve game. They are making Icefrog's Bad Mod 2, Sequel Boogaloo.

After having played my 3rd game today, I'm not entirely sure this is the case. Yes, I love LOL but looking at the added layers DOTA 2 has over LOL, I'm just not sure they do anything positive other than raise the learning curve. And did I mention how fucking AWFUL the UI is? Why am I losing 1/4 of the screen to interface? Team fights are hard enough to track without losing 25% of my peripheral vision.

And is the summoner experience disabled for the beta? I haven't gotten any XP for 3 games, and one of those was a win.

XP is disabled at the moment, yes. I'm not even sure what its supposed to do, actually.

Good post and 100% agree.

@Haem:

The positives are that in league things get very predictable once you've played or watched enough of it. The DOTA2 learning curve isn't just a learning curve its a skill cap that is astronomically higher than LoL, one of the key things to look at is item philosophy between the two games, fog of war versus brush, map size, champ turning speed, mana and cooldown numbers and I could keep going. The outcomes feel much less predetermined as a result. Whereas in LoL its much less likely for the unexpected to occur because playing safe and smart is so much easier and gives you so much more thanks to the red/blue buff, dragon and baron.

I'm watching the LoL tourney at IPL Vegas, and so far, its kinda boring. I don't know if its the quality of the teams playing, or the shoutcasting, or the simple fact I don't recognize any of the heroes.

It's 2:2 sixteen minutes into this game without a single tower down. Will keep watching in hopes it picks up.


-edit-

Can heroes not destroy the terrain in LoL? That's one thing I didn't see in the LoL game that was really fun to watch in the DotA2 game, the ability for heroes to plow through trees to hide/escape/attack.

The terrain is not destructible in LoL.  Also, playing extremely defensively is pretty common.  Its not nearly as entertaining an eSport to watch as DOTA 2.  (Granted, I prefer SC to both of them, but I digress).  LoL's extreme stream viewer numbers comes from the fact that it has such a huge playerbase, not its quality as a spectator game.

Tourney LoL, especially in knockout games, is really passive.  I had a hard time watching LoL, before I played it, when all I would see were stuff like the Season 1 finals. 

DOTA2 streams are still hard for me to follow. Still too foreign.  Still have yet to play. 

I predict some fun games coming up soon.

I just found out that picking "random" starts you with 250 more gold than normal.  :oh_i_see:

Had an interesting message when I logged into DotA 2 today.

"We’ve recently taken action against one or more players you’ve previously reported for bad conduct. Thanks for your help in making the Dota 2 community a friendlier place."

Of course I think on average I report at least one person almost every game so I can't exactly narrow it down.

If they take action against everyone reported, there would be no community.

Well, yeah, that's a given for pretty much every game that connects to the internet.  I don't report any more often in DotA than I did in League.

I'm watching this JoinDOTA tourney and it's much better as a spectator thing. Way more STUFF going on.


Like stuff I, the uninitiated, can actually see and follow. Kills and Towers and Positioning and Runes and STUFF. I also seem to parse the DOTA2 information better then I parse LoL's, the window might be annoying to play in, but I can see the heroes and items and stuff clearer as the observer.

I think I have a spare invite to give out, if anyone is interested.

Random draft mode may be my new favorite game mode. (I had never played DotA 1 to experience it in)

You take the pool of champions (remember in DotA everyone owns everyone, so you don't have a limited pool like in League) and you get 20 of them to choose from.  Both teams use that pool and do a 1-2-2-2-2-1 draft.  Simple as that but will make for some much more interesting games since you see different champions than normal without being forced into one random pick.  All it needs now (badly) is the ability to trade picks within your team.

You could do that in dota1 so I'm sure it's up there on the list

Anyone still interested in playing this that hasn't got keys? If so, I got two keys this morning. PM me with your Steam name and I'll see about getting them over to you. First come, first serve.

EDIT: One key left.

I would take one out BUT all I would do is play bots for 2 hours then never play again. A Waste!

http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/4/20/2961883/dota-2-will-be-free-to-play-with-a-twist

Free to play confirmed.  I think this was pretty expected at this point, especially considering its competition.  It'll be interesting to see what they come up with.

Some really weird quotes in that article. Steam already lets me keep track of, chat, and leave messages for my friends; tells me about the activities of internet strangers I don't care about; and collects and uses my data in ways I'm only kind of comfortable with. What the hell does Newell think a "traditional social network" is?

Facebook.

I'd really listen to the podcast in that article instead of going on quote snippets. It's quite an interesting podcast anyway.

I don't know that we've talked about it yet, but the some of this stuff that they are building in to make the spectator experience better is truly impressive.  Being able to jump in an spectate games which are going on is awesome and so outpaces LoL on the issue that it isn't even funny.  I'm currrently as I'm typing this watching a game which has 283 spectators, all of whom and jump in or leave at any point.  Also, there is a "Directed Camera" mode which controls your camera (you can free cam if you want) and everyone who is spectating and using Directed Cam will see the same thing so you can chat about the game, and it is REALLY freaking good at catching all the action - even better than some of the spectators I've seen doing casting and such.  Its just really damned impressive.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=22133.0

 :oh_i_see:

LoL's spectator mode is a joke by comparison.

How so?

Mmm, perhaps I've spoken too soon, the spectator FAQ is out of date on the LoL site, it looks like they have adopted some of the similar features of DOTA2's mode according to the patch notes.  So I'll retract that part of what I said.

They've integrated that directed camera into the replay system as well.  There is an option that runs the replay at like 8x and slows everything down when there is action.  It's pretty brilliant.

Only took them 2+ years to add one of the most requested features.  :oh_i_see:

A bit of competition is probably healthy for the genre.

I don't see either DoTA2 or LoL killing the other though.

Agreed, DotA 2 will never have the HUGE player base of LoL because League is so much more accessible to players new to the genre (it's what got me started).  DotA 2 may end up with a more interesting eSport scene simply because tournament level League has become extremely boring to watch, but I will be surprised if DotA 2 ever hits even 25% of Leagues player numbers.

Agreed.  But LoL is taking off as a competitive game in Korea now, which is really going to increase its longevity as an eSport.  Apparently the game is absolutely HUGE in PC bangs right now (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_bang) which is notable because it mirrors the rise off Starcraft: Broodwar there. 

I'm not a huge eSport fan, but how does the playstyle of DOTA two make for more compelling viewing than LoL? Both are pretty impenetrable and hard to follow from a viewing standpoint in my view. It's not like Starcraft, where you can follow the economic game, and the micro game at the same time, and cool micro is easy to spot and appreciate; at least that's what I see in these games.

The Metagame for LoL has become VERY VERY passive for the most part, so there are a lot of times when nothing is happening for really long stretches, just people farming.  DOTA 2 seems much more dynamic and exciting throughout, at least from what I have seen.   I'll watch LoL on occasion (say, if the SC2 stream is quiet for a while during a tournament that also has a LoL stream) and it just isn't very exciting to watch.  But DOTA 2 has tended to produce more interesting from a spectator standpoint.

^ Jesus yeah. What's up with Valve and rehashing lately, CS:GO looks just as completely unexciting.

I got in the beta AFTER I burned out of LoL. I was really ready to give it a chance again (I played DotA a lot years ago). I played one game and haven't launched it since. It may be a great esport, but the game is just annoying. After playing LoL I can't go back.

The two huge advantage I think they have, to overcome their shit game design, is that (1) the full roster will probably be free (Valve doesn't exactly need the money, and being privately owned they are free to do awesome stuff like this). And (2) It's on Steam, duh.

Players actually get kills in DotA2 and/or actively escape them. That's very easy to understand. The shoutcaster's can then fill you in on the non-obvious farm/denial/xp/gold battles or whatever.

Watching a Windrunner carve herself a path through the woods with her special arrow to escape a blinking hero is pretty neat.

Watching 3 heroes stand in a shrub and fail gank an enemy simply because the enemy could walk the opposite direction, not so much fun to view.

I agree with this, the dynamic nature of the terrain because the trees can be destroyed tends to be a source of the coolest moments, at least from my perspective.

Minor derail: I've heard sort of thing this a few times from StarCraft players, and it kind of puzzles me.  Surely, both games are fairly inscrutable to the ininitiated observer (someone who's never played the game or any of the similar titles), right?  It's just little video game mans shooting each other, and then one side dies for reasons they don't really understand.  And if you do decide to learn about them, both games are fairly easy to understand the basics of, with regards to economy and tech/buffs/etc. at least to the degree that even if you can't execute a pro level strategy, you can generally understand why they're doing it.  I'm just not seeing why SC would be easier to follow than LoL or DotA.

Two armies trying to kill each other is a very easy concept to grasp. As is the idea that 2 marines might die to a giant space monster, but 20 will be okay.

Sure, but what about LoL or DotA is different in that respect?  The concept of a single really powerful unit or team of units laying waste to an army of weaker enemies is the central theme of about 95% of all action movies.

MOBA gameplay is just much less intuitive than RTS gameplay overall. Objectives, why you'd take a particular action, etc., all this is much clearer for the uninitiated in an RTS than it is in a MOBA.

I agree, and the plethora of skills probably makes it even more confusing. Armies are easy to understand, heroes doing things out of nowhere aren't.

DotA doesn't have two armies fighting each other.

It has two teams of theoretically equally powerful hero characters fighting each other, where said heroes power levels can vary DRAMATICALLY between level differences, item builds and skill selection and use. A hero in one game can be a unstoppable death machine, but be shut down entirely the next and the reasons for both are not apparent at all to those without specific game knowledge.



Just look at how the average DotA game starts, with rival heroes standing beside each other, basically ignoring one another as they both play the last hit farming game. "Why aren't they attacking each other? Aren't they supposed to kill each other? Why did he just kill his own teams monster?" Without specific game knowledge, that's all very counter intuitive.


Where in SC2, the Terran player building a wall at the entrance to his base to keep the Alien bug monsters out, not only is that understandable from a spectator point of view, it's down right sensible!  :why_so_serious:

And furthermore the *way* they fight each other - which is mostly not by fighting each other directly - is baffling if you don't know the game well. SC2 is easy to grasp. Gather resources, build army, knock down other guy's base. MOBAs are like, we shall go do our thing and not actually directly fight each other until some unspecified point and even when we do it will be confusing!


And yeah, MOBAs have all kinds of extra concepts about roles and builds that don't manifest themselves in the same way as in an RTS. Starcraft has builds, yes, but they manifest themselves in very obvious and watchable ways. Oh look, that guy just built a shit ton of flying space bugs, etc. MOBA stuff is much more opaque.

Which is why DotA 2 is a better spectator experience, since for whatever reason, direct conflict seems to happen WAY more in Dota2.


Watching a pair of heroes sneak through the jungle to assassinate the unsuspecting enemy. Anyone can grasp that.

Played a few games of this with friends against bot.   I really didn't enjoy it very much, but I haven't given it much time, so really shouldn't judge.  Still, pace of game just feels slow/off.  But the biggest things that made me outright hate it was the UI and graphics.  Seriously, the UI seemed really counter intuitive, and the graphics are bland as shit.  Really like LoL's graphical style way better, and this game is just hard to look at for me.  But meh, maybe I'll give it another shot later on.

The current store layout in DotA is especially terrible compared to LoL.  You mostly have to know what your looking for to be able find it.

Yeah, I was noticing this as well.  This is especially annoying to me because they just changed a huge amount of the icons and all the websites I've been looking at for build guides have the old graphics still so I can't even easily just try to match the icon.   On the other hand, once I know where everything is, it is definitely quick then having to go through a couple of layers of menus.  I guess like everything else in DOTA 2 it sucks for newbies and makes sense for veterans  :why_so_serious:

Anything makes sense for veterans. The DOTA newbie UI experience is just fucking dreadful and there's really no excuse for it other than "it's like DOTA."

What the other chaps said, but to add. I think if you watch a SC2 battle and you see a player doing some really nice micro, like blinking out individual stalkers as they take damage, that is intuitively easier to follow than trying to follow a hero in LoL or DoTA pull off some impressive combo of abilities where most of the activity is often invisible to the spectator. SC2 tends to have fewer spell effects than LoL, and you can intuitively follow the tides of battle easier by watching units fall. In contrast, I watch team fights in LoL (even as someone who has played a fair amount of the game) and most times you just see a bunch of people blow up in an unintelligible mess of special effects and the 10s later one or two heroes walk away, and there's not much to be learned or appreciated from that.

What makes the DotA2 UI so much worse as a player?

I think it is really only the store UI that is the problem.  It just lays everything out, by icon only, and there is one tab for base items and one tab for "upgrades."  There are also 4 secret stores on the map, and it isn't clear at all what is located where by the UI.  I jumped in game real quick and took a couple screenshots to show the store UI http://imgur.com/aQ8zf,0Ndvs

Admittedly, the suggested items are nice, and it does have the ability to save custom builds, which is also nice.

The default shop UI has two levels of tabs and only displays one column of items (with names) at a time.

But no, it's not just the shop. It's also the wonky selection mechanisms, the terrible range indicators, the inability to bind modifier keys other than alt, the way-too-zoomed camera, and the lack of smartcast.

I guess I don't see the issue with icon only menus for items if each item as a distinct icon.

Again, it is just another thing for newbies to overcome.  They aren't particularly well organized and can be hard to find if you don't know what you are looking for.  It is not the end of the world, it just sucks to be that guy on your team that needs to sit that at your fountain and slowly pick through the list.  I've only played a handful of vs. bot games, and I don't dare venture into a real match until I've got all of this basic stuff figured out.   Its definitely going to be a hefty learning curve, and this just adds to it.  This isn't a long term issue, its a learning curve issue.  Compare it to LoL where I could always find items easily because they were organized by stat, so all i had to know was what the item did and I could find it pretty quickly.

I've never tried it myself but I've read that you can improve range indicators through some settings changes.  Although even if that does work the fact it isn't default is still a terrible UI.


I probably scroll my mouse wheel to make sure I'm zoomed out as far as I can twenty times a game easily.   :heartbreak:

1/4 of the screen is obscured by an absolutely unnecessary block of buttons and icons, most of which is just empty color.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtJumK0mcvM&t=7m13s (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtJumK0mcvM&t=7m13s)

DotA 2 tournament game, 5-4 and a Roshan (think Baron) kill before a minute into the game.

It also just dawned on me an obvious reason by LoL has gotten boring to watch, summoner spells. "OH HE MADE HIM BURN FLASH!" is an eventful gank in early game high level play.

Yeah, as I've been playing DOTA 2 I've realized just how sloppy and stupid having Flash in LoL has made me play.

Ursa is so silly to watch. Enemies were vaporizing once he got his claws on them.

I'd give this a try if someone got a code left.

http://www.own3d.tv/video/619136/joinDOTA_Masters_-_NextKZ_vs_Fnatic (http://www.own3d.tv/video/619136/joinDOTA_Masters_-_NextKZ_vs_Fnatic)

Another crazy tense game worth watching, is just insane near the end.  (the commentator gets annoying near the end he's flipping out so much)

Something about it kinda bugs me. Seems a little too big maybe? IDK.

Crazy over the top commentators are the bread and butter of E-Sports  :why_so_serious:


-edit- Any game with Ursa is a good game  :heart:

Haemish got me into beta and I am suprised at how much fun this game actually is.

In case anybody cares, looks like the scrap between Valve and Blizzard regarding the DOTA brand has been resolved.  Valve keeps the rights to the DOTA title, mods for Blizzard games can continue to use the name DOTA as long as they're free, and Blizzard's DOTA game gets renamed to "Blizzard All-Stars."

Is there a good place to see what all the various items do? The joinDOTA site has all the heroes, but not the items.

http://www.dotafire.com/dota-2/items (http://www.dotafire.com/dota-2/items)

Can probably find a better once since those aren't sorted or anything nice and it's still the older images, but it has the items.

Got to play Ursa in a single draft game last night, so much fun.  My favorite moment  :oh_i_see: -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uzAc6sdZfE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uzAc6sdZfE)

Thanks for the list, Heros can change so dramatically because of their items it felt like I was only getting half the story each VOD.

This site is the best for being up to date with heros and items.
http://www.dota2wiki.com/wiki/Dota_2_Wiki

It doesn't have any builds though so dotafire.com or playdota.com for those.

Another fun site is http://stats.dota2.be/ which lets you view your match history online.

I played this again in the last few days. The UI is still just a godawful, confusing, fuckstupidly large eyesore. Did anyone else have really long wait times before matchmaking found a match this weekend no matter what settings were used?

I only ever queue SD/RD and my queues were usually around 5 minutes, don't think I ever had any longer than 10.  However I think the matchmaking servers were actually down for a bit at some point in the weekend.

Must have been yesterday because that's when I couldn't get anything to work and just went and played some LOL.

I tried a game. Not a good first impression.  

I imagine it'd feel better if I was from a DOTA background instead of a LoL background.  Game just felt foreign.  Interface might be the biggest culprit, but the movement, last hitting (I guess animations in general), art style, and OMG I JUST DIED BECAUSE I TRIED TO LAST HIT weren't great either.  

Seems like I'd need 200 odd games to get the hang of it all. No time; must injure my arm playing D3 come tomorrow.

It definitely FEELS a lot slower moving then LoL, attack animations especially.

Played again at lunch because Riot Games has shit the bed with the latest patch. Got an item - a treasure chest. Which in order to get anything from, I have to buy a key from the store for $2.49. Still no fucking idea what I'm doing in the game, was absolutely horrible at it but the team was good so I got a win.

It looks like the store is modeled directly after Team Fortess 2's store. So there's that.

They really seem to be supporting the competitive end of it. ( http://blog.dota2.com/2012/06/did-you-see-that-kill/ )


I know that in SC2 a lot of people would gladly pay for access to every replay from a tourney, and I imagine the Dota games would be similar.

I bought the $5 pass and it was easily worth it.  I mostly just bought it out of a "hey, I'll try to support eSports" but the few matches I actually watched it was really slick.  You can select any announcers audio stream, select any announcers point of view, or just control your own camera or have it auto directed.  It was all very smooth and very cool.

On a different note, I played Rubrick for the first time in a single draft game last night.  I never want to play anyone else now.  :Love_Letters:

For anyone that knows nothing about him, his ult (on a 15 second cooldown) is that you copy the last spell any target enemy cast.  You now have that spell for 2-3 minutes to cast as you please with it's normal cooldown, but it's always off cooldown when you steal it.  When you steal it overwrites your previous stolen spell, but the fast cool down makes it very usable multiple times in a big fight still.  Last night I initiated a fight with an Earthshaker fissure, cast an Omniknight ult mid fight, then was able to get away from someone chasing me using Skeleton King's stun.  :oh_i_see:  His own base spells are really good as well to top it off.

Do the replays granted from the pass include the casting audio too?

Yes

That's pretty sweet, being able to listen to the casting while keeping your own camera control if you want. Like 90% of the time I follow the casters camera, but there's always that moment where they miss a drop/play and you can see it on the mini-map and your like LOOK OVER THERE AAARGH.

I got into Beta and have been dicking around against the Easy bots.

My first impression as someone who has never really played a Dota/Moba style game... last hitting is a bitch.  I am the master of SECOND to last hitting  :why_so_serious: . I mostly got the concept of it, it's the execution that I need to work on, that will only come with time I imagine.


I started off with Nature's Prophet, since he's almost exactly the same deal as he was in War3 (as in the actual RTS). I picked up my noob items, took my treants into the forest and proceeded to farm enough gold to buy up every stacking aura I could find in the shop. 10-20 Minutes later my tree army had pushed down every tower and rax and my victory over easy bots was complete.


Of course, that wouldn't work in an actual game, so next I went to Luna and headed to middle lane, which the friendly bots let me have solo. I proceeded to farm up roughly negative 450 gold before I went back into the forest to farm neutrals. I kitted her out like I was going to a dungeon run in WoW and was eventually able to farm entire creep lanes/camps in like 2 attacks thanks to her mass cleave passive. I won that game through sheer attrition against enemy rax's.

I did that more or less a few more times, getting a little better on last hitting each time, figuring out I need more then 1 tree eating item to live etc.


Then I wanted to Try the other cat rider, the Priestess of the Moon. I went roughly 3-20 on arrow hits and like 1-16 on kills/deaths and earned my first loss against the easy bots. How embarrassing.  :ye_gods:

Next one I tried was Ursa, I didn't even get like 5 minutes into that attempt because I bought the wrong item/skills and couldn't jungle effectively. That's okay though, Bots don't care if you ditch them.

Did Treant Protector one game, love the hero thematically, have no fucking idea what to do with him mechanically once I hit mid game. I was surprisingly good at last hitting with HIM of all heroes, high base damage or something... but yea, early game in the lanes, I actually did almost good and proper. Once the mid game started up I became utterly lost on what My job was. I built a Mechanisim and tried to follow my team around to 'support' them. The tiny range on my leech seed and my cumbersome speed meant I just did nothing but feed all game. Loss number TWO against the easy bots  :cry:


So I went back to Luna and really focused down on trying to lane/last hit properly. I went to the bottom lane where a friendly Tidehunter was waiting for me. He didn't immediately abandon me in the lane alone, so I took that as a sign I was in the right spot for once. I also adjusted my starting skills and items. I had been doing it entirely ass backwards before, skilling up glaives early and ignoring the +dmg aura. This time I went Aura/Nuke maxed, picking up my Ult at 6. So instead of constantly pushing the wave into the enemy tower, I actually had some decent base damage and could land actual last hits, instead of my amazing second to last hits. I also decided to make the enemy Juggernaut my little bitch. Every time he poked his head into the lane for a hit, he ate a LunarBeam nuke thing, then Fishbot would hit him with a Gush and he would have to run all the way back to his base.

So I was finally getting gold and not dieing horribly to the Easy AI. Life was great! Then around when I hit level 7 or 8, Fishbot disappeared and 3-4 enemy heroes showed up to run a train on me  :ye_gods: . I had apparently missed the memo that we were now in the push/gank phase of the game. This game I was fairly resolute to NOT feed the damn bots, so I started buying up every item I thought would actually keep me alive. I got this sword that let me turn invisible and run faster, I got this bar that made me immune to magic, I got this hat that gave me life stealing and more armor. I even eventually got Link's Sphere or something that stopped the first spell cast against me. I PROOOBABLY only needed like, 1 or 2 of those items, not all of them at once... but I was determined to NOT die this game.

I also had a change of tactics, instead of me trying to push lanes and towers, I was just going to follow Fishbot around, let the enemy attack Fishbot and then I would swoop in and spam all my abilities till something died. It turns out when I don't instantly get focused on and die, my abilities hurt like a son of a bitch. Especially against the bots, since they don't seem to have any concept of spreading out to avoid AE and I do nothing BUT AE with my auto attacks. I even managed to gank a few bots by myself on occasion, the highlight of that being me winning a 1v2 against a Lina and Windrunner, die ginger scum!


So 12 kills, 6 deaths and 10 assists later, I am Victorious!



Maybe tomorrow I'll put the bots on normal  :oh_i_see:



-fake edit- How do I lock the camera to my hero? I was really struggling to keep vision while microing stuff around.

Don't play against bots.  :awesome_for_real:

I don't believe you can and while I don't want to sound like a smug asshole and say you shouldn't play that way anyways, I can't help myself.

You double click the char portrait to lock to target.


-edit- My first REAL game:



The Easy Bots were harder then those guys.

My item build was funny. The other team fed into us so much, I hit all my planned items REALLY fast and I hadn't really thought past getting the boots and mech. 

My last hitting was extra terrible (it's bad in the best of circumstances) because I got to solo Mid against the Invoker and Ursa. The Ursa was completely retarded though and I managed to kill him at least 2-3 times in that lane. Every so often the Riki would hop over to mid, I would Ult and we would get a kill or two.


The other team sans the Broodmother all just left at like 15-20 mins in. It was like 18-0 at that point.


The mana pool on Treant is a total bitch, I need to experiment with a SoulRing or something. It also took me like 15 seconds to figure out how to buy/place the donkey.  :why_so_serious:


We even got to kill Roshan!


All in all, I don't think I could ask for a better first game.

Congrats on the first win Fordel!  :awesome_for_real:

Hope it continues and you enjoy Dota much more than me!  :why_so_serious:

I got a few more games in today, a bunch of weird ones.


One game had 4 out of 5 people on the enemy team CONSTANTLY feeding. Like, I don't mean they were bad and kept dieing. They were like, bots or something, they just kept auto running into lanes and suicide into our towers. The one human person on the other team started off confused, then got angry, then just resigned himself to his fate and begged us to end the game faster. I felt bad for him :(  ( we won 61-1 )


Another game had one person on our team that seemed to be WAY better then everyone else in the game. He went 25/0 and had more then double the Last Hits of anyone else in the entire game. We won that one like 40-5 or something. It was pretty silly. The all-star was playing a Riki.


One game we SHOULD have won, we had all the advantages and had just wiped the other team at their mid rax AND took the rax... But for the life of me I could not convince the 3 carries on my team to rotate top. It turns out me and a dazzle can't take a rax before the enemy team re-spawns and wipes our other 3 team members that are circle jerking each other all along the empty mid lane for the past minute. We slowly lost as the other team pushed in all the lanes and took OUR raxes, like we should have done to them.  :angryfist:


The other game I lost was fairly unremarkable, we just got beat, the end. Can't win them all and all that.



The last game I played, this one I am rather pleased with:

Me and the Spirit Breaker had the top lane and we were up against the BountyHunter and Omniknight and it felt like we shut them down pretty damn hard. We wiped them out at least twice, with a bonus gank on the BH at one point. Though the SB did die at least once in the lane, when I ran OOM. (Story of my life as Treant, NOT ENOUGH MAAANAAAA). We also managed the creeps nicely, keeping them just beside our tower so we could be safe, but not so close that the tower was stealing hits from us. We even pushed the tier 1 fairly early and it got me enough farm for Arcane Boots and a Ring of Basilius. They eventually gave up on top and moved to middle.

The bottom lane was the Void and Clinkz against the Riki and PA. The Void and Clinkz shut that pair down even better then we did on the top lane, to the point where the Riki just bailed from the game like 15 mins in after I roamed bottom for a gank.

Middle lane was the Undying free farming towers for the first like 10/15 mins, because their Lycan went into their jungle to farm, and promptly died at least twice to neutral creeps. I watched the replay just to figure out how the HELL he was dying in there and the first time he managed to block himself into a corner as the Trolls spawned skeletons on him.  :oh_i_see: When the BH and Omni moved to middle, the Undying was having a harder time of things and had to back off, but it let us push down the tier 2 on top and a tier 1 bottom.

I tried to get the guys on bottom to back up to our tower, but only one dude listened to me and the others over extended on bottom and got wiped. This let their team attack our bottom tower, but they got a little to confident, since 3 of our guys were dead and I was no where to be seen. They probably thought I went back to base, but I was actually invisible beside them the entire time, waiting for the tower to bring one of them low.. one leechseed, auto-attack and ult later there was a dead Omni and a Treant who got away scot free!

This bought us time for respawns and we pushed them back, I went back to base to finish off my Mek while everyone else went to mid lane to pressure there. They went in too far on mid, and were getting pushed back and in danger of wiping again, but the giant Tree-man got there in time to Ulty, Mek and Leechseed to heal everyone back up. What should've been a wipe, turned into a rout in our favor! This pretty much sealed the deal for us, as we were able to take mid rax, back out safely, kill them a few more times then take top rax and then the GG.



4 wins, 2 losses now, wining record!  :why_so_serious:



-edit- I almost forgot to mention how I solo'ed the BH at one point. I was backing out of a lane to rotate, and he caught me alone without any towers or creeps around. So I tried to invis to get away, but he was still able to see me somehow (I had to look up the BH track ability after the game to figure that out), but my Ult had JUST gotten off cooldown, so I poped it and my leechseed, and beat him down instead. My Tree then said "Someone put a bounty on a tree?" and I laughed, the end!

First time I've seen Wisp used in a pro-game. Wisp + Prophet turns any lane into a full team fight, it's nuts. Wisp is squishy as hell though, sneeze on it and it dies.

http://www.joindota.com/en/vods/1341-the-defense-navi-vs-mtw-group-stage-part-1
http://www.joindota.com/en/vods/1340-the-defense-navi-vs-mtw-group-stage-part-2

Wisp was banned in almost every game since it was put into Captain's mode that I've watched.  Look forward to watching these later, got a chance to play Wisp in a single draft game last week and really enjoyed it.  Saw Rubrick in a few games as well but he just got crushed.

Game 7 was a long one, that started off really shitty, but turned out great in the end :

I started off on bottom, paired with the Lina and between the two of us, I think we managed a dozen Last Hits  :awesome_for_real: . We were up against a CK/BH duo and I didn't think to buy Sentry Wards for the first like 5 minutes. We were getting out farmed badly, but we traded evenly on kills at least. (In general, I really struggle with the Treant's early game. The mana pool is so shit, my regen and armor haven't kicked in and I am usually missing SOMETHING useful still. Everything smooths out around level 8-10, then my abilities are all available and useful and I'll have Arcane Boots by then to sustain it. Cast one leech seed/nature's guise and OOM for 2 levels. )

The top lane wasn't doing much better, with the DK and Clinkz being out farmed and losing a tower during the first night. Our Mirana in middle lane was the only thing holding any of our lanes together, she kept tabs on the runes and ganked into bottom when opportunity came up. We still lost all our tier 1 towers within the first 10-15 minutes it felt like.

In the mid game, our team kept getting caught out in ganks and uneven team fights, so we just hunkered down into a defensive posture and farmed what we could without dieing. This turned out to be a good idea, as the other team came to push one of our towers down and we were finally all in position for a proper team fight. I got at least 3-4 if not all 5 enemy hero's in my ultimate and we won the fight easily, with only the Lina dieing. This gave me enough farm to actually get my support items going, Mek, Medallion etc. Also caught us up a bunch of levels which REALLY helps my mana situation.

This pattern repeated a half dozen times, we would push some lane a bit, wait for them to come in, then clean them out. The amount of HP I could restore with my leech seed and mek going constantly in the fights, is kinda obscene. I could even keep the Lina alive half the time. The Medallion is way more useful offensively then I initially thought. Once I hit mid/late game, my armor is in the mid 20's so the drop isn't a big deal for me but on something like a sniper or BH, its virtually a nuke. I was just using it for easy Roshans before, the more you know! *rainbow*

This just basically demoralized the other team, from starting off strong and in control, to feeling utterly helpless as they lost team fight after team fight. We just went around the map cleaning out the towers and there was nothing the other side could really do about it. They kept trading 1 kill for 3-5 deaths. We went from being like a dozen kills behind to a dozen ahead in the end. I enjoyed the fact I could tank the last set of towers without even losing HP. There was also one team fight just outside the radiant tier 2, where I spent the entire fight invisible, since I can use all my spells without breaking it, as long as I have trees to hide beside, ult included apparently.

The Mirana did a really good job on making sure we didn't over-extend, she was on the ball on where and when to move out.
The DK had a moment where we all died in a TF, but he had aegis, re-spawned and decided to just farm the creeps instead of trying to escape before the other team found him again  :why_so_serious:
The Lina was pretty quiet, but she always got all her spells off before they focused her down.
The Clinkz was my partner in crime in picking off stragglers then sneak away.

The CK went Manta, fucking 24 illusions with his ult up too.  :uhrr:
The Luna was just squishy, I don't know what her gameplan was.
The Sniper, he was always on the outskirts of the fight but always managed to die anyways.
The BountyHunter kept trying to gank our Clinkz and I kept stopping him.
The BeastMaster seemed to be the best one on their team and was the one who asked us to end his pain at the end.



Everyone was friendly on my team and we slowly but surely synced up. Another GG!



I seriously need a better plan for the first like 10 levels though, I have mana pool for NOTHING. I'll review my replay tommorow, I'm sure I can find lots of mistakes I made outside the obvious "LAWL TOWER DIIIIVE"

Did that CK never buy boots?  :ye_gods:

FWIW: There are quite a few guides out there on how to build certain heroes to achieve certain goals.
E.g.: playdota guide (http://www.playdota.com/guides/)

As to DotA2: I didn't get to play the beta yet but watches some hours worth of streaming (twitch.tv). Personally enjoying Heroes of Newerth the most of all the DotA clones (and I know I'm very much in the minority here...), I can't see myself switching over to DotA2 from HoN. It's mostly the gamespeed and visual feedback that kinda turns me down. And I kinda dislike the artwork, but that may very well be because I got too used to HoN's style over the years...
I'll still give it a shot though once I get a chance to play it myself.

He might of sold them at the end when we were dicking around their base for the last 5-10 minutes. I don't know for certain to be honest. CK was pretty damn fast either way. He simply out ran us a few times at the end of a team fight.




Yea, I've browsed the playdota guides, there's only two relevant to Treant though. He apparently went a major overhaul relatively recently and the older guides are talking about abilities that don't exist anymore. I think he's just level dependent, he has pretty nice stat scaling on leveling. I either need to get a lot better at that early game last hitting, or always find someone who can own a lane to partner up with. I'm not super farm dependent, I can live with just arcane boots and *support item*. Vanguard and Medallion were both luxuries simply because I had extra farm at that point, though I'm probably going to grab Medallion as a core from now on too. It's cheap enough to be a realistic goal.

I've been very conservative with my items though, like that last game I could have probably just farmed a tiny bit more and picked up like, a Radiance or maybe even a Maelstrom/Mjolnir. I have a love/hate with Radiance, it takes so much effort to actually buy up, but once you have it you can make that farm back in no time AND pressure the shit out of lanes.

Or I could double up and get a pipe beside the mek. That probably makes more sense.



-edit-

I'm not sure I've even seen a HoN match before, it seems like the red-headed stepchild of the Dota world the way people talk about it.

Just can't get over the sluggishness of the controls.  Why did they do it this way?  HoN and LoL are just so much more responsive.

I've never played HoN or LoL, so I don't have anything to compare it too really, but I haven't had any issue with the controls so far.


The goals seems to be to make everything as true to the original as possible, for good or ill.

I haven't really gotten this impression, could you explain more specifically what you mean.

I actually find Dota2 more responsive than LoL but yeah...

One of my staple heroes which is a bit more aggressive than Treant is Tidehunter. Give him ago if you want a change of pace. Your ulti is the bomb for teamfights and gush's slow and armour reduction is huge.

Yea, Tide and Treant seem very similar in many ways, with Tide being more offensive/aggressive.


I lean on Treant's invisibility a lot still though, at my skill bracket, the idea of sentry/dust/gems is so very rare, it lets me escape/initiate a lot of things I really shouldn't be able too. I would probably farm better on tide with anchor smash though, I'll have to give it a go.

It's hard to explain I suppose.  HoN and LoL just feel much snappier in terms of control.  In DotA2 it feels like I'm fighting the controls, it definitely feels like an RTS game.  Whereas HoN and LoL feel more like an action RPG.

^ This. ^

Coming from LOL, DOTA2 just feels really sloggy. Not being able to lock the camera to your champ doesn't help.

I have played DOTA, then LoL, then DOTA 2 pretty extensively, and I have never noticed an appreciable difference. (Possibly just because when I went 'back to DOTA 2 I just expected it to be like DOTA, and that's one way it happens to be like DOTA?)

I think the overall speed of DOTA is a bit slower (in terms of movement vs. size of the map, not ability use), and more things have actual animations that can be interrupted, but I'm not sure that's really the same thing as responsiveness.

I gotta go with Ice Cream Emperor here.  Not to say that people who think it has a different feel are wrong, just that I didn't notice it either.

I had never played DotA, have played over 2,000 games of League and jumped straight into DotA 2 without ever feeling like the controls were sluggish or anything.

Also, for all the newcomers to DotA:

The black codex. (http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?404560-FJ-Presents-The-black-code)

While written for HoN, it certainly holds true for most every DotA style game out there. Very well written and useful also for more seasoned players imo.

Double click your char portrait to lock to hero.

Where in the fuck is that documented in game that I'm supposed to know that?

Help for noobs, it could use it.

I'm sure it will have tutorials when it's officially released or whatever.


Wasn't hard to fiddle it out though.

I dunno, it took years for them to add that kind of thing to TF2.

Don't play with your camera locked.  It's something you really should get used to not having on.

Maining Gangplank for months cured me of that bad habit.  Need to know where to shoot at all times.

They already have hero and item lists on the site and inside the game browser itself. When you get killed, the game tells you which hero did it and what there abilities are too with a little mouse over 'playing card' thing.

I'd have to double check but I want to say the side bar of match making screen already has a 'play tutorial' button greyed out and waiting for it to be done.


I'm willing to bet the tutorials come really soon after the official release, if not before it. It's just such a different beast from what TF2 is, even now with all the variants on weapons and stuff. There's no baseline "use gun on man" that you can lean on with Dota.

I don't want it locked permanently, I just want a keyboard shortcut that shoots the camera back my way without me having to mouse for it. The double-click portrait thing is so non-intuitive.

This is a different thing.  You can hit F1 to select your hero, or double tap F1 to center the camera on your hero.

 :facepalm: How the hell did you find that out?

Not sure to be honest.  I think it may have been in a guide I read at reddit.com/r/dota2 when I got into the beta, but I can't recall for sure at this point.

That is the key that was used in WC3 to select/focus your first hero.

It's also in the key bindings.

You can also put units into control groups, just like WC3/SC2/EveryRTSEver and just double tap the control group button for quick centering.

I just got an invite to this thing - do I download DOTA2 or DOTA2 Test?

Or does it not matter?

Plain old Dota 2 should do it.

I've looked over the key bindings at LEAST 3 times, and never saw anything labeled remotely like what I would expect to see to accomplish the centering on the avatar. The game is just brutally obtuse to people who've never played this flavor of DOTA.

The game uses RTS logic for controls.  Double tapping a control groups brings the camera to a control group in most RTS games, this is the implied knowledge I believe.    The remnants of Warcraft III are far more visible in DOTA 2 than in the other stand alone MOBA games for obvious reasons.  I find that if you think like you are playing an RTS the whole thing makes a lot more sense t control.   In fact, I noticed that after I started playing SC2 more frequently again I got immediately a lot better at DOTA 2.

If anyone hasn't got an invite for this yet, but wants one, the secret way in appears to be to buy something on steam.

I applied a while back, but by a remarkable coincidence got invited 30 seconds after buying a thing on steam. On a Sunday. Outside of PST daylight hours.

I can see how you missed it.  :oh_i_see:

I would never have thought "Select Hero" would be it, mainly because having played LOL, why should I have to "SELECT" my hero? It's not like I can select anyone else's hero, nor can I control a minion (and didn't even think about having to select my courier). I can see now how that sounds like "DUH, YOU FUCKING MONKEY" retardation, but the terminology is completely different. That really is RTS terminology, and LOL is a far piece from traditional RTS.

Now I know though, and knowing is something something.

You totally can select someone else's hero if they share control (and I think if they drop out after a rage quit too). It's most useful on hero's with summons/pets/charms where the neutrals you can charm all have their own abilities. Put the Centaur on 2, the Wildkin on 3 etc.

There's an item that lets anyone charm a neutral creep too, people use the neutral to stack the ancient camp while they farm a lane or whatever.

What Fordel said. Any player can make his character controlable to other players and make units controlled by him (pets, summons,...) controllable to other players.
Playing with pets/charmed neutrals/controlled players really makes DotA feel like a micro-heavy RTS . You can assign hotkeys to those 'groups' (actually can really form groups. Like you AND your pet is 1, your char alone is 2 and your pet alone is 3).

Yea, it's just like every other RTS in existence basically in that regard. There's even a keybind to give universal orders to everything under your control. Useful on someone like Nature's Prophet or Broodmother, where you have a mass of simple units that need nothing more then a A-move most of the time.


Double click a unit to select all of a specific type too.

I am pretty sure League uses the exact same key shortcut (double tapping f1 that is) otherwise I can confirm I never would have played more than one game of it.

Eurogamer is in the middle of a really great writeup from the new player perspective.  I thought some of you newer players here might enjoy it.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-10-the-dota-2-experience-part-one
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-17-the-dota-2-experience-part-two

It's spacebar in LoL (or at least that's what I've got it set to). I don't think I've ever used the F keys in LoL, and you certainly can't select any other unit to control.

Well, that basically summarizes why I love DOTA 2 as a game.  Perhaps this statement near the end summarizes it best for me though


There may be a reason I watch more DOTA 2 than play it.  :awesome_for_real:

Spacebar by default brings up the last 'event' in Dota 2, double tapping it should in a round about way bring you back to your Hero too. Almost everyone I've seen rebinds it to an item slot though.



-edit-

The EuroGamer players sound like Albs to me.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately.  I can't pin down exactly what I love about this game so much (I've been playing for 7 or 8 years now).  Its constantly infuriating to me but yet I cannot stop playing it.

So, 2 out of 3 games I start fail because some fuck can't load the game inside the 2 minute time limit.

Is half the community playing this on a TI-83 or do people with normal computers have trouble with it?

Yea, it happens. Its a thing with Source-engine games, the first load is always longer then subsequent ones. I used to get this with TF2 as well.

There were server issues yesterday assuming that is when you were playing.  It also could be regional, on US West for instance that happens maybe 1 out of 50 games.

There is also a strong possibility that they are in fact playing on crappy computers. Lots of the player base came directly from the original dota, which could be run on some of your cellphones I bet  :why_so_serious:


How old is War3 now anyways? 10 years?

Almost exactly: July 3, 2002 (With Frozen Throne just about exactly a year afterwards)

To be fair to DOTA2, this is happening at least 1 out of every 3 goddamn games of League of Legends that I play these days.

Another update is coming soon'ish, three new heroes. http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=48273



Full Notes:

Live now, with all three heroes. Looking forward to firing up Visage again, once I get home.

Quick question(i have not been wathcing this game at ALL) but what will this game offer for the $60 price tag that other free games won't?

Keeper of the Light is totally Gandalf, it's awesome!


Fuck if I know how to play him though, he's like some constant pressure artillery piece/mana battery.


-edit- Dota 2 is free, or will be once it's out of 'beta'.


Valve is going to make money with their cosmetic item sales. They have no impact on actual game abilities or power.

^^ Same format as TF2 is now, afaik. Game is free, cosmetics cost cashy-money.

TF2 you can buy non-cosmetic items too (i.e. it's not just about the hats).

I'm not convinced their model works, cosmetic items each of which only fit on one of a hundred dota-guys?

I wouldn't be surprised if Valve just think of it as a steam promotion thing.

I think you drastically underestimate the amount people like playing dress up.

People can't resist the random loot chests.

Windrun + Rupture = Sadface  :sad:

I think we've already had this discussion, but this game REALLY needs a surrender function. 

Not really, no.

It's not GG till the throne is gone, accept that and play!

Yeah, when I have an hour to play, and literally half of that if taken up by an unwinnable (or unloseable) game, you aren't looking at a game I really want to be playing.

If that means I'm not in the target audience over the long haul, so be it.  I know DOTA is elitist as fuck, so I won't be missed.

Edit: I think the other part of it is the SC2 mentality I have, whereby if I know I've made a critical error, I can "gg" at any time and then work to correct the mistake.  SC2 is one long learning process for me, and I can cut out the "wasted" time by not playing out games that have a small chance of victory.  In DOTA 2 I treat every game as practice, not as competition, so winning isn't as important as learning, and I don't think there is nearly so much learning that can happen in a game which you are winning by a lot or losing by a lot. It is very difficult to know if your decisions are good or bad late in a game when one side or the other just has a huge exp/gold lead.

You might want to slow down and re-examine your approach before sperging out in shitfit buzzwords like 'elitist'. You don't show up to a football game going "ok guys I only have 30 mins to play and they've already scored twice, laters losers". Its a team game, and you make a commitment to nine other people each time you queue up.

Altering the entire though-process of the game in order to accommodate the few initial blowout games you are going to want to surrender on, is not healthy in the long run. I've played enough League to never want to sit through 35 minutes of surrender spam after some clown loses blue buff in the first 2 minutes, ever again.

Or, to answer your question more directly, their team has a huge xp/gold lead because of your team's bad decisions in the early game. Work on improving that first.

How is dropping from a game every time you make a big mistake going to improve your play? In any game?


Recovery from mistakes is just as important as prevention of those mistakes.



Especially in a game like DOTA, one or two good team fights and the whole game turns around again.

Gee, you know what would help me get better at improving my early game? GETTING TO START A NEW EARLY GAME.

If all you want to do is grind out an early lane, go practice against the cheating bots.


They don't care if you want to ditch early because the game went badly for you.

I can't for the life of me figure out how I deny things.

For a while I was simply rising above this bullshit mechanic. But that got old.

You can attack friendly creeps once they go below 50% health. You have to A-move on them directly. (Where 'A' is the default attack command button)

Friendly Towers and Heroes need to be MUCH lower before you can attack them to deny, I don't know the exact number, but its like 5% of the health bar left maybe? 

Towers need to be like, below ~130 hp, iirc. Heroes you can only deny if they are under the effect of a dot, and only some dots. Viper's Viper Strike is one for example. So is Axe's Battle Hunger, or Doombringer's Doom. I don't know the exact hp threshold.

Is it just me or does denying sound like one of the shittiest mechanics ever?

It's not just you, but in practice you barely even notice and it just doesn't matter nearly as much as other things.

I always said I would stay with LoL and never play DotA just because of the terrible denial mechanic.  Then I actually tried DotA and got into it and realized it just isn't that big of a deal.

Actually, in League of Legends, there are times when you just cannot fucking recover. I had such a time last night, when both of the bot laners on my team sucked so much ass that they lost the goddamn first turret in less than 10 minutes, and the second one a few minutes later. Then they both ragequit. I was having a decent game and they shit all over it. I tried very hard to surrender and one little assgoblin on my team didn't want to, so I had to sit through 40 fucking minutes of beating opponents 1v1 and 1v2 then getting crowdfucked by the rest of the opposing team. I very much wanted to surrender then.

Disconnects make for EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING GAMES. Having a surrender option is really really important, IMO.

To be fair, games become "safe to leave" 5 minutes after someone disconnects, so it does have a solution to this particular problem.  I do still think a team should be able to concede though.

The potential of surrender actually made Haemish's game worse because everyone was spending time discussing surrendering instead of playing the damn game.

In pub games of dota someone has inevitably disconnected by 20 minutes anyway.

No, the fact that I couldn't just get out of the goddamn horror game that we had NO HOPE OF WINNING because one little turd didn't want to surrender is what made it unbearable. Hell, I had a good game that notwithstanding, with a good K/D ratio. But I'd have rather gotten those extra 20-30 minutes back to do something else with.

Uhh, I don't see how that disproves Eld's point?

This is the bit that resonates for me.

Bullshit? At most you make a commitment to the other 4 people on your own team. Surrendering is not shutting the game off and telling both teams to fuck off. Surrendering is, as typical in lol, something your team needs to vote on. It's not depriving the opposing team of a victory, it is conceding defeat and very much acknowledging their gameplay.

What surrendering DOES do is not wate peoples fucking time, which is more important than any game.

It's no fun fighting a losing battle and you can go on about the learning experience and other completely batshit ideas on why its smart to stay in a game but what about the other side?

I've been in plenty of winning games where it just stopped being fun because the enemy team wouldn't quit. It wasn't a contest, it wasn't even close but they just wanted to be dicks and fight for every inch.  It's a game, it's not a goddamned land battle and people need to invest their time doing better things when a victor is inevitable.

Come from behind victories are the best wins and are much more possible in DotA than they are in LoL.

Surrender is not a team vote because once it's in you will just get people who go "Surrender, I'm just going to afk if you vote no."  Saw it all the time in League, rarely ever see people actually abandon or afk in DotA.

LoL's incredibly bad itemization/item design hurts a lot but I'm still going to say that I prefer not having surrender to having it after 200 games of dota2 and probably close to 1k games of LoL.

Because instead of being able to play a game I was actually going to enjoy, I had to sit in a game whose ending was a foregone fucking conclusion.

This works fine when you are playing ranked games/competitive games, etc.  But to just sit down and play a random game at lunch, I'm really not going to make a commitment to 9 other people.  Then again, this, combined with the shit community, is why I don't play LoL anymore.   The gameplay of the genre is really good, but it never really has fit my schedule very well.  Whereas with Starcraft I need not worry about screwing anyone over if I leave, generally games last 10-15 minutes, and so forth.  *Shrugs* I don't even really have a point anymore, I just wish there was a way to play this genre that was more suitable to me.   My mix of hardcore mentality/casual schedule really precludes team games I guess.

Yes really, yes. Yes yes yes. YES.


(QED)

Edit: Okay, honestly this one totally baffles me. Like I literally cannot imagine a single remotely reasonable argument for not allowing one team to surrender to the other if they believe the game is no longer winnable. Even if they are wrong, I still don't understand why it would be a problem for anybody involved. Nobody wants to play a game with a bunch of people who would rather be afk, or even better playing a second game that they had some chance of winning. I just cannot think of a single civilized game that operates on the same principles as DOTA that does not allow one side to concede defeat once the other side has gained an insurmountable advantage. Not one.

I really am not the sort of person who likes to throw around generalizations, but I think I'm willing to go to bat for the claim that literally all competitive and non-competitive games that do, have, or will exist either already contain such a rule or would benefit from such a rule. Like, this is Geneva convention level shit, here, people -- even in war, you should get to surrender.

But there is nothing preventing you from quitting. There is a button right there in the play menu. Its called "Leave Game" or something.

The fact you can have your account banned from doing so seems like a deterrent.

You don't get banned (I think?), you just end up playing with other people who agree that it's fine to just leave as soon as you are unhappy with the game state.  Seems like a win-win for everyone!

And then nobody gets credit for the game, even if they outplayed you? Even if they deserve a proper win? Why not include tools to allow teams to make the decision, and have it enforced/carried out by the game. Among other things this would help create community consensus about what to do when you are losing. Are you really saying that one dude quitting the game is usefully equivalent to one team conceding? The former is shitty, unilateral behaviour that potentially ruins the game, the latter is just what civilized, friendly people do when a competitive game is already decided and they don't feel like playing it out.

Not wanting to be the guy that screws everyone over for quitting or going AFK while everyone else is still playing prevents me from quitting, even if it pisses me off at the same time.

I thought the lack of concede was because this was a beta and not everything had been implemented yet.

Are you people saying that there's no concede because that's a design decision?  And there's players who support that design decision?

Are you fucking mad?

Yes, Yes, No

DOTA always had a hardcore following but I'm thinking valve is going to realize that it might be too narrow a playerbase and add stuff.

If a player leaves the game, and the rest of his team follows, their Ancient will self-destruct after a brief delay, and the other team gets the win accordingly.


So, the answer then therefore, is not that the option to surrender is a necessary function of gameplay, but a means for you to get out when you feel like it.

Ask yourself this question, both of you (sorry ICE, I know I'm not answering you fully, but I need to head off to work): lets say you are in a game and things are going badly. Someone starts a surrender vote, and you hit Yes. You are downvoted 3 to 2. Are you, then, going to do a mental 180, tell yourself that "ok, most of my team still believes this game to be worthwhile" and do your best to turn the game around? No you aren't, are you. The game is "already lost" and is a "waste of your time", and thus, fuck everyone else.

Now you guys personally are not like that, but I don't think you will disagree that 99.99%-repeating-to-infinity of pretty much any player base will act accordingly.

Does it solve the problem 100%, no.  But surrender has absolutely saved me a bunch of headaches in LoL, this isn't some totally hypothetical situation. 

Well, it's a team game, right? Don't be the guy who doesn't run out that grounder to first. Like, in Haemish's story, the guy who didn't want to give up is the bad guy. I dunno, I don't see him that way, and I see that as a big problem.

I absolutely understand the value of the concession option in a 1 on 1 game; in a team game, though, the community has to not shit on the guy who stops people from getting their way because he wants to play it out. I can't see that happening in a MOBA, so I can definitely see the argument about taking the concession option away entirely.

But in LoL you are much less likely to ever come back from being down because of many of the crappy design choices of the game.  In DotA you see huge come-from-behind wins all the time.

This discussion could go back and forth for 100 pages and no one on either side is going to shift their view on it.

This is definitely a fair point.  But fine, lets shift the discussion a bit.   If DOTA 2 a game, where if you sit down, you are saying "I'm going to spend the next hour doing this regardless of anything that happens"  because that is a tough pill to swallow for me.

Why would you sit down to play it in the first place if you don't have that hour?

It isn't about having an hour, it is about having to sit through an hour game that everyone agrees is over instead of being able to start up a new game.

This. My God, some of the games I've had to endure where we couldn't get 4 people to vote for a surrender were just goddamn PAINFUL. As in "I literally want to reach through the Internet and yank this guy's brain stem out using his testicles as a handle" rage. The griefing and trolling in those games alone by people who START the game feeding on purpose just amps up, especially when you have at best time for 1 fucking game the entire night. I'd rather just not have to play through games like that. I had one game in LOL where the Mundo was an obvious troll - he started the game running straight down the middle lane before minions had even spawned to be killed by the turrets. And then he did shit like that ALL GAME. At least in LoL, I hopefully only have to endure 20 minutes of that shit.

If it was actually over, you would lose in 5 mins, not 30+ .

Well, you did kind-of start this discussion by complaining that you couldn't get a game into your lunch-hour. Soo...

If the game went on for an hour when you though that it was over in 15 minutes, then either the other team were jerks, in which case you have a report function - use it, or the game was a lot closer then you supposed.


You're right, but anecdotally the reverse is also true. The amount of times I've seen the Surrender function in League being abused more than balances this out. If we are talking in anecdotes. That same guy you mentioned is probably relying on the fact that "oh I'm just going to fuck around for 20 mins because my time is going to surrender anyway".

The point of the current system in DotA2 is to eventually filter those kinds of people out through a combination of the Report function and the low-priority pool, and increase the overall health of the player base. Now this is not a quick-fix process that everyone loves, and it doesn't let you keep hitting the reset button until its your turn to "win", but in the long run, I think, it will result in a much healthier community.

No it won't. DOTA games by definition draw out the most insanely disgusting group of degenerate fucktards to grace the planet.

Thanks baby, love you too  :heart:

These games (MOBA) are designed to snowball.  It's pretty easy for the game to know how much gold/levels advantage one side has over the other.  If you, statistically, reach a "less than 10% of games won after this amount of deficit", the surrender button should light up.

Also not a perfect solution.  Much better then having to listen to a team mate try to talk the team into quitting after going down by 2 deaths.  Much better then suffering through a drawn-out beating from sociopaths who are enjoying pulling the wings off of flies.

To be fair, the little I've played DOTA 2, I've had less trouble from fucktards than LoL. Of course, that's likely because I didn't have clue one what I was doing most of the time and was in lower level games.

If you really want to surrender in DOTA2 you just need one of the team who hasn't been first disconnect for a while to take the hit, and then the rest of you can quit for free.

AFAIK you need multiple first disconnects in a period of time to get tagged as low priority (which just means you get paired with other people who have a record of surrendering when behind).

This mirrors my general experience.  It is also one of the reasons that generally speaking the better I get at a game, the less I enjoy it. 

Edit:  I should clarify what I mean here.

When you are new there are several good things : 1) everything is new and exciting 2) the community of newbs is generally ok 3) you can be bad and not care..

But eventually you hit a sort of "pub star" state where 1) You notice every little mistake you make that didn't bother you when you were new 2) So does everyone else and 3) The fact that everyone is reasonably good means that a lot of people have drastically inflated opinions of how good they actually are.  Great in pubs, but not actually near true competitive level.  This is where I tend to cap out these days - and it is just a dreadful place to be in most games.

But, if eventually you crest into that actual competitive tier, and join a team (as I've done with several games over the years) which plays in leagues and such, then things start to get good again because the players you interact with regularly are teammates, there is a general sense of helping each other, and mistakes becomes things to correct for next time, rather than things that ruined the current game.   

I just find it so hard to believe that you are taking a fair account of your own experience, here. I played LoL pretty regularly for the better part of a year and there is no way that there was an equal number of cases of people abusing surrender vs. surrendering sensibly in a way that saved everybody involved a significant amount of their free time. If what you actually mean is 'I have anecdotes on both sides therefore they're basically the same' then I assume we agree that this is not a reasonable argument.

A lost game that is surrendered as a natural flow of things, preventing a final 5-10-15 minutes (depending on the proactivity of the winning team, this could easily stretch out indefinitely) of meaningless play, simply does not register as a notable experience -- you don't even remember that shit, because it is just so normal. It's unremarkable, it's how the game works. One guy spazzing because he wants to surrender after 5 minutes, or one guy refusing to ever surrender even though the game is lost and the other team is running endless Barons and farming up endgame items instead of pushing -- those things you remember. But those things aren't the design decision, here -- the unremarkable, normal, everyday experience of 'oh damn, there's no way, we've lost, /surrender' is the design decision. And it's the right one.

As for all these people advocating about how DotA is like, super-come-from-behind-land compared to LoL -- do you guys actually play this game? I mean on the one hand, yes, you are correct -- the mechanics of DotA are such that it is more likely a team might come from behind. But it's those exact same mechanics -- the presence of harder carries, the dramatic momentum that results from deaths causing gold loss, the even greater importance of map control -- that also mean that in some cases it is a thousand times less likely that your team can come from behind.

If your team comp has a shitty late-game and then you lose the early game because you get outplayed, the game. is. over. It's over. You are not going to miraculously become better players and turn Zeus into a late-game right-click carry. Not against the team that already kicked your ass for the last 15 minutes?

Yes some extremely good teams in extremely well-matched games with carefully-calibrated drafting do come back -- and yes just as often some random pub team that has superior late-game team composition gets stomped early but then turtles and farms up and follows through on their heroes' potential. But those are exceptional circumstances and moreso they are predictable: you can see the possibility that things will turn around, just as clearly as you can see the impossibility of a turnaround in other games where one team is up 27/3 and the team with 27 kills is so excited about their map control they are running around farming and doing Roshan for the next 25 minutes instead of waltzing into the enemy base to end the game. (Or maybe they are pushing, but the losing team has super-strong turtling capability so they can hold out for like 20 minutes even though they will never actually turn that shit around.)

The point is, you have to let the players in the actual game evaluate these things. You can't decide for them that they should never, ever give up, and then stigmatize anyone who does as a leaver, because you are creating a completely retarded community environment. 

I mean imagine going to play a game of tennis with your buddy (or even some random guy) and after he whips you 6-0 6-0 in the first two sets you are like 'damn you are on fire, you totally won and I'm not feeling it, let's go get a drink' your opponent is like 'NO WE AGREED BEST OF FIVE YOU MUST FINISH NOOB WTF LEAVER' and keeps serving tennis balls at your face for the next 20 minutes... ? Like what the fuck sort of game is that? And this is talking about tennis, where neither side gains even the faintest structural momentum, so that it is actually totally possible that one player could win 15 straight games to come from behind or whatever -- whereas in the DOTA version of tennis after winning two sets one player would get like three first serves, have rocket shoes, and a racket that hits every ball in two directions simultaneously.)

The point is, players learn when they are beaten, and recognizing that is a skill that is worth developing. The fact that team dynamics are involved in the decision makes it harder, but it doesn't actually reduce the value in making the decision -- which is, as mentioned, like several man-hours worth of free time, when you consider that you are saving 10 people somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes each.

Your tennis example is a one on one game. The situation changes in a game like DOTA because you have some level of obligation to the other 4 people on your team.

So ignore that example and the rest of the post is still a good argument.

I dunno. When you're playing a game competitively, and there's an opportunity to improve your play skill by playing the whole thing out, you take it. I've maybe conceded one game of Blood Bowl ever*; there's always something to learn in a losing effort, in most games. Some don't lend themselves to it mechanically, like a chess match where you're in one of those '3 moves to checkmate' locks, but I don't think this is the case in MOBAs. There's always some aspect you can be working on improving, and if you add to it the obligation to teammates, I just can't see doing it. Hell just seeing how the winning team is winning is useful. I never want to be that 'just let them win' guy in Alterac Valley, and that's what a surrender button means to me. Maybe they should just disable it in ranked play or something, that might be a decent compromise.

I don't know, maybe my approach to this kind of thing is more unusual than I think. I piss people off in MTGO when I won't take prize splits for the same reason; I'm there to play the game and improve, getting to the last round and then not playing seems silly.

*There's a strategic reason to do it if you're trying to protect important players, etc., in some circumstances. Concede simply because I can't win? Not a chance.

(You know what would be great, also, would be if my invite to this game would ever actually freaking happen so I can talk about the actual mechanical parts instead of just generic competitive gameplay theory stuff.)

This is where I disagree entirely. Players IN the game are TERRIBLE judges of how the game is actually going. They only get half the information at best and it's almost entirely biased to fit their current mood or amount of momentum they feel they have/don't have. 

Dota, SC2, fucking Arathi Basin, name it, people are completely wrong about how a game will play out ALL the time.

Have you bought anything on steam lately? That's what triggered it for me.

Depending how into it you are you can buy in for 30 bucks and get a bunch of cosmetic items.

Ninja Edit: http://www.dota2.com/store/itemdetails/57939587?appid=570

Piles and piles of stuff, yeah.

I can usually predict how my games are going to go during the first 10 minutes.  It's not very difficult.  Most of these types of games tend to just snowball and even the best match making can end up with pretty poorly balanced teams (we're not pros). 

No one stigmatizes SC2 players for surrendering, which is what likely 95% of them end in (number yanked purely from ass, but I can remember most pro games that I've seen go down to the last unit/structure).   You know when it's over.  You can claw tooth and nail and hope for the miracle, but I'd rather get a few more games in.

Note: this isn't just for losing.  Winning a long, drawn out stomp isn't very thrilling.

Players get shit for GGing to early all the time in SC2. Some of them are infamous for doing it and actually giving away games they actually won.

MOST infamous is easily Idra. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0nDsBOzeA4  :why_so_serious:

Did you just not read the last paragraph of my post? I am talking about the team deciding to concede, not individual players unilaterally quitting -- that's the whole point, right now the only way a game ends early is if somebody unilaterally quits, which as you point out is not something to be encouraged. Right now there is no game- or community-approved way for a game to end early, even when there clearly should be one.

Obviously that it has to be a team decision makes it a more complicated thing... to implement. But it doesn't make it remotely less of a good idea -- just harder to do right. In my opinion, however, it's really not all that hard -- LoL's approach is perfectly fine, though it could I am sure be improved upon as well.

But THEY ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO LOSE ANYTHING IF THEY CHOOSE WRONG. Holy shit this is mind-blowing. You are actually arguing in favour of forcing a group of people to keep playing a game when they no longer feel like playing a game. It's just like... what.

In the thousands of competitive SC2 matches that have happened, a handful at best have been really obviously wrong ggs, and the majority of them have been by Idra because he is a headcase.  This is not an argument in your favor.  Nearly every single game ends in a proper gg, and even if the occcasional one might not be 100% over, they are almost never ever questionable.

This is amazing, couldn't happen to a better person...if I'm thinking of the right guy.

I wonder how many pages we are going to debate the surrender option back and forth, both sides using the same points over and over, no one ever shifting or being convinced they are wrong.  I've read every post, I still don't want surrender added into DotA.

Can we add a super newbie crappy player mode for people who want surrender?  You can even label it as such so I have to feel shamed for playing it.

Except for the guys who think the team is doing fine and don't want to stop playing, but are getting pressured by the rest of their team because they have the nerve to actually play the game through.

If the game is so far gone you can not possibly win, it will be over in 5 minutes anyways. Probably less.




Malakili , you are severely underestimating the number of premature GGs. Many times people have GG'd while still having an army left, or both sides losing their armies but one side deciding they might not rebuild fast enough. Idra is just the most extreme example of it.  :why_so_serious:

This isn't even touching the non-pro scene, where you can make half your opponents rage quit out of a game just by having the nerve to attack them before the 5-10 minute mark. Fuck I've won games where all I had was 3 DTs a pylon and a probe and my opponent who had 90 supply of workers and army decided he wouldn't have enough time to make one detector before 3 DT's somehow chewed through everything.

Then you have situation in SC2 where the other side just expects you to GG out, because shit man, your slightly behind, time for you to go! They'll actively harass you to leave because "your wasting their time!" but then 10 mins later you walk away with the win.


A Proper GG in SC2 is when you don't have an army and/or the ability to rebuild it, then it would just be 15 minutes of your opponent going building to building to clear the map. In Dota you don't have to clear out the entire map, just the big building in the corner. If you've totally lost with no hope, then that building is going down really fast anyways.



-edit-

Thrawn , yea it probably is who your thinking of. Idra is a notoriously bad mannered player that chokes and rages constantly when push comes to shove.

I missed the part where someone comes and breaks your legs if you just leave the game I guess.

There is just no way you actually play public games of DOTA 2? I know this is a shitty argument to start with, rhetorically, but it's like you're talking about a different universe. I have played so many games of DOTA (and a similar percentage of DOTA 2) that stretched on endlessly past the point of no return because the team with the overwhelming advantage preferred to sit on their hands, farm the neutrals, gank feeders, do Roshan, etc. With like maybe one or two people actually pushing (and then maybe getting killed, slowing down future pushes, etc.) All this while still offering zero chance for the other team to recover, for reasons already covered exhaustively above. Games routinely take ten to twenty minutes longer than they should to end, and I am always the person on my team saying 'let's just push and end it' out of consideration for the other team. And I am not talking about situations where the game is still in the balance, and a few successful defenses will turn things around, I am talking about, like, we are playing chess and all you have left are four pawns a horse and a king, and I am moving my shit around while they are pinned in the corner trying to make the most aesthetically-pleasing patterns out of my four up-jumped pawn-queens.

Like it's great to hear all these stories about how people prematurely 'gg' in SC2 or whatever, but like again -- the risk here is so small compared to the overwhelming reward to the community at large and the vast majority of players involved. We're talking about enormous quantities of personal time, traded up against -- what, some people not learning to be good at the game as fast as they might otherwise?

I'd love to hear people expand more on this idea of inter-team squabbles over people not surrendering -- it's a legitimate argument for sure, but it just seems to me so totally overwhelmed by the benefit in all the other cases. It's not that I don't hear this argument, I just don't understand how it trumps what I perceive as the vast majority of the cases, where everyone involved could have moved on to the next more challenging game 10 or 15 minutes earlier than otherwise.

An argument of genius, there. Just because there are merely social repercussions, they must therefore be inconsequential? I'm talking about what builds sportsmanlike, competitive community. Real competitive games allow one side to decide to concede rather than play out a pointless endgame -- especially when that endgame could be as long as the game up to that point, with no chance of recovery. They don't tell people to man up and unilaterally quit, circumventing the actual rules of the game?


Edit: I mean, you guys do realise that in actual competitive DOTA 2 play, most games end by one team conceding, right? They call 'gg'. They say 'go next'. These are the best players in the world at this game. This is how it should work.

In actual competitive DOTA 2 play teams also surrender late into the game when the other team is in the base killing everything.  Not 15 minutes in because early game didn't go how they wanted.  (Yes, exceptions exist of course.)  I fail to see how letting people give up and leave as soon as they feel something isn't going how they want it builds a sportsmanlike, competitive community.

I think I'm to a point where I'm ready to start doing random when I play all pick games, except I'm still scared I'll end up with Invoker who I still haven't tried.  :uhrr:

The last tourney I watched used time rankings to break up any tie-breakers in the group stages so teams played to the actual destruction of the ancient.





How is that a hopeless game though? There giving you time to farm and gank and maybe counter push something. They can't seal the deal and finish the game yet (and this IS part of the game being able to actually finish it after building an advantage). Are you still at a disadvantage? Probably. There's still plenty of game left there to be decided though. Unless your being team wiped and raxed, it ain't over (and if you are, its going to be over very soon anyways).

Why is : that bad? If that's what their team comp gave them and it's their only way of staying in the game, why shouldn't they do it? Why can't they turn it around, is the other team incapable of making mistakes?



How do you define the point of 'no return'? How does that effect your outlook on the game and your level of effort/play? What happens when you and I disagree on what a 'lost' game is? Why are we trying to figure out when we have 'lost' during an active game anyways, how is that helping the current game we are in at all? Why are we trying to create a self fulfilling prophecy?



Or better yet, do you prefer two 30 minute losses, or one 60 minute win? What about a 60 min loss that could of been a win?

Pretty much this, I've played enough games with my idiot average wanna be pro friends *Megrim/Finlky* to lose games when we're up 10/15 kills because we don't push hard to win before their hard carries are farmed up to counter.

On the other hand we have won games were we win 2/3 team fights after being down 10 kills or so and get some good rhythm and some tower pushes down.

Worse case is if the game is that sh1t what happens if you just leave? You get a disconnect but save time to start again that you so dearly wanted.

I've still only played Treant Protector all of 1 game so far. My first non-tree game, I went Windrunner. I had played like two dozen bot games as windrunner, making sure I had a semi-decent grasp on that whole shackling thing and when to run away and stuff.


My Windrunner game, I face up against a Riki and a Bloodseeker that decided I was the meat in their pain sandwhich. Not fun  :why_so_serious: Every team fight I got to choose between the Riki fucking me in the ass, or Rupture fucking me in the ass as I ran away. I don't know what I needed to do there exactly, maybe a ghost scepter or a yuuls? Better positioning?

Better teammates? Did you have wards (possibly both) on river/neutrals?

That's a pretty gank heavy combo so that's pretty tough to survive as a WR without a teammate on you deter the farkers. Sentry wards to provide sight on Riki when he stealths in is key as well. At low levels Rikis tend to be overconfident and don't realise that people buy wards to get vision and will tail the entire opposing team when suddenly down comes a ward and 50 nukes.

I'm not familiar with WR but as Crystal Maiden I would be warding river your neutrals and generally not be solo unless I saw Riki farming a lane far from me.

 :heart: Megrim

The biggest counter to both SA and BH are town portal scrolls.

 * Edit; no problem. I still have a couple spare if people are interested.

I had some sentries for Riki, but I could've done a better job with observers probably. If I am doing wards I usually just drop them near the runes, I don't know the best spots for every situation yet.

What a how many professional real world sports are there where teams habitually surrender?

I'm struggling to think of many...

Badminton? :awesome_for_real:

(Yes I know they weren't "surrendering")

And in the professional setting for LoL, you don't see a lot of surrenders (especially in LANs).  Their teammates also probably aren't calling them a faggot for missing a skill shot and haven't sold their entire inventory so they could draw a penis with wards.

You're not picking your team here most of the time and LoL has hit WoW like numbers so there are WoW like assholes every where.  Maybe DOTA2 will stay small enough to not hit such a critical mass of wretchedness with the community.

edit: Perhaps with DOTA2 linked to Steam accounts, people will be less likely to indulge in ban-worthy behavior.

I'm already running into loads of people who are utter dickheads for no reason.  Its like - every single one of us at this level is utter trash at the game, how can you possibly be trash talking?  I'm consistently amazed at how much people over rate themselves.

How many professional real world sports give one side a structural advantage when they win the early game? Oh right none, because that's not how sports work. Meanwhile the only example of a major (western) competitive game where this is so -- chess -- has an entire history built around concession, offering of draws, etc.

And meanwhile many, many little league baseball games have ended due to the mercy rule. (Six runs in an inning, etc. it seems to vary considerably in implementation.) Because we aren't talking about professional level play, because that's not the play they need to design their pick-up matchmaking system for. Professional level DOTA play has already been covered -- teams can and do concede, regularly, it's considered totally normal. Yes, as pointed out, they mostly concede once they've lost at least one base tower, but sometimes they decide to concede earlier as well. Because those teams understand how the game works, they understand what a deficit means in the game, and they respect the ability of their opponents to follow through.

This whole 'wouldn't you rather play a 60 minute game because you might totally win because you were totally able to stop them from pushing for 10 minutes' line of reasoning... this argument is so disingenuous. Regardless of my personal answer to that question, the point is that I should be able to answer that question and have my answer mean something -- right now I am not even allowed to decide I'd rather not play the game, I just have to. Maybe some times I will feel like playing a game out, maybe other times I will be like 'fuck it, I want to concede' -- the point is that I am the one playing the game, me and the other players on my team are the ones who should get to decide. It's like, a basic recognition of our ability to decide what to do with our time?

The only counter-argument I am even seeing here is that like, having a concession ability will cause people to immediately give up because of one or two problems early on -- but my experience in LoL is that this sort of thing does not actually happen that often? Because most players want to try and win? And obviously it is pretty trivial to follow LoL's example and not allow surrendering until the 20 or 25 minute mark, anyways, which pretty much makes it explicit that giving up at 5 minutes is simply not kosher. To be honest I think you get fewer people DC-quitting at 10 minutes if they realize that they can play out the next 10-15 minutes and call a surrender vote, because you offer them a socially legitimate way to get out of an unsatisfying game. Obviously some people will just ragequit and that's that (and DOTA deals with ragequitting very well, IMO) but the sort of surrender-based griefing that is being brought up seems like this tiny fraction of games compared to how many games legitimately end early because one team reasonably and correctly decides to /surrender because the game is lost.

I don't have any stats but I feel like when I played LoL at least half of my games ended through surrender -- not usually instant-surrender, but at some point teams decided it was over and not to bother playing out the final base-destruction. Do other people really have dramatically different experiences of LoL on this one? Because if you add up all that saved time from 50% of LoL games (most ending only 2-10 minutes early at most, some more like 10-15) it is a whole fucking lot of saved time for the players involved. It just seems like a huge net benefit to me, versus the risk of... what I don't know. I don't think the presence of a concession option somehow enables the sort of griefing and 'we've lost just give up, gg losers' behaviour that people are hinting at -- I think that happens anyways, already, and while it's possible that the surrender option's very existence would aggravate it, that seems like a fine tradeoff to me.

A good mercy rule is about the only thing that could get me to comeback to MOBA.  I just value my time and sanity too much to sit through the non-competive games.

I was mostly being facetious...  :heartbreak:

Regarding the surrender thing, I agree with Ingmar's points from a page or so ago and think that adding it is a bad idea. If you and your team want to give up, just tell the other team that you're quitting and sit in your base while they come kill you.

Also, I realized I never actually applied to join this. I'm attempting to do so now, but it's asking all kinds of weird shit about the original DotA that I don't remember at all so I just made some shit up. Anyone have an invite?

I poked Megrim! Where's my kudos!  :grin:

Yeah, if the issue is it's your personal time and that you should dictate it then just leave. You're already valuing your time other random pubbies so loss of rep with random pubbies shouldn't matter to you.

It's not like you're not allowed to requeue straightaway, although I've no idea what the queueing algorithm is like and what queueing times are for solo queuers.

Ironically, one of the reasons I was drawn to League initially was the surrender function. After playing it for a year and over a thousand games later, it was one of reasons I quit. Not the main one mind you, but one of the several compounding issues. The fact that it happens to be abusable is just an added bonus. Or, more correctly, I should say that its not so much abusable (not really much to abuse there) but that it creates a culture of 'win trading' for a lack of a better expression. The game turns away from being a contest where two teams contest victory, and instead becomes a game of who gets matched with less passive-aggressive teammates. You are playing some kind of aborted, truncated version of the game.

You said it yourself - half, half your games end in surrender. Fifty percent of the time, you do not actually get to finish a game, because one of the teams walks off the pitch! Apart from the sheer lack of sportsmanship this demonstrates, how do you even expect to learn to play a game into the lategame? What about champions that scale well into the lategame? Admittedly this is a loaded question, since in League most of the champs are functionally identical anyway, but in Dota2 this makes a huge difference. What about developing an understanding of map control over time, the importance of money management in farming versus saving to timely re-buys, or the difference in team compositions to favour various periods of time in the game.

As an example, there are limits on Observer Ward restocking in Dota2, as well as a limit on Smoke of Deceit. This seems like a small thing, but in fact is hugely important because a crucial skill in using these relatively minor items revolves around being able to maximise their efficacy over time. What use would any of this be if people just surrendered 25 minutes in, half of the time? How do you deal with set-backs, failed pushes and being outmanoeuvred as you try to wrap the game up? Hell, a whole sub-set of game strategy, "Chinese Dota" exists that specifically relies on super-lategame carries and tenacious defensive play.

In so far as little league goes, I've been playing sports for, er, what twenty years now? Since I was about ten I think, and not once in my memory have I ever been on a team or in a solo game, where surrender has taken place. Literally, not once has a team walked off the field, or I or my opponent have conceded. I did have a player refuse to play a tennis match against me once, but I think that had more to do with my penchant for playing at the net and aiming all my smashes at the opposing player. So, uh, cultural differences I guess? (You weak girly-man you).

And the 60-minute game argument is not disingenuous. It comes down to making a commitment to nine other people, to sit down and play a game. Saying, as you have "sometimes - fuck it, I just want to surrender" comes exactly down to what the problem is. I'd presented a hypothetical example once before already: lets say that you feel this way. You start a surrender vote, and it gets turned down 3 to 2. Now what? Are you prepared to change your mind and support your teammates in trying to win the game? You know as well as I do that the answer is no. You just want out, and couldn't give a stuff about what the rest of your team thinks. So you can quit, freely in fact - but you have to deal with the consequence of ditching your team, and your opponents.

It just seems to me fundamentally at odds with the possibility of enjoying the game in "solo queue" if there is no way to end a game early.  Over the long haul, no, I'm really not going to literally roll the digital dice on hoping the RNG pairs me up with 9 people who are worth spending an hour of my life with with no way out, and I'm not a big enough asshole to leave a game either.

Agreeing to a surrender is not always lack of sportsmanship and it's disingenuous to say that it is. Sometimes you are just beaten and you know it. The lack of sportsmanship comes when people can't admit they've been outplayed and outmatched.

Not giving up is not unsportsmanlike.

The basic notion of sportsmanship is that winning isn't everything, it's how you play. Giving someone shit for not giving up as soon as you think they are beat is the unsportsmanlike act, not the other way around.

It seems like there are just different cultures here.  It is absolutely considered bad mannered to stay in a Starcraft game after you are beaten, for example, thus forcing the enemy to actually eliminate you from the game.  Granted, it can't be considered BM in a game that doesn't allow you to surrender.  Frankly, at the end of the day this is less about winning and losing games than it is about letting the players in a game decide when they are done.    I'm perfectly happy to stay in a LoL game where my team doesn't surrender.  I might be upset they didn't, but I'm grown-up enough to suck it up and finish.  But honestly, I think that situation is way overblown.  The HUGE majority of the time the team knows they are beaten, and surrenders, and everyone is happier and moves on with their lives.  The fact that the system can be abused or isn't perfect isn't grounds to not have it at all.  Hell, sometimes I've been on the other side, and DON'T want to surrender, but my team passes the vote.  I still just queue up again and move on.   The amount of drama surrounding this feature is just way less in my experience then you guys seem to be suggesting, and maybe that is just lucky on my part, but overwhelming the drama/shit I've had in LoL from people occurs regardless of the surrender feature, it is just douchebags being douchebags.  They are going to be douchebags regardless.

Not if you're the first one down in a multiplayer (team) game, though, right?

Also, Fordel and I beat up the easy bots, I am totally an expert now.

Feeding noob!

 :headscratch:

I don't know if it's your newness to the genre, but I don't know what point you're trying to make here.  At least in LoL, surrender votes aren't unanimous.  One guy refusing to go won't stop anything.   I don't know how other MOBAs work.  Does HoN have a surrender function?

And grats on breaking the seal.  Only 200 to 300 games to go before you've got a good grasp on the mechanics.  :grin:

I don't think it's fair to compare Starcraft gg with surrender at all.

Pro Starcraft is 1v1 (unless you're talking about team matches but from back in Broodwar you hung around hoping your teammate could finish off the weakened opponents).

Personally I also feel it's much more easier to objectively see when you've lost in a 1v1 game of Starcraft, who has the bigger army, more mineral intake, expansions, map control and better production.

It's much more clear than having a mess of a team fight 5v3 where the weaker team manages to kill their carries and burn down the throne due to the 90s respawn timer.

I admit I never got into LoL though so I can't say I've used it extensively

I was referring to SC2 - if you're in a team game, your teammate GGing or fighting til the last building can easily make the difference between win or lose, the extra few seconds for the other 2 teammates to drop the hammer, whatever. Point being, the 'rudeness' of *not* surrendering in SC2 is once again a 1 on 1 thing, which makes it pretty inapplicable to this.

====

Also, I totally beat the easy bots WITHOUT Fordel now, unstoppable

I can already tell the big  :uhrr: for me is going to be the item buying/upgrading whatever decisions. And learning/remembering what all the heroes I *don't* play can do I guess.

One thing from LoL that I would like to see added to DotA 2 is that if you haven't picked a champion by 0:00, you just get forced someone randomly and the game starts.

Dota2 has a problem where it does take quite a long time to finish the game off. The game is way better off despite this for not having a /surrender option. Yes you need to be willing to play a game for one hour before you start a game of Dota2.

Dota2 has a problem with the game modes. Its hilarious how much better Riot's solo queue drafting works compared to any of the Dota2 game modes available. Single draft might get better when/if they give us trading and tell us what everyone on your team has in their pool but right now the Dota2 game modes are heavily inferior unless you are good enough to play with people who aren't retarded and all ten want to play for reals (never going to happen ever in pubs).

Dota2 has a problem where some things are hard to see/use/understand in game just because that's how it was in Dota1, for me the only one I can still think of is ward placement. Those things all just require some patience practice and adjustment but they don't help the fun in the first 100 games or so.

Dota2 has hats.

So, I was watching The Defense (DOTA 2 tournament) and one team was about to lose their last barracks and called gg.  Seems normal enough.   But then they continued to fight, both sides got a couple of more kills, and a couple of minutes later they overwhelmed them finally and won the game.  Everyone in the game seemed to be cool with what down, the announcers mentioned the gg when it came out, but didn't seem surprised the fighting continued.  In this sort of competitive environment is this the normal etiquette?  Just found it odd to call out gg, and to continue playing (I guess instead of waiting in your spawn for the game to end).

Tiebreakers were being decided by how long it took a team to win/lose, so by defending longer they improve their tiebreaker score.

That is fine.  I guess I just interpret gg as "I (we) concede" so it was odd to see people continue playing after what looked to me like  a concession.  *Shrugs* It isn't really important just struck me as odd.

Yeah, it's different to SC2 and Broodwar where you say gg then quit.

it's more saying good game I think we've lost this

Did the whole team say it or was it just one player?

Barrier to entry, high. So far I have a faint noob grasp of:

Lich
Omniknight
Sniper
Tidehunter
Zeus

Of those I think I felt most comfortable/effective (against the amazing bots) with Lich and Omniknight. So, I'll probably figure out some kind of decent item build for each of those and dip my feet into the horrors of a pub game soon. I hope they're not both taken first.  :why_so_serious:

EDIT: I tried Venomancer too and liked it but I am sure that the way I was playing him would not actually work against real players so I am not including him in 'things I think I sort of understand'.

I found the barrier much more surmountable once I got the fuck out of the lanes and started playing jungle heroes. Ursa was the first to click for me, especially as the development strategy is simple. Kill shit in jungle, each level take whichever skill is the furthest to the right, buy Vlad's, fuck Roshan's shit up.

I'm starting to play laning heroes, but found it much easier to learn the basics in a role where enemy bots don't bother you while leveling (so I'm not feeding them), and I'm not pissing off team mates so much.

Also, finding this extremely useful for hero builds : http://www.dotafire.com/dota-2/guides

One of the better guides I've seen is this  (http://www.purgegamers.com/welcome-to-dota-you-suck)one. It covers most of the things you need to know about going into the game, as well as giving some advice for what happens once you get beyond the initial baby steps.

Ahhh geez. That guide is depressing.


Why would you copy stuff like that over from DotA 1?

I don't really see the problem with it.  Every game has quirks like that to master if you want to be competitive.

For the oldschool arcade and console fighters that couldn't be patched I understand but for a persistent online game? The only reason to have it is an artificial way to build depth into your game

Plenty of worthwhile mechanics game out of bugs/exploits.  It adds a top tier of play, and the reality is that no one here is likely to play at high enough level that they need to worry about this stuff.  I think people see stuff like this and worry about it tons when meanwhile they are still missing 1/2 their last hits and such.  It is really just a non issue as far as I am concerned, and even if in principle you don't like it, in practice it isn't going to matter for all but high levels of play.

Like denial, it's a thing I file under shitty design you can mostly ignore.

The worry is they don't go so far as to add similar nonsense that might start to affect games between old and non-competitive individuals - because it really doesn't speak well of the people designing the game.

Yeah I had read that purge guide earlier, very helpful as an intro.

Finally had a couple breakthrough games where things have started clicking for me.  Finally to the point after maybe 50 games or so where I feel like I actually have a feel for what is going on, what can kill me, what I can kill, etc etc.   Also, jungle lycanthrope is pretty fun.

Without aiming to restart this whole thing again (long weekend vacations are good for squashing foolish internet-argument impulses), I just want to point out that there is a big difference between a scheduled, organized game (which is probably most of the sports-games people have experience with) and a casual pick-up game. It's true that I have never seen a team walk off the field in a league game of soccer -- but if you play pick-up soccer people come and go all the time, even if the game 'serious' enough to keep a vague score, etc.

But really it comes down to the fact that there is no direct, mechanical, structural momentum in most (all?) athletic sports. As I mention ad-nauseum, Chess is a game that includes structural momentum, and all serious play of Chess includes the ability for one side to resign or offer a draw. If you are unwilling to ever resign or accept draw offers, you are not going to get very far playing competitive Chess.

SC2 is another game that involves structural momentum, and unsurprisingly it also includes (as far as I can tell, I don't play it) a tradition of concession, though not one that is totally always 100% awesome -- which is not surprising, even Chess grandmasters have been known to concede/offer draws incorrectly. I am guessing if you did an analysis of FPS games (and their most popular competitive modes) you would see an identical trend: the modes/games that include structural momentum (and consequently have longer competitive units, in terms of time to finish) also include the ability to resign.

Anyways, I did appreciate the longer unpacking of objections from Megrim -- but I don't know if I agree that lopsided games in which one team has stomped the other early game are a particularly useful place to practice map control and late-game strategies. It's not hard to control the map when you are 5 levels higher than the other team and/or have out of control carries, etc. I'm not saying you can't practice at all, but you get a pretty skewed perspective on how to be efficient with wards, etc. when you are drowning in money and the enemy team is stuck in their base. I do agree that if the result of a surrender option in DOTA was that almost all games ended after 25 minutes, it would be a bad thing -- but maybe I just overrate the competitiveness of my fellow-players when I suggest that it wouldn't happen. It happens in LoL because, as mentioned, LoL has very little variability in scaling, or difference in mid- to late-game play. I don't think that the majority of people in LoL games surrender just because the option is available, but instead because they actually correctly recognize that they have lost -- the fact that this is usually obvious after the first 15-20 minutes of the game is a failure of LoL, not the surrender command.

 :oh_i_see:

I started playing some other random heroes, I don't get Ursa yet... he's a monster but I have no feel for what he can handle compared to other characters. Slardar is fun. And bad teammates that extend games and shit talk suck. Even if you're winning and especially if you trying to end it

Ursa is incredibly team dependent once you get out of the lowest levels of play you basically need a team that was built around holding people in place for you so you can eat them.

Prior to that level of play you can basically go to jungle, farm vlads, kill rosh solo (should be by minute 10 if not sooner), get aegis, jungle more, get blink/bkb/shadow blade, eat the stupidest person on their team over and over again, take gold and make big items, win game.

Determining if its a shadow blade or bkb or blink dagger game is probably the only hard part. In your first 50 games its probably shadow blade, nobody will use dust and you can just free kill the most annoying support with it. Against a team where everyone brought a stun bkb is a must and if your team has bad lock down or no initiation or they have elusive targets blink might be the choice.

My favorite Ursa partnership is Shadow Shaman but anyone with a long root or even good slow will work. If you hit a single target with Overpower + Fury Swipes + Enrage they die basically automatically no matter who they are. If they don't you have done something very wrong in your item build or your farming/leveling.

One time when I was a total noob against total noobs I went SS + Ursa in safe lane and we got like 11 kills in 15 minutes because they literally couldn't figure out to stop letting me shackle someone and ursa would just walk up and kill them. Their lane was like Puck and someone else who shouldn't be in a duo lane but that game has always stuck with me because it was so fucking easy and it was one of the only times I've felt like I was on the team doing the obnoxiously simple pub stomping.

Ursa is always a hoot, it doesn't matter how big someone gets, give Ursa 3 uninterrupted seconds and he will eat them, the end.


Never man fight an Ursa.  :why_so_serious:

Went and played a random draft after reading thread, got Ursa.   :awesome_for_real:

Some interesting numbers and graphs for crazy people who like that kind of thing -

http://dotaholic.com/dota-2/statistics-blog (http://dotaholic.com/dota-2/statistics-blog)

I bet the slight Radiant win advantage is down entirely to that being the side people practice on vs. bots more before taking their first dive into the real game.  :-P

The GPM stats irritated me.

Correllation is not causality, espeicially when winning generates gold.

Comparing GPM before first blood or in the first n minutes would be interesting.

Happened at last, got Invoker doing random in all pick.  Have no idea why I never tried him before, it wasn't that difficult and might be the most fun hero I've played to date.  I certainly didn't carry, but I did manage to end the game with more kills than deaths. (We won, our Dragon Knight/Jugger lane crushed and got fed.)

I lost so many hours of my life playing this game, from pubs to the stupid banlist to eventual cal- competition.

In fifteen words or less, is DotA2 worth risking poopsocking?

Do you have a prettier though not necessarily improved version of DOTA with Steam matchmaking and little other changes? Then yes.

Oh boy.  Poopsock initiate. :Love_Letters:

My biggest qualm with League of Legends was getting away from the simplicity of the four-ability hero system, but that sounds awesome.  :)

Sorry for the semi-derail.

I'm still too afraid to play against real players but it really is a lot of fun against the bots.  :why_so_serious:

I'm assuming premades still exist -- if so (and if the game remians relatively unchanged), I'll be downloading tonight and could hop on for a game or two.

Steam ID is cmlancas (or maybe clancaster...I forget).

PM/hit me up there.  I'm sure we'll have a good time.  :D

Have you stopped feeding the bots at least?  :why_so_serious:

How many deaths before I'm feeding?   :why_so_serious:

If you can survive the hard bots, you are probably more then ready for the newbie match making bracket.

I'm not that good yet. I can do ok on the normal bots as lich and to a lesser extent Omniknight but FUS RO DAH-ing vampires off cliffs has derailed my practice sessions.

That's probably fine too. People in our bracket are REALLY BAD.

Maybe I'll break the seal this weekend. I am still really, really shitty at last-hitting.

Most people are.  It seems with DOTA2's high aggression, this may be less of an issue at lower levels.  

Errr.. does DOTA2 even have levels?

It does! 25 of them. Actually I'm not sure where/if they cap out, I take that back. But it does have player xp/levels.

A Lich isn't farm dependent anyways.


Basically the people WE will be playing, are no where near as good as the people we watched on those spectator games. Not even close. The bots are WAY better at last hitting then 80% of the people in our bracket.

Double Post for this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_4sh8IzIZI

A little tutorial on starting items. This is easily one of the most common things people screw up at first.

Yeah my roomate started playing and we spent so long playing bot matches and being all like 'I don't want to play with people, they're scary' and while it's true that bots are at least not total jerks, regular players don't rack up 20+ denies every game and hit perfect stun combos either.

Also: playing with someone who knows more about the game and will actually give you advice is also extremely helpful, even if the advice is just 'run away', 'you want to be running now', 'don't fight that', 'oh my god run' etc. etc. Of course voice communication is kind of crucial for that part, but it's amazing how many deaths can be avoided by someone just telling you not to suicidally engage.

DOTA 2 is DOTA 1, in the source engine, with steam integration and really good spectator mode, and hats.

Played one game yesterday as Drow Ranger, 5-1-12.

Overall thoughts from original DotA:

The new shop menu is weird to get used to.  I don't like having to toggle the shop on and off.

Range attack animations are a little choppy.  I struggled to time last hits, and it was almost like retraining myself.  But, different game, different mechanics.  This could also be because I have a bum video card and need to turn some effects down.

The game really retained it's overall flavor, which I think is awesome.  This is definitely worth it (and even paying for a beta key) if you enjoyed the original DotA.

Oh, and wtf hats?  This whole outfitting a hero thing to me is really strange.  I liked the simplicity/complexity of the orginal, and a lot of these new bells and whistles seem tacked on.

Well, they have to monetize somehow. Better hats than making us pay for certain heroes or whatever.

Again, I literally just fired up the client for the first time yesterday, but does it actually upgrade your character or is it just flavor?

I can see how the pack mule thing can be convenient.

They have no stat effect, just cosmetic.

Yea, it's just for playing dress up. People love them some dress up. There are custom couriers and game announcers too.

Whaaaa?  Who doesn't love them some "HOLY SHIT" Unreal Tournament style?

I suppose seeing Sand King pretty in pink might be worth it, ha.

For real, to all you new people here are two pieces of advice:

1) Your first 20 games will be against humans that are mostly half as good as easy bots.

2) Don't play Lich. Or other heros that guides say are good for noobs. You are playing against mainly humans that are half as good as easy bots. On your team and the other team. If you like winning you want to learn one of the many heros that if left unmolested in the jungle get to win for free if you aren't bad.

Things like Lone Druid, Lycan and Ursa are probably the easiest wins imaginable. Because you can jungle you don't even need people to not fuck up your lane which is why you can't just count on carrying with solo lane heros like Broodmother, Dark Seer, Invoker because half your team has no clue about lane assignments.

I could keep going with other hero advice and you can sometimes carry a game with just Lich ultimate but believe me that if you aren't braindead you might as well learn to jungle and get out of the low bracket then switch over to noob friendly supports until you feel like your ready to play semis/gankers.

Played about six more matches yesterday and found myself increasingly frustrated with people intentionally playing poorly (mostly haha LoL better, omg HoN better, fux Dota2).    :uhrr:

How can I get into matches with people who aren't actively trolling? 

In my last 20-30 or maybe more games I haven't reported a single person for intentional feeding, trolling, bad play, etc.  Play someone like Ursa or Lycan who can destroy low level games easily by just ignoring the game for the first 10 minutes and clearing jungle creeps in peace.  Then just work your way out of the "low" bracket.  Don't get yourself put into the leavers queue from abandons and you should be fine.

I heard there are different brackets and whatnot -- do you know anything about that?

I don't know the details, but I know if you search for games to watch you can sort by normal/high/very high skill level.  You can search for your own name and filter by this to find out what level your games are considered.  Their is also a "leavers queue" for people who get reported often, abandon a lot or think it's ok to just afk and leave a game because they gave up being able to win after 5 minutes.  You don't ever want to be in the leavers queue.  I'm guessing matchmaking puts you in one of these brackets depending on where it has you at.  But I can't find my info on how exactly matchmaking works, doesn't seem like anyone really knows for sure.

I bet I'm in the leavers queue right now...spotty connection FTL.

That makes more sense.

Is there any documentation out for how you get queued as something different?  I'm just wondering how many AP games I'll have to play and carry before I get out of the  :uhrr:  queues.

If you end up in the low priority queue it tells you in big red letters when searching for games. To get in you need to be the first to disconnect n times in t days. Being reported by other players is also supposed to have an effect.