EPT(As seen here http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=293137#3)
DotA is probably the game that i have spent the most time playing over the past 6ish years (It is nearly 2012 holy crap!). And I love it to bits. I can fondly remember my first DotA games as me rushing headdress of rejuvanation as Broodmother and enjoying the webs! I can remember when PotM was introduced and i thought she was hopeless compared to my brood!
Most of my time playing DotA was on Bored Aussies. It was a private server that was hosted by some amazing person and i spent hours playing my cracked warcraft3 on it. I joined the server in 2006 and at the time accounts were able to made throught the bnet menus. I can specificly remember just creating a new account if i could not remember my password/got bored of my old name. I honestly wish i could remember their names though! Invites for BA are relatively rare and each account would have 2 invites by now.
I also enjoyed playing DotA at school. In year 9 (2006) i put a cracked version of warcraft 3 on a DvD and simply copied the files over onto the desktop of the school computers. The teacher at the time was a year old man who obviously loved his job, but also loved playing video games. He didn't care that we were breaking the school policy and let us play all the games that we wanted assuming that we completed the work. I remember solving his visual basics assignments in a matter of minutes (I was a freak and have been able to touchtype since year4). I would then tell the usual crew the answers and we would start copying dota over to the computers.
HOWEVER! A problem arose, The class was barely 80 minutes long total and that was never enough time for 2 games of dota including copying. So we had to find a solution and fast (because we were impatient). We ended up finding a "glitch" or hole in the way the computers work. Even though they would everything off the desktop each night, they would never empty the recycle bin. Seems like a major foresight on the part of company who wrote that program or whatever but at the time noone cared. We simply would "delete' the warcraft 3 file that we copied over to the desktop and restore it during the next class (usually 2 days later).
The next problem that arose was the school's resident computer admin. He was noticing "significantly higher" network usage in our room and assumed that we were up to something. He would often "burst in" and try to catch us in the act. After the first time that someone was caught we all simply ran wc3 in a window and quit the program if he was to bother going round to your computer.
Unfortunately that teacher quit after that year and there was no more DotA at school so all my time was spent playing DotA over hamachi/Bored Aussies. This continued on until one of my mates told me about HoN.
I remember staying up till 5am Australian time because i was in one of the first 5k Facebook giveaways or something! I started the game downloading and went to school with no sleep. I had regrets during the day but school was simple for me and the only challenging thing at the time was computer games. I played some games on the US servers and hated the lag, but i fell in love with the game. There was nothing better during that time, and it was amazing. Orb modifiers stacked and i could carry games like never before. Stacking slow/lifesteal/armour reduction and being an unstoppable carry late game.
I never actually pre-purchased HoN because i was a dumbass so i missed out on the awesome "golden shield". But that never really made a difference to me. I ended up buying the game the day it went "retail". It was a great day aswell, They totally reset stats and i was stomped in so many games that I learnt extreme humility.
In the entire time i was playing HoN i have played something stupid like 1k+ games. I never got that great but, mainly due to the fact that I like most people was bad and I never felt the drive to properly improve. I obviously liked to win! But it didn't really matter to me. My peak PSR was 1730ish and I dropped to 1250 at some stage (i don't know how but it happens).
Hon started to change for me around the time that tremble was released. They were nerfing things that i did not believe needed to be nerfed, and releasing heroe's that in my opinion were no fun to play. I started to play HoN less and less and eventually pretty much quit when it went f2p. I find that lot's of people did because the did not believe in S2's early access philosophy.
I started to play LoL for a little but quit aswell. LoL was a boring game to me, it didn't ever really take my interest due to the "runes" forbidding me from playing certain heroes and the lack of variety in games. So of course, i started playing DotA again! DotA 2 that is.
DotA 2 is an amazing game and currently i can not think of a single thing that can be improved upon in this genre. Everyone can argue hero balance to the end's of the earth but that is something that is very opinion based. As long as DotA pulls in the big numbers from HoN I think it might be the "final" dota game. There is honestly nothing that can be improved upon.
Gameplay wise dota2 is perfect. It is an exact (well pretty much exact) copy of DotA1 just lacking some heroes. I love the graphics feel and the overall flow of gameplay. It was a bit jarring coming from HoN but it is good fun like always.
Well there is my DotA story. I hope that you enjoyed reading it if you did, feel free to post your own haha, i feel that DotA is one of those games that has lasted the ages in people's mind.
