The Official Live On Three Thread - Page 27

On August 04 2011 12:33 kwahip wrote:


I have a question, have you been following and playing dota seriously for over 7-8 years? From reading your post I can tell you either haven't or have a very distorted view of it.

Let me just preface with, I'm doing this all from memory so don't take all this history stuff for 100% accuracy, but it should be close enough for my points to be valid.

First off I won't try and argue to hard weather dota was based off AoS or not as I wasn't around in those days, at least not playing those kinds of maps. I have however seen respected and long time members of the community confirm that it's based off AoS (I recall guinsoo and pendragon confirming this.)

Icefrog did popularized the game, at least in the competitive aspect of the game. In eul's version of dota, it was much to young, not popular enough to support any kind of robust community. After that came guinsoo, and he ported it over to TFT and called it dota allstars. He is the one who really popularized dota and helped grow the initial community based around the game. He created TDA (team dota allstars) and this is when most of the "forefathers' first started coming around pendragon icefrog, to name the biggest ones. The game however was still very imbalanced. In my opinion, Guinsoo's greatest flaw was that he was very bad at balancing the game. I would say however that his greatest strength was creating new and original heroes, and he added many of the heroes in the game. Guinsoo ended up leaving and eventually icefrog took over the reins.

Fastforward around 20 versions, Icefrog has succeeded in re balancing the game enough so that it can be played at the competitive level. He did this mainly by not adding to many new heroes, and tweaking the existing ones. Maybe that's where you get the impression that he didn't change it much, but I feel his changes mattered the most. It's at this point that tournaments and leagues start picking up dota, competitive teams get sponsored (The first big sponsor I remember was Complexity and Verge.). From that point on icefrog kept the game extremely well balanced and continued growing the game.

I started playing and following competitive dota in 6.27b, this is when most of the big NA teams started getting sponsored. The dota communities around the world were still pretty isolated and mostly there was only coverage of NA teams and small tid bits from the European scene, while the asian scene seemed non existent, most likely it existed in its own bubble. Eventually NA and the EU scenes got connected, while the asia scene still seemed either small or non existent. Weather this is because of lag issues or because at the time their scene was small I can't say, but the NA and especially the EU scene were booming.

At around ~6.50 I stop playing dota and following the competitive scene, pretty much up until now. It seems really odd to me that the Chinese scene is the biggest now, because from my perspective it always seemed like the EU scene was the strongest with NA behind it. Maybe the chinese scene was always this big, but it lived in its own bubble, or this is a relatively new thing in dota's life cycle.

Even if the true innovators for dota were blizzard (this is extremely debatable), Guinsoo and especially Icefrog are responsible for what it has become today. It has spawned to very successful games, and pretty much created its on genre or sub genre. Most of dota's heroes arn't taken from forums ROFL. Where do you get this information?? Most of the heroes are from guinsoo's age of dota, which from what I know are completely his, and his staffs doing. And even most of the earlier heroes icefrog implemented were not from the forums. That being said, whats wrong with heroes , that are taken from the community? It's not like icefrog just goes around picking random hero suggestions. He takes the most balanced ones that fit the meta game demand at the time. I can't say if this is still true since I left the scene, but it was true when I played.

Valves dota will not fail. Why? Because dota has been extremely successful competitively and casually as a stand alone mod for an old game. Both the games that have spawned from this mod have also been immensely successful. Dota 2 is pretty much a port on to its own stand alone engine, and this is a great thing. I can guarantee most HoN players and a large chunk of LoL players will switch over permanently to dota 2 once it comes out. I believe this because dota has always had the better game-play than HoN and is much more balanced than LoL, Many players switched to those games simply because of graphics and UI improvements, not because the gameplay was better, and now dota 2 will have this.

Also one thing I've noticed is that there's this weird stigma that the dota community is filled with aholes. Having played in a few of the bigger online communities (sc2, halo, wc3, cod), I haven't really noticed a difference... People are jerks on the internet. This is a well known fact.

The only thing I can think of, that would make people think dota has more jerks in the community, is that the game is a 5v5, meaning there are more people per game, meaning there are more jerks in your face at one time. The game is also heavily team based, and one player can very easily drag the rest of the team down. This means one person can pretty much unwittingly take the victory from you, even if you play near perfect. This will cause the jerks to rage on newer players that are still trying to learn the game. The game also has an extremely high learning curve, just to play it casually, which further amplifies how long you are going to be bad at the game, and how long you will be raged at. In a way this has probably socially engineered the community into keeping outsiders away, and locking the community in this bubble. Frankly the solution for both sides of this (the newer players, and the people who hate playing with them), is to join clans, and play with friends and have IH (inhouse) games. Anyhow just some random thoughts I had.as

Sorry for the wall of text and the rambling, and if some of my sentences are a little badly written, I apologize, english is not my first language :D