EPT![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/Bumblebee/dotablog/dotabanner1.jpg)
DotA 2 has been in beta since The International at GamesCom and, mysteriously enough, I've been able to con my way to access the servers. And it's been amazing!
To give you a little bit of knowledge of my background in MOBA games, it's pretty much where I came from before, I went into StarCraft. I tried DotA a few times, but the WarCraft engine never got me hooked, but I liked the gameplay a lot. I've also played about 2000-2500 games of Heroes of Newerth at ~1900 rating. Lastly I also played a bit of League of Legends (around 250-300 games which got to me about level 30). In the few weeks, I've gotten to play the game, I have managed to play a few hundred games and maintain a ~71 % winrate.
My experience has been tremendous. But it's very much coloured by the fact that, deep down, I hate Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends. S2Games has been nothing but disappointing to me throughout the history of their game. It's horribly imbalanced and they just keep spitting out new heroes every second week without balancing the old ones a tiny bit. As for League of Legends, it's more so that it's a very different game than bad game-design, even though I think there's some basic flaws to the game. A little example could be that the flash ability "ruins" the game. But I'm not interested in getting into a huge debate about whether or not the other games are good. DotA2 is amazing, but it will not be the answers to your prayers and be your saving grace in a moment of desperation.
What's up with DotA?
A few things that are always (and need?) talked about when MOBA (..and beta) games are mentioned are how do you get into the game, hostile environment, game bugs, etc.
- "I really want to get into DotA, but the environment is hostile and people just flame me," is something that is heard fairly often and it sucks. It really sucks to be known to have a hostile environment that is not very welcoming for new players and makes a lot of people not want to play the game. However there is two sides of the story as always ..and let me start out saying that I completely understand both sides of it.
When you're new to the game and you play your first games, you literally have no idea of the game, the mechanics or the heroes. In a game of DotA, you need to understand the heroes (as units in StarCraft) and as soon as you don't do that, people tend to be quite aggressive towards you and blame you for a lot of things. This is the point where a lot of people just back and out and can't be bothered to play it anymore. Why? Because you're not having fun when people are blaming you, flaming you and insulting you in every way they can.
It's kind of blatant, but what could help is if people were more forgiving and welcoming in their tone, and willingly to use some of their games on explaining new people what to do and what their role is. Unfortunately this is quite a big thing to do as there is a million heroes (no.. but it feels like it when you have to explain people the game) in the game and a lot of it comes with experience, but you can kind of draw a comparison to StarCraft with the roles on the team. If you're playing Collosi (your DPS which is often times called a carry in DotA), you need to have a lot of units that backs it up (support in DotA terms) or it will simply crumble in the teamfights and you will lose the game because of that.
On the other side of the hill, you have the pro-gamers, the experienced users and just people who have been playing this (or these) games for a long time. And I can totally understand why sometimes it can be unbelievably frustrating to lose back to back games because you're playing with people who are completely new to the game. To me it's literally the most annoying thing that if you stomp your opponent and do your job super-well, but still ends up losing because of that one atrocious, new guy. It can sometimes just be too much for people who wish to play the game, be good and win. Not all people are interested in educating people and expect a certain standard of play; this is also why matchmakingrating is developed. But it's just the ever-debated thing about these type of games. - In context to the above, you will within no time acknowledge people really care about their games. As Heyoka stated to me; people care about dumb things. Things like a win/loss ratio, kill/death ratio and alike are things people really, really care about. This also leads to a lot of whining when things are not going the way you want them to.
- Interestingly (and somewhat funny) you will also notice that there will be drawn a lot of comparisons to other games. If someone is doing badly, people who tend to whine accuse them of being LoL players. If someone is flaming and blaming everybody but himself, he's labelled a HoN player. Haha.
- I'm not amazed as I kind of expected it, but the UI is really good. It's very easy to understand (except for X2-F1, what the fuck is that! It took me a little while to figure out that it was two times F1. Haha) and it's very friendly set up, especially the in-game hotkeys. As you can see on the picture, I posted below, it's actually set up as the in-game UI would look like. That way there's absolutely no excuse for not setting your hotkeys right or screwing them up.
- For both the people watching and playing the game, it's really important to understand it's a game in progress. It's early beta and a lot of things are not implemented yet and there is still a lot of bugs in the games that needs to be figured out, no matter how annoying it can be to have them there. But for the sceptics: Valve is updating the game every Thursday; fixing bugs, adding new content such as sounds, heroes and other good stuff.
- The spectating feature of the game is nothing but absolutely amazing. Some of you might have played other Valve games as Counter Strike 1.6 or Counter Strike: Source and is already aware of the HLTV or SourceTV possibilities in those game. In DotA, we have DotATV. It lets you spectate any game that is live at the moment and it lets you do it in amazing fashion.
The features that you have in game are just.. Wow! The games are delayed with two minutes, which makes the directed camera feature a possibility. It controls the camera for you and takes you anywhere on the map where there's action going on so you won't miss any kill or gank attempt. Also there's a player perspective, but not only do you see his perspective (i.e. camera), you also see his mouse cursor, when he clicks and stuff alike. And there's of course a free camera as well.
Besides that there's a broadcast feature, which makes broadcasters able to join the lobbies and broadcast the games as a "real" spectator and then people on DotATV can turn on the broadcasters on/off as they want to.
Next to those features, there's all the standard stuff. A scoreboard, a board with gpm, xpm and that too. Instead of just numeric values, there's also graphs so you can see it shown on when a team is in the lead with gold earned or experience gained, etc. They've just done a really, really good job! - Another thing that I also feel needs to be mentioned is that Valve has implemented bots! I haven't actually tried it myself, but I know they're working really hard on making the bots good and so that people can actually improve their skill by playing against these. They've actually already implemented that you can "control" the bots by pinging, writing and other things (i.e. you can set up ganks, push, etc.). If this ends up being done well, it's another amazing feature for the game.
What do I want within a short time frame
In the long run, I think we all just want a perfect game (which will of course never happen, lol). But on a short term notice, there is a few things that I'd like to see implemented or fixed.
- The ranged creeps aggro kind of weird, I think. It's like they sometimes prioritize me, the hero, over the creeps even though I'm just standing there. On the aggro aspect, the creeps also prioritize enemy heroes over the catapults. I don't really know if this how DotA was or meant to be like this, but it's definitely something I don't like.
- I want to see my loved ones, Mortred & Troll, in the game!
- I'd like a re-work of the Lion and Venomancer model. They're just not good looking. I also miss my Pandaraen Storm Spirit, but the Mexican is funny as hell!
- I'd like to see some sort of banning pick or single draft in matchmaking instead of all pick only.
Congratulations to @8mmspikes and @staphu - I hope you'll enjoy your DotA 2 beta access!
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/robinnymann
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/robinnymann
Pictures
. Unless Mortred gets ridic fed that is and can 1v5 people with Battlefury, reaver,bkb and shit.
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. Anyway, I'll welcome every new player in dota2.
