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From Eurogamer:
Blizzard Entertainment EVP of game design Rob Pardo has expressed his disappointment at Valve’s decision to trademark and develop a Defense Of The Ancients clone called DOTA.
“To us, that means that you're really taking it away from the Blizzard and Warcraft III community and that just doesn't seem the right thing to do,” he told Eurogamer.
Defense of the Ancients is a widely popular mod for WarCraft III and it is usually short named as “DOTA” by its fans. In Defense of the Ancients, two teams of up to 6 players each try to use the heroes’ abilities, upgrades and enchantments tactically in order to defeat the other team’s heroes and help their army win.
During the recent Blizzcon fan convention in Anaheim, CA, Blizzard unveiled “Blizzard DOTA”, a new StarCraft II map inspired by the original WarCraft III DOTA.
Pardo noted that Valve is well known for supporting the mod community, and that’s why “It just seems a really strange move to us that Valve would go off and try to exclusively trademark the term considering it's something that's been freely available to us and everyone in the Warcraft III community up to this point. “
Valve’s DOTA’s development is being led by IceFrog, the custodian for the DotA Allstars variation of the WarCraft III mod. According to Valve, the only major difference between the new DOTA and the original one is in the graphics and the integration with Steam.
FACTS: 2 years ago, Blizzard offered Icefrog to join in and rework Dota inside Blizzard. The goal was to make a quick game with basically no additionnal development needed, and sell it: a cash machine.
IceFrog said no, because he wanted a team, he wanted to be in control of everything and he disliked the idea of building a quick product with few evolutions and give it all to Blizzard. (I can understand, they would probably have made WOW-style offers like "new items for 15$")
And now Blizzard is trying to be all about community and freedom of mods and going "bouhou Valve is a bad company".
ye, right.
 
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I thought Public Relations was all about lying well?
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Yeah man, we're getting all of these DOTA games for free and shit! Fuck the man i want to pay for things!
+ Show Spoiler +Though i can see what you mean - kind of funny / hypocritical of them.
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Oh i thought it was another bw vs Sc2 thread again :<
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It seems that anybody who helps blizzards games eventually end up getting bit in the butt. Point in case, this scenario and the whole Pro League issue. Without Pro League Starcraft wouldn't be nearly what it is today. Probably just another forgotten game. And how does Blizzard repay the Korean E-Sport community? By suing them. Because they want everybody to convert to SC2. Blizzards really been shitty lately and money hungry. They really need to chill out and realize that their products wouldn't have been anything without these people.
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Oh wait so they shouldnt be paid for the work they did while you are raging a politcal and PR war on the other side of the planet arguing that you should be payed for the same reasons?
Its mind boggling.
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Both sides are bad. Riot Games is the only good guy in this whole fight.
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Blizzard sending out feeler soundbites to gauge the popular sentiment, then BAM: lawsuit.
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They're just pissed because Steam is ten times better then bnet will ever be.
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Could you link to some documentation of fact two? Especially the whether they were intending to sell it part.
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Icefrog is not the saint you think he is.
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Have you read the part where the community creators of those items are getting paid for everything they sell? Some have made over 10k at this point for creating 3 items for a game.
Show me something from WOW that expands and helps the community flourish like that.
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Blizzard has been on a down hill slope for awhile now, the fact that they are so butt hurt about Valve -taking- DOTA just makes me want to buy Valve's version more. 
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Blizzard sure supported the War3 community, yeah totally, they didn't let it go to shit after WoW came out, no they would've never done that.
Blizzard totally supported the DotA community too...
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ALLEYCAT BLUES50242 Posts
Coming from tf2maps.net myself I would say that the mannconomy update is a bad example to support the argument.the item creators also make money.
lol Blizzard and Valve are lovers in the night,don't take this seriously just because of one comment made by Pardo.
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Source for the Blizzard trying to recruit icefrog please.
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I'd like to see the source on that as well. But as usual Valve has another crushing victory on Blizzard. Blizzard is just throwing a tantrum now like a kid unable to get what he wants. Goddamn, I want to support Blizzard but their management is just absolutely terrible nowadays.
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you actually trust anything icefrog says. youre funny
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How is noting the trademarking of DotA even close to a tantrum? Do you realize it's not even originally by Icefrog? DotA all-stars was originally developed by Guinsoo.
First of all: http://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ Though this isn't 100% reliable, naturally.
They're not saying the GAME itself is supposed to remain free (or why didn't they attack HoN, or LoL? HoN though is by far the closer clone of DotA containing at least half of the DotA heroes as ports), just that they didn't like how the name was trademarked.
Also, about the WoW items: None of them actually make you any better at the game. They're all aesthetic, and for some reason, people like looking fly. I'm not a huge microtransaction fan, but really, it's not Blizzard's fault if people want to buy a sparkly pony for real money. They're perfectly capable of making decision, especially when the decision has no real in-game consequences.
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The tantrum is because they did not take measures to prevent another company from doing what Valve is doing. When Icefrog went to work for Valve, it should have set off all kinds of bells and whistles at Blizzard HQ. Very poor business decision making on supporting and protecting a mod coming out of their own community. Just the fact that Valve now has the name "DOTA" alone is going to get them a shit ton of extra exposure and money while taking the same away from Blizzard. Dota is heavily associated with WC3/Blizzard and is basically the only thing keeping WC3 alive. Whether or not Blizzard saw this coming, Valve essentially has cut off a chunk of Blizzard's empire and Blizzard is throwing PR tantrum over it.
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On October 28 2010 01:57 DeckOneBell wrote:How is noting the trademarking of DotA even close to a tantrum? Do you realize it's not even originally by Icefrog? DotA all-stars was originally developed by Guinsoo. First of all: http://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ Though this isn't 100% reliable, naturally. They're not saying the GAME itself is supposed to remain free (or why didn't they attack HoN, or LoL? HoN though is by far the closer clone of DotA containing at least half of the DotA heroes as ports), just that they didn't like how the name was trademarked. Also, about the WoW items: None of them actually make you any better at the game. They're all aesthetic, and for some reason, people like looking fly. I'm not a huge microtransaction fan, but really, it's not Blizzard's fault if people want to buy a sparkly pony for real money. They're perfectly capable of making decision, especially when the decision has no real in-game consequences.
Dude, sorry but you're full of shit
Ex / current Valve employees tell me the IceFrog/DOTA blog post is all false. Good to hear. Now, where's Half-Life Ep3?
Source: George Broussard's Twitter
User was warned for this post
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The whole dota/hon scene is a complete joke so why even discuss it? I'm not saying the game itself sucks, just the community and people around it. These type of topics doesn't deserve any discussion because it just embodies the whole dota scene - crying, trash talking and putting blame/responsiblity on whomever is suitable.
But i'm glad the OP managed to make Blizzard look like the evil corporation they truly are.
You must feel really good about yourself now that you set the record straight on who did what and who deserves the praise. Because that was the point of the topic right?
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So we are going to have Valve DoTA, Blizzard DoTA, HoN, LoL, WC3 DoTA.
With so many versions, DoTA is going to have fun being a legitimate competetive game with a healthy scene. Definately doesn't have the chance to degrade into flames and disagreenet on which version is better as already seen on HoN/LoL forums -_-.
Also tourneys like MLG are only going to have space for one variant. Further adding to the problem.
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lol blizzard totally left wc3 out to dry for years.. and DotA was not even supported in any way by blizzard.
can't say i like the direction blizzard is going in these days. haven't even bought sc2.
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I don't get these holy crusades on game development companies. They simply make games and you can choose to buy them or not. Play the games for what they are and let the courts deal with IP issues.
The development history isn't important (and most people have incomplete information) in judging one dota-clone from another. Since active players need to play the latest version, it only matters who is on the current development team.
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On October 28 2010 02:45 ToFu. wrote:
can't say i like the direction blizzard is going in these days. haven't even bought sc2.
highfive! I didn't buy sc2 either.
Don't even both comparing blizzard and valve. Valve > blizzard always.
<3
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On October 28 2010 02:54 prototype. wrote:Show nested quote +On October 28 2010 02:45 ToFu. wrote:
can't say i like the direction blizzard is going in these days. haven't even bought sc2.
highfive! I didn't buy sc2 either. Don't even both comparing blizzard and valve. Valve > blizzard always. <3
Oh yeah?! Well video-game company A is better than video-game company B! So there!
Seriously go join a PC vs. Mac debate, this shit is stupid.
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On October 28 2010 02:14 Gliche wrote:
The tantrum is because they did not take measures to prevent another company from doing what Valve is doing. When Icefrog went to work for Valve, it should have set off all kinds of bells and whistles at Blizzard HQ. Very poor business decision making on supporting and protecting a mod coming out of their own community. Just the fact that Valve now has the name "DOTA" alone is going to get them a shit ton of extra exposure and money while taking the same away from Blizzard. Dota is heavily associated with WC3/Blizzard and is basically the only thing keeping WC3 alive. Whether or not Blizzard saw this coming, Valve essentially has cut off a chunk of Blizzard's empire and Blizzard is throwing PR tantrum over it.
A PR tantrum? "That's kinda weird that they are copyrighting something that, if anything, belongs to Guinsoo." A tantrum if I ever saw one! And why would Blizzard want to keep WC3 alive? It's made its money, it's had its run, no one else will be buying the game anytime soon.
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On October 28 2010 02:28 Senx wrote:
The whole dota/hon scene is a complete joke so why even discuss it? I'm not saying the game itself sucks, just the community and people around it. These type of topics doesn't deserve any discussion because it just embodies the whole dota scene - crying, trash talking and putting blame/responsiblity on whomever is suitable.
But i'm glad the OP managed to make Blizzard look like the evil corporation they truly are.
You must feel really good about yourself now that you set the record straight on who did what and who deserves the praise. Because that was the point of the topic right?
I'm pretty sure every gaming scene is like that... look at halo, CoD, etc. It seems like starcraft is the exception more than anything. My theory is because the BM/GM stuff got standardized by the koreans but i don't know enough about my BW history.
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On October 28 2010 03:26 crazeman wrote:Show nested quote +On October 28 2010 02:28 Senx wrote:
The whole dota/hon scene is a complete joke so why even discuss it? I'm not saying the game itself sucks, just the community and people around it. These type of topics doesn't deserve any discussion because it just embodies the whole dota scene - crying, trash talking and putting blame/responsiblity on whomever is suitable.
But i'm glad the OP managed to make Blizzard look like the evil corporation they truly are.
You must feel really good about yourself now that you set the record straight on who did what and who deserves the praise. Because that was the point of the topic right? I'm pretty sure every gaming scene is like that... look at halo, CoD, etc. It seems like starcraft is the exception more than anything. My theory is because the BM/GM stuff got standardized by the koreans but i don't know enough about my BW history.
It seems SC is an exception to us, because within the mess that is the sc scene there is both the good and the bad, and when you're a part of something you associate with some parts but not the others (like the blizzard sc forums). The same exists for any other gaming scene (CS/WoW/halo/etc). From the outside they all look like a trainwreck but there is sanity to be found in all of them if you look at the right place.
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On October 28 2010 00:26 yejin wrote:
FACTS: 2 years ago, Blizzard offered Icefrog to join in and rework Dota inside Blizzard. The goal was to make a quick game with basically no additionnal development needed, and sell it: a cash machine.
IceFrog said no, because he wanted a team, he wanted to be in control of everything and he disliked the idea of building a quick product with few evolutions and give it all to Blizzard. (I can understand, they would probably have made WOW-style offers like "new items for 15$")
From a comment on the Icefrog Truth blog:
http://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/
I also heard he got politely sent home from the Blizzard campus by a senior manager when he showed up there with an AGENT to pitch DOTA. Who the hell shows up with an AGENT to a job interview in the game industry? I didn't even know that individual people had agents in games. That's somewhere between pretentious and clueless. We aren't Hollywood.
From this it sounds like Icefrog shopped Dota around, not the other way around. He did it with Riot, he did it with S2 and finally ended up with Valve. Just because you say that Blizz was hot and bothered to release a super quick stand alone Dota with no improvements doesn't mean it's so. Essentially this is EXACTLY what Icefrog is doing at Valve currently:
DotA-Allstars' roster of 100+ heroes is being brought over in its entirety. The single map games take place on is functionally identical to the one that you can download for free today in the Warcraft III mod. Items, skills, and upgrade paths are unchanged. Some hero skills work slightly better due to being freed from the now-ancient Warcraft III engine, but Dota 2 will be instantly familiar to any DotA player.
Source: http://www.gosugamers.net/dota/news/13313-valve-announces-dota-2
You argue that Icefrog took a moral stance against doing a simple rehash at Blizzard, only to go over to Valve to do... A simple rehash?
Also, this is freakin Blizzard that we're talking about, nothing that they release is just a quick simple rehash to make money. When was the last time you saw a Blizz title that wasn't at least 3 years in development?
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Valve vs Blizzard on doing good and bad deeds is silly. Both companies have done good things and also bad things in the past and present. Valve practically pioneered the DRM concept yet no one really hates them for it anymore. Blizzard does Battle.net 2.0 and is crucified because it has DRM.
The simple way to put it every game producer and developer is evil in the eyes of their customers at one or more points in their companies history. People will forget about this in years to come, just like how Valve was forgiven for paving the way of DRM.
I don't get why people are under the assumption Blizzard is getting upset about valve "doing it first". They are just stating that they think it is not a good choice to try and trademark the word "DOTA". Could be a hidden message here but it is all speculation and conjecture.
I love & hate both companies time to time.
[Edit]: Read the Steam EULA and you will cringe as well.
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Well, Valve is just better at seeing these deals than Blizz is.
Counter-Strike and Team Fortress were both third-party free mods and Valve took notice. Now same thing for DOTA. Not a surprise.
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Icefrog was the one who went to Blizzard. Blizzard could not put up with his ego, nor could any other company. He worked at S2 Games and Riot Games both which make the current DotA standalone games.
He is the most spoiled brat in the industry, Valve could barely put up with him, but Valve wants the cash that's going to come from DotA 2 so they're letting him do what he wants.
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Icefrog has no right with DotA since he's not the original creator, Eul is. About the source that blizz try to recruit icefrog, he post it himself at the old dota forum iirc (not playdota.com). Just google it.
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United States47024 Posts
On October 28 2010 00:26 yejin wrote:
FACTS: 2 years ago, Blizzard offered Icefrog to join in and rework Dota inside Blizzard. The goal was to make a quick game with basically no additionnal development needed, and sell it: a cash machine.
IceFrog said no, because he wanted a team, he wanted to be in control of everything and he disliked the idea of building a quick product with few evolutions and give it all to Blizzard. (I can understand, they would probably have made WOW-style offers like "new items for 15$")
And now Blizzard is trying to be all about community and freedom of mods and going "bouhou Valve is a bad company".
ye, right.
I'm going to call bullshit right here, especially with no source. Given the vastly differing accounts of what actually happened between Blizzard and Icefrog (and the nature of private meetings being that only Icefrog and the relevant Blizzard employees would actually know for sure) we can only speculate as to what "the goal" was, who said no to what, etc. As such, making rash judgments, both about Icefrog, or about Blizzard based on such speculation is extremely silly.
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I really think at this point in time, people are making huge leaps of faith about why they hate Blizzard, for this specific action. It's not really a big deal, there are literally two sentences worth of actual quotes from Blizzard in that article.
And honestly, to me, it's a little depressing to see "Valve > Blizzard" on TL.net, home of Starcraft tournament coverage. ):
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We need a confirmation of all the "FACTS" to actually start arguing.
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man this niche market is being oversatured, half of the players play dota because it comes from cheap easy to run game and any newbs can play it casually, then there is HoN and LoL that just came out competing for the new best more competitive version or clone of the game if you will.
Now blizzard is trying to get a new one for sc2 as well as Valve trying to remake it almost exactly.
What is going to happen is the community will be so fragmented that the genre could just die out. You will just have a bunch of people arguing about which game is better, then patches could come and reverse the order of best competitive dota style game back and forth and fanboys and poor players will just stick to the one they know/can play and more and more players will bleed off into other games until every game just has such small following it becomes like wc2 where there is only a handful of diehards running their own custom servers or whatever.
PS- Have they still not come up with a fucking name for this genre of game? I'm sick of calling everything 'dota type' or whatever.
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On October 28 2010 04:28 Kralic wrote:
Valve vs Blizzard on doing good and bad deeds is silly. Both companies have done good things and also bad things in the past and present. Valve practically pioneered the DRM concept yet no one really hates them for it anymore. Blizzard does Battle.net 2.0 and is crucified because it has DRM.
The simple way to put it every game producer and developer is evil in the eyes of their customers at one or more points in their companies history. People will forget about this in years to come, just like how Valve was forgiven for paving the way of DRM.
I don't get why people are under the assumption Blizzard is getting upset about valve "doing it first". They are just stating that they think it is not a good choice to try and trademark the word "DOTA". Could be a hidden message here but it is all speculation and conjecture.
I love & hate both companies time to time.
[Edit]: Read the Steam EULA and you will cringe as well.
I think the reason people accepted Valve's Steam as a DRM platform while Blizzard got blasted for battle.net 2.0 was because Steam added many features and did not take away any old ones.
Steam:
- LAN support (obviously for games that have it included).
- Ability to use local custom content without ridiculous censorship.
- Chat across all games not just ones developed by Valve.
- Global community.
- Steam cloud for save games/configs across multiple computers.
In Steam's case you end up with more features than before as a "trade" for DRM.
Battle.net 2.0:
- Locked the community into regions they couldn't choose.
- Removed LAN.
- Removed Chat.
- Cross game "Real ID" chat did not work as advertised for SEA players.
- Awful custom game interface, brilliant games removed for pathetic censorship reasons even though the game is rated Teen.
In battle.net 2.0's case... well yeah.
A bit off-topic I know but you don't have to think very hard to work out why people accepted Steam more readily than battle.net 2.0.
On topic.. good to see Rob Pardo is still as childish as ever, Blizzard had nothing to do with the original DOTA D:
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FACTS: 2 years ago, Blizzard offered Icefrog to join in and rework Dota inside Blizzard. The goal was to make a quick game with basically no additionnal development needed, and sell it: a cash machine .
Source for your bold-cap-facts please
And i just found this while searching the net, interesting
http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?s=5d887059e0f925d0e193bd52b09747a3&t=159905
Icefrog worked for S2 games, S2 owns rights to use atleast 3 years of dota's development however they wish, Valve/Icefrog is trying to claim these rights for themselves.
From Pendragon, creator of Dota-allstars.com
http://www.dota-allstars.com/index.html
While I originally intended to leave this out of this letter, in light of the fact that this information is now out in the open, I think it’s important to set the record straight. Many believe that Icefrog left because I wanted to commercialize, and he did not. In reality – I had learned that Icefrog had been secretly working for S2Games after conducting a series of meetings where he was attempting to sell a full DotA game concept to a number of companies (including Riot). The differences of opinion that we had were merely that I chose to be transparent and honest about the project that I was working on, and the direction my career was going.
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Bnet 2.0 is not as good as Valve steam and that is a mayor reason why he could have chose valve over blizzard. Nowadays its had to trust Blizzard as its not the same company it was some years back Activision-Blizzard is something completely different. Either way this type of game works better in a free environment, if you have to pay-to-play the amount of people playing wont be as much So that is why I believe that LoL will always have the upper hand on these Dota remakes, when this goes out HoN´s user base will be significantly smaller, as it is already small compared to the LoL user base.
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On October 28 2010 20:22 vek wrote:Show nested quote +On October 28 2010 04:28 Kralic wrote:
Valve vs Blizzard on doing good and bad deeds is silly. Both companies have done good things and also bad things in the past and present. Valve practically pioneered the DRM concept yet no one really hates them for it anymore. Blizzard does Battle.net 2.0 and is crucified because it has DRM.
The simple way to put it every game producer and developer is evil in the eyes of their customers at one or more points in their companies history. People will forget about this in years to come, just like how Valve was forgiven for paving the way of DRM.
I don't get why people are under the assumption Blizzard is getting upset about valve "doing it first". They are just stating that they think it is not a good choice to try and trademark the word "DOTA". Could be a hidden message here but it is all speculation and conjecture.
I love & hate both companies time to time.
[Edit]: Read the Steam EULA and you will cringe as well. I think the reason people accepted Valve's Steam as a DRM platform while Blizzard got blasted for battle.net 2.0 was because Steam added many features and did not take away any old ones. Steam: - LAN support (obviously for games that have it included). - Ability to use local custom content without ridiculous censorship. - Chat across all games not just ones developed by Valve. - Global community. - Steam cloud for save games/configs across multiple computers. In Steam's case you end up with more features than before as a "trade" for DRM. Battle.net 2.0: - Locked the community into regions they couldn't choose. - Removed LAN. - Removed Chat. - Cross game "Real ID" chat did not work as advertised for SEA players. - Awful custom game interface, brilliant games removed for pathetic censorship reasons even though the game is rated Teen. In battle.net 2.0's case... well yeah. A bit off-topic I know but you don't have to think very hard to work out why people accepted Steam more readily than battle.net 2.0. On topic.. good to see Rob Pardo is still as childish as ever, Blizzard had nothing to do with the original DOTA D:
I will give you that, but you must also know that Steam was terrible when it first came out as well.
-Friend system wasn't working for a long time.
-No chat channels
-Limited games
-A lot of bugs that froze games you were playing.
-If you use paypal and your account has a dispute with Valve they lock and close your account.
-Valve releasing a fake "leaked" version of HL2 so they could mass ban those who used the cd-key(not a bad thing, but a dick move for the company to grab money off of all the HL1, CS, Blue shift, Opposing Force games they banned the cd-keys on).
-No account security options.
The list can go on for Valve as well.
Battle.net 2.0 is in its new stage and Blizzard has admited they need to do a lot of work on it still. You mean LAN play as in you have to be connected to steam to be able to use those games?(Not all but a lot need a internet connection to launch so you can play the game to play LAN).
Blizzard;s DOTA is just a fun mod they are doing of course most people will probably choose Valve's version because like you said Steam has more friendly features. I still don't agree with Valve trying to trademark the name "DOTA" though. At least HON and LOL were able to come up with their own names for the game.
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I don't see what's wrong with Rob Pardo's comment? Why is it ok for Valve to trademark a name that has been free to use for anyone in the past?
blogs like this are really fucking annoying when one person makes up a few lies and everybody gets to bandwagon against blizzard -_-
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On October 29 2010 02:14 FragKrag wrote:
I don't see what's wrong with Rob Pardo's comment? Why is it ok for Valve to trademark a name that has been free to use for anyone in the past?
blogs like this are really fucking annoying when one person makes up a few lies and everybody gets to bandwagon against blizzard -_-
You so cool, FragKrag.
Really doesn't seem like a big deal to me.
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I am really quite sympathetic that a virtuous, benevolent company like blizza....
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hahahahahahhahahah no
aint nothing wrong with what valve is doing
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If Blizzard is just "disappointed" at Valve for making DOTA but aren't going to pursue legal actions, then why can't some Korean developer make "SC-Korea" based on original SC and play that? lol. Far-fetched idea but you know, it just looks like Blizzard is afraid of taking Valve on for a legal battle.
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EPT
