EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/azkYa.jpg)
I believe they had to change the name after their first choice, Cumstain Ridge, tested poorly in alpha.
I spawned in the upper right, my opponent in the lower left. It's a 2 player map, as you can maybe see by the circles indicating spawn points, though I did not realize that fact at first. I scouted the upper left corner of the map and upon realizing "wait a minute, that doesn't look like it could be a main," I took a closer look around the map. I deduced my opponents spawn and took note that there were alternate paths to his natural, which could be accessed by breaking down some rocks. So, I formulated a plan. I did the standard Protoss shit, some Zealots, Stalkers, and Sentries to defend myself while expanding to my own natural and beginning to tech up to a Robotics Facility and eventually an accompanying Bay. Since this was my third HotS game, I wanted to utilize this newfangled Mothership Core. I don't know how you're "supposed" to use it, but I wanted to give it a bit of a test drive. The plan I had in mind was to build a couple of immortals to go along with my tier 1 army, sneak across the map and use the immortals to quickly break down the rocks, opening the back pathway to my opponent's natural. Then, I would attack from behind and attempt to forcefield off and kill as many mining SCVs as possible before using the Mothership Core's Recall ability to return to the safety of my base when he came to defend or if he counter attacked.
However, when I got there, I ended up Forcefielding his army in half, killing him, and winning the game. I won the game accidentally, the result of a 10 minute buildup to a 20 second battle. I had not played SC2 in at least 8 months, maybe longer, and after that game I remembered why. For various reasons, I did not enjoy the game.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/4GgDr.jpg)
Forcefields rank highly among them.
So many reasons, several of them minute and difficult to qualify, that to gather my thoughts I began to type out another blog. I started writing about my history of being a Blizzard fanboy, how I came to play SC2, the initial hype and the ultimate disillusionment with both the game itself and the surrounding scene. I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, and, by the end, it totaled about 10,000 words. Every time I went to trim something, I ended up adding more. I went through it all, added images, tagged it up with the appropriate BBCode, put in links to relevant articles, and divided it up into subsections for readability. After 10 hours of insomnia induced work, I had created a hulking monstrosity of a blog. I had it pasted into the "Add Blog Entry" box, and was moments away from a final proofreading and submission. But, by then, it was morning. I was tired and hungry. I went to the kitchen to prepare some morning toast and juice, when from the window over the sink I found a pale sun shining through and, in the light of a new day, I realized that nobody would want to read that shit. And, even if they did, I didn't really want to post it. There was a wonderful catharsis in writing it, but nobody else needed to suffer through it. I chose to keep it around in case I wanted to cannibalize passages from it later.
I closed up the Word document, shoved all the images into a folder with it, and thought to myself, "OK, what now?" I had, as the blog went on, ultimately decided I was done with Blizzard games. Although, admittedly, I'll probably relent and end up playing WoW again at some point or another. And I still don't think Diablo 3 was as bad as people said it was. So I guess my prohibition extends only to Starcraft 2. Regardless, I had invested quite a bit into that game and so I sat, kind of sad and dumbly looking at the main page of Team Liquid, when I realized the answer may have been right in front of me, emblazoned on the homepage. I had never bothered edit the settings which would have removed Dota 2 content from the front page, even though when it was added I had no interest in the game. So I looked at news posts about players and teams which meant absolutely nothing to me, and supposed, if it was good enough for TL, it should be good enough for me.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/4g03j.png)
This line of logic is not always effective.
It was supposed to be the best fucking game ever, right? So, why not give it a try? I knew from experience, though, that DotA isn't really something you can just jump into and play, unless you like losing and consequently being informed precisely how little you are worth as a human being by both teammate and opponent alike. Neither prospect seemed terribly appealing.
I can't even remember when the last time I played DotA was. I played some of the Reign of Chaos version of DotA, and then a little bit of the Frozen Throne version (Allstars I think it was called?). I was one of those weirdos who actually liked playing the real Warcraft 3, though, so I never really cared much for DotA, thinking of it as just a diversion from ladder. When I ended up attempting to play it, it had already evolved its own asinine little community, and pubs on battle.net did not take kindly to noobs such as myself. Or anyone, really. The only distinct memory I have of DotA is randoming Clinkz and then playing him for like 5 games in a row, because he had what I imagined to be the simplest possible skill set: just shooting arrows at people and running away if they tried to kill you. It was like a combination Night Elf Priestess of the Moon and Orc Blademaster, which seemed to me an utterly ridiculous idea for a hero. Regardless, I figured if I played something simple and (from my perspective) strong, I could maybe figure out what the fuck was happening in the rest of the game. I never did.
I gave up on ever learning and ended up sticking with WC3 until I eventually moved on to WoW, other shit, WoW again, more other shit, and so on. Years later, after a great deal of personal resistance from my then SC2 elitist self, my friend got me to play LoL, which I ended up enjoying. However, sort of looming in the distance and overshadowing the whole LoL experience was this spectre of DotA, or by now Dota 2, which as LoL players are incessantly reminded of, is supposed to be a much better game. Apparently, all I had to do was stop being a pussy, man up, and learn the real game, and I would never want to play that casual LoL tripe ever again. Also, Riot is apparently the devil incarnate, the worst gaming company to ever exist, and will single-handedly strangle the life from esports. Suffice it to say, Dota 2 fans are rather... vigorous about how they promote their game. Or, rather, how they shit on other people's games. Thinking on it, nobody ever really says exactly why Dota 2 is better than LoL, other than something approximating "haha, it has denying you casual faggot, enjoy your stale metagame LoL scrub," which is somewhat less than helpful even if the sentiments expressed are real, if crude.
Anyhow, returning to a thoroughly depressed me staring at the TL main page, thinking about Dota 2: I couldn't just go play it, foremost because I didn't have access to. Someone had once offered me a key, but I turned it down as I was playing LoL and SC2 at the time and didn't want to waste it. Not that I desired to rush headlong into a Dota game, anyway. So I thought for a moment, and I remembered Dota 2 had held some kind of big tournament recently. I wanted to learn more about this game, and what better way to learn about it than to watch some of the best players in the world play? Or so I thought. I found Youtube vods from the grand finals of The International 2012 and loaded them up.
I think my strongest initial impression was that, plainly, I could not see what the fuck was going on. It wasn't so much that I didn't know what was going on, which obviously I didn't, but it was that I literally couldn't see what the fuck was going on. I was watching the vod in 720p, but I may as well have been watching a GOM free stream for all the good it was doing me. To be clear, the resolution and framerate were fine, and I could make out all the heroes and creeps as discrete units if I paused the game. However, everything was moving so fast, and everything was so foreign to me, I just could not mentally keep up with what was happening on my monitor. The commentators, their intended audience consisting of learned Dota players, did little to aid my quest for understanding. As soon as my brain adjusted to a new setting, the camera would fly across the map and look at a fight occurring elsewhere, and before I even knew what the hell was going on, 2 heroes would be dead, killed by some abilities I could not possibly hope to ascertain the nature of before I would have to divert my attention somewhere else for further doses of confusion. It was a bit overwhelming.
After a few games of watching Dota 2, my eyes would eventually adjust and even though I still had no idea what was happening on the screen, I could more easily see what hero was shooting what spell, and could sort of begin to establish what each particle effect represented. League of Legends gets a lot of flak for looking cartoony, and it does, but that big, blocky, cartoony style makes it much easier to see what's happening on the screen, especially for someone unfamiliar with all the mechanics involved. The same phenomenon occurs, I would think, when going from BW to SC2. Even though BW's graphics are technically inferior to SC2's, similar to how LoL's are technically inferior to Dota 2's, that inferiority is actually a kind of boon in some respects. Compare these two screenshots, one of a BW PvP and one of an SC2 PvP.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/3g7Hn.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/K3vwP.jpg)
I know the SC2 picture is scaled a bit downward, but it was the best exemplar I could find via Google and I'm not about to go attempt to use high templar in a PvP on the ladder. Regardless, there is a similar amount of action going on in each shot, but it's significantly easier to tell what's going on in the BW picture because the units are larger and more spaced out. Also, because the units take up more screen real estate, there are less actors per screen, making what is happening even clearer to the viewer. Of course, I don't have any trouble figuring out an SC2 game, but I've been following the game since beta. I imagine that someone totally new to the game might have similar experiences when first watching SC2 to what I did when watching the eye raping clusterfuck that was my first watched Dota 2 game. There's also the issue that games which try to look cartoony tend to have greater graphical longevity, because those that try to look "realistic" end up looking like shit after a few years when newer games with better graphics come out to supplant them, but that's another topic entirely.
After I finished watching game 1 of the grand finals, I had about as much Dota 2 knowledge as I did before I had watched it. For a moment, I considered giving up, retreating to the calm familiarity of a LoL match. I would compare trying to learn Dota 2 by watching it to trying to learn Shakespeare by reading it. It's not going to happen. I don't care how great of a writer ol' Bill was back in the day, because I cannot understand a fucking word of what he wrote without a series of annotations almost as lengthy as the dialogue itself.
Undeterred, I headed over to the Dota 2 forums on TL. After some browsing, I found a series of videos aimed at teaching LoL players the nuances of Dota 2, narrated by some nice fellow with a European accent I could not place. His information proved quite helpful, if a bit disorganized. Slowly, the basics of the game began to come together in my mind. I still had little idea what each hero did, but I suspected that would be the case for quite some time, as there are so many of them. From the LoL community, I had heard people bemoaning the complexity of Dota 2, throwing around scary sounding terms like "creep stacking" or "suicide lanes." From the way some people portrayed it, I imagined I would have to memorize and perform innumerable ritual arcana just to play the game without being constantly called a noob and made to feel terrible about myself. Dota 2 was made to sound cult-like and impossibly vague to outsiders.
After watching videos, however, the concepts seemed much more manageable, even highly interesting. When I would end up playing, which, after watching further professional matches, seemed a more and more definite eventuality, I might not know when or precisely how to execute these techniques, but at least they were not altogether mysterious and unlearnable to those without years of education on the subject. As with any sufficiently complex game, questions continued to arise, like "do trees regrow?" but Google searches ameliorated most of these fairly easily.
I started searching around for more tournaments to watch, and eventually came upon some games casted by Tobiwan, who quickly became my new favorite Australian. Sorry, Moonglade. He not only seemed to be able to describe what was going on in the fights, but also offer some commentary about the strategy as well. I eventually downloaded the client from Steam, and started watching some random matchmade games, as I presumed they would look quite different from a high level tournament game. Finally, I was convinced that I wanted to give Dota 2 a try firsthand, so I procured an invite for myself.
After launching the game, it asked me if I was new, to which I replied in the affirmative, though I did not read the text below each box, which, if I had, would probably have prompted me to click the "familiar" box instead.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/XIjqh.jpg)
I am new; please don't hurt me.
I made a few custom games to familiarize myself with the UI and game mechanics. Most of them were not all too unfamiliar, as they were intended to mimic the quirks of the WC3 engine which I still had a decent memory of. I changed my settings and hotkeys to my liking and steeled myself for my first match. My Dota 2 career would start off with something significantly less than a bang. A mere minute after creeps had spawned, the following happened.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Gesaz.jpg)
A fantastic start.
Goddamn it. These wonder twins would take turns disconnecting and reconnecting for the rest of the game. I had picked the Lone Druid for that game, because I had watched him be played in a tournament and he did not seem terribly complicated. Also because I like bears. Even 1-2 men down, I was still able to take my bear and help to try to gank an enemy occasionally with its entangle. As could be expected, I didn't play well overall. In LoL, you cannot deselect your hero and you use alt-click to command summons, so it was a constant mindfuck for me to have to keep remembering that when I clicked to move somewhere I might not actually be telling my hero to do it. Years of 1a Protoss gameplay and League of Legends have apparently killed the tiny amount of video game skill I might have once possessed. It didn't help that the enemy mostly picked heroes that I had not yet seen in a vod or looked up, so I didn't have any clue what the hell was going on. Predictably, we lost the game. I didn't know if I would receive whatever imaginary internet points Dota 2 gives out for playing a game if I left, so I stayed until the end and tried to kill as many enemy heroes as possible by selecting all of my disconnected allies (eventually everyone but 1 person left), right clicking on someone, and tabbing around randomly mashing the q,w,e, and r keys.
Afterwards, undeterred by the less than encouraging start, I queued up again. This time, I decided to pick a hero without summons because there was too much shit going on for me to not only micro my own things, but to try to pay attention to everyone else's things and learn what they did. I chose Vengeful Spirit, who seemed pretty simple. Nobody immediately disconnected this game, so that was nice. The problem? Two of my teammates had apparently never played a video game before. One of my allies bought no items, trained no abilities, ran down the lane into enemies and towers, died, and repeated this process several times before eventually just sitting in the middle of the map for 5 minutes, evidently contemplating just how exactly he had ended up in this bizarre corner of the internet, and then finally leaving the game. Now, from that description it may sound like he was trolling, but he never said anything, and everything he did had the clear markers of someone who had no idea what they were doing.
On the other side of the map, we had another ally who similarly bought no items and trained no skills. Looking at their names, they both kind of looked Slavic or something. They weren't written in Cyrillic, but they were nevertheless incomprehensible to me. Why they would be on US West or East (the 2 servers I had selected), I don't know. The second ally eventually bought some items, but then left shortly after his buddy did, leaving me in yet another 3v5 game. Later, I think when the game was "safe to leave," another ally understandably gave up and left. I stayed, however, because I wanted to play around some more. One of the enemies, who seemed to be new to Dota 2 but obviously had experience in other similar games, asked if he could switch teams to balance the game, like an FPS server. Unfortunately, he could not. Anyway, it ended up being me and a Bloodseeker, a hero whose abilities I had no understanding of, as the last remnants of our team. He seemed pretty adept at murdering people, though. I followed him around and tried to stun people so he could do whatever he was doing to make them dead. That was fun for awhile, but eventually the opposing team just pushed into our base and killed our buildings with their superior numbers.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Z045T.jpg)
2 of these are not like the others.
The next day, I queued up for a third time. One thing I noticed was that it was taking me far longer to find a Dota 2 match than a LoL match, which seemed fairly understandable for various reasons. This game in particular took 5 and a half minutes to form, probably because it was quite late at night/early in the morning in the USA. From the "search range" indicator, I'm assuming it tries to find players near my skill level, and then slowly broadens the range until it finds a team. Or maybe it's geographical, I don't know. Either way, since I told the game I was new and lost my first and only 2 games, I assume I was at the bottom of the matchmaking barrel. Over the course of those 5 minutes, though, I'm guessing it finally gave up on finding someone as statistically terrible as I was and matched me up with people who seemed like they knew what they were doing. This third game resembled what I would suppose to be a normal game.
I picked Venomancer and was on the Dire side. For whatever reason, nobody wanted to go to our bot lane, nor did anyone seem to want to buy a courier, which I thought was fairly important. So I decided to do both. I figured if I just did the shit nobody else wanted to do, maybe my team could do the rest and carry me. And it seemed to be working. We had a Naix who wanted to jungle, so I was all alone down in the bot lane. I just hugged my tower, tried to get what last hits I could, and resolved to not feed at any cost. When the lane would push out a bit, I'd go throw one of my plague wards in the river, because it seemed like a good idea. The one time I thought I could solo kill someone in lane, it was actually just me getting baited, and another enemy came and killed me. So afterwards I just played as passively as I could, which seemed to be the best thing I could do, given my limited experience.
A teammate yelled at me for not calling mia, but I honestly had no fucking clue when my lane opponents were actually missing. In LoL, I'm experienced enough that I can kind of tell, with the aid of wards, when someone is mia with the intention to gank, or is backing, or is just taking their wraiths. In Dota 2, though, there's trees and shit everywhere. Unless they just expected me to spam mia whenever someone ran into the fog of war, I didn't really know what qualified as an mia, so I never said anything. The fact that someone was even bitching at me for not calling mia was comforting on some level, though, because it meant that person at least had some idea of how a game like this worked, unlike some of my previous allies. A couple of times, an ally would try to gank the enemy for me, but they didn't ping and my level of attention to the minimap was abysmal as I was still getting adjusted to processing all the information on the screen, so the ganks never really worked. I was deemed a "useless veno," which was probably not too far from the truth. In general, though, I wasn't feeding hardcore and the other lanes seemed to be doing all right for themselves and I thought, "hey, maybe I'll win my first game."
All this took a turn for the worse when from our Naix came the following sentence:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/VoofM.jpg)
Oh sure, no problem. I'm sure you meant to say "guys," too.
Then, he proceeded to AFK not for 5 seconds, but for 30 FUCKING MINUTES.
The game remained decently even for a while, but slowly, with one more person, they pushed us back and destroyed tower after tower. Since this was 4v5 instead of 3v5, there were still enough of us to have some fairly fun team fights. I died in most of them, because even if I know what a hero does, I have no idea how much damage it does or how much it can take before dying. Further, I positioned myself rather poorly in most of them. Still, it was, at the very least, a learning experience and much more fun than the previous 2 games. There were even a few points where it seemed like we could actually win, managing to push to their tier 3 towers after a few successful fights. Eventually, Naix came back, but he was so far behind in levels and items, and we had lost so much map control, that all he could do was feed them more kills when they came to push another tower down. Three games, three losses. I'm kind of whining here, but in game I decided to take the White-Ra approach and say gg each time.
Disheartened at my apparent inability to find games unmarred by AFKers and leavers, I didn't play for a few days. I played some LoL instead, if only because leavers there seemed much less commonplace, at least at level 30. Still, I wanted to learn Dota 2. I decided to try playing in the afternoon/evening instead of late at night, reasoning that maybe I would find games quicker and possibly encounter less abandonment from the players in those games. Sure enough, I did find a game much faster, but, to my disappointment, my second hope was dashed. I don't know what kind of matchmaking hell I was placed in, or what I did to deserve such a fate, but when I entered that fourth game, one of my allies left the game immediately and did not seem intent on ever coming back. This time, I took the chance to leave freely when it presented itself.
Taking a break from attempting to play, I watched a few more random matchmaking games and saw a hero which interested me greatly. He seemed not only fun, but, most importantly for me, his effectiveness seemed almost completely independent from the skill of the player using him. What I was watching was the Ogre Magi. As a LoL player, he seemed to fill a role similar to Taric, but instead of just stunning and buffing/debuffing people, you had a chance to fucking explode them, too. I think that sums up a lot about the differences between the two games. Further, the Magi's bloodlust ability scales with how well other people are doing, so even if I sucked hardcore, I could still buff the other people on my team to do better. To top it off, his voice responses were greatly amusing to me.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/MEbCC.png)
Pure skill.
This match proceeded like I imagine most noob games proceed. The person who wanted mid fed all game. Nobody really bothered with the jungle. Nobody warded anything. Everyone just kind of pushed their lanes, rendering the whole "off lane" concept moot. Nobody seemed to really care about Roshan. Nobody bought TP scrolls. Last hits were few and far between, and I was the source of literally all the denies, a skill I was attempting rather unsuccessfully to practice for a bit. More important than all of that, though, was the fact that nobody left or AFKed. It was a game where I wasn't constantly pushed back into my side of the map because not only did I suck, but was outnumbered. In short, it was fun.
I bought a courier again this game, which did not see much use. Lower level people seem more inclined to just buy things when they return to the fountain to heal or die. After some debate as to what lane the rest of my team wanted me in, I ended up going in the bot lane (Dire side) with a Phantom Lancer, a hero that I kind of remembered from my ancient DotA experience. Luckily, he clearly knew how to play the game to some degree. He hung back near our tower to farm and when I would stun an overextended enemy he would run up and try to beat them to death with me. The game seemed to progress decently for our side. Even as our Centaur continuously ran off on his own to die, our Lancer and Luna got more and more fed. Eventually, after the laning phase seemed to wane, I started following our carries around the map, bloodlusting them, and stunning any enemies who got near us. There was one team fight where I helped peel for our Luna, who successfully kited backwards and scored a kill with less than 10% of her health remaining, which made me feel pretty cool. At one point, someone said "gj magi," probably because I let them have all the kills. Eventually the game snowballed in our favor pretty hard and we had little difficulty pushing down all their towers and securing my first Dota 2 victory.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/pRTzy.jpg)
An historic day.
There's no particular point to this blog, other than to tell the story of one noob starting to play Dota 2 with no guidance from anybody. Having now played a few matches and watched many more, I have developed an appreciation for the game, and thus an appreciation for another esport. However, this appreciation has not diminished my enjoyment of LoL. I see them as similar, but very different, games, and will continue to play and watch both. I'm not going to expound upon the differences between the two, maybe when I'm more experienced with Dota, but they both have qualities I like and I'm glad I took the time to investigate Dota 2 instead of just sticking with only LoL because it was what I knew. Hooray for video games.
Glad you're enjoying it despite the typical entry level difficulties 
