EPTI thought of Teamliquid as exclusively a Starcraft website for the first year I was here. Then, I began posting in General, and got into many a flamewar. After being banned the first time, I found the Automated Ban List community.
Then, a friend dragooned me into playing LoL, and since then I've been following the adventures of streamers and Soniv in his endless quest to make people play Viktor.
Things changed when I realized that Teamliquid wasn't just about Starcraft-it's about bringing together the gaming community(and a few people who don't play games but register to troll instead).
Today marked a huge surprise for many TL users: the site went down for maintenance, and when it came back up we had this:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=364639
As of today, TeamLiquid.net will be adding Dota 2 as an official game to its site content. While TeamLiquid.net has provided resources for non-Starcraft games for some time now – forums, stream lists, calendar events, etc. – we have decided to go the additional mile for Dota 2. It will become part of our official news coverage, and it will become the third Liquipedia sub-site alongside Brood War and StarCraft II.
Along with that announcement came an entirely new forum for Dota 2, complete with strategy and tournaments.
When I saw it, I was pretty pissed off. After all, I believed that LoL was the superior game, with as many if not more viewers and players. Why the hell should Dota have a forum all to itself instead of League of Legends, a nearly identical game in all but gameplay and graphics?!
Then I began to think...and think some more.
Maybe I was just missing something.
So, I went to the Dota forum and pulled up this article on Dendi, one of the most famous players in Dota 2 and a member of the team Na'Vi.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=364641
SirJolt and riptide did an amazing job on this article. More so than reading another boring guide about beginning the game or about hero roles, this got me excited about playing.
This video helped as well. As I listened to PSY's beats, I realized that Dota is a game that has fundamentals similar to LoL and Starcraft. It's got its own pro scene, as big a community.
From that point on, I was sold. Dota deserves a forum, that shouldn't be disputed. Teamliquid has never been exclusively Starcraft, and now can become a home for Dota 2 players.
It certainly looks good, and with the help of some TL people, I'm going to start learning the game...tomorrow.
But there's more!
The League of Legends subforum has been active for more than a year. It's developed it's own personalities, like Skarnold and Soniv, all created with the help of NeoIllusions, who takes hours of time to police a subforum that arguably has the greatest post per minute count of anything less that a Destiny scandal thread.
It's a great place, and with champion guides from there and the support of the players, I never would have kept playing League.
As a result, Teamliquid not creating a LoL forum is kinda puzzling to me. There are many pieces to the subforum, heavily modded and organized. The community effort in them is mind-blowing.
League of Legends has no "home" right now. Solomid.net and mobafire are reasonable, but there's no sense of community. It needs a place for competitive players to meet with the casuals. That's what'll happen with the Dota 2 forum.
League should get it's own forum, either soon or whenever is appropriate(I say now), because the community here is one of the best and most active I have ever seen in a forum, anywhere.
TL;DR-Dota 2 is great game, deserves forum 100%, LoL should have one too.
I definitely hope for more tolerance for other games between gaming communities in the future. I think it's absolutely silly for people to ONLY be fans of 1 game and nothing else ever. Even if you don't enjoy watching or playing it, you should still be respectful towards the community and scene it has built.
