Epic Hamcat posted:

6.81 is upon us



Welcome to the 8th DOTA2 Thread! We have a long OP, but you should read it! Zeus help you if you post before reading the third post of this op!
For totally new players check out the frog sirened NEW PLAYERS section before posting! Remember: One Game and One Training Bullet Point before posting!

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/dotagoons is the steam group
In game we have guild GOON, just ask in the LLJK chat in game and you'll get an invite.

4th Thread^* (Archives)
Probation Earned: 5 Months 2 weeks 3 days 6 Hours
Number of Bans: 2
5th Thread^* (Archives)
Probations Earned: 4 Months 1 weeks 1 days 12 Hours
Number of Bans: 4
6th Thread^* (Archives)
Probations Earned: 2 Months 1 Weeks 2 Days 6 Hours
Number of Bans: 3
7th Thread^*
Probation Earned7: 3 Months 3 Weeks 5 Days 12 Hours
Number of Bans: 3


What is DotA/2?

DOTA2, simply, is the new engine sequel/remake to/of DotA. It makes sense to start with that then:

DotA, or Defense of the Ancients, is a Warcraft III mod that involves two teams of five players competing against each other to take down their opponents' bases. While the base engine of DotA may have been an RTS, the game plays more like a hourlong RPG; each team's army units (known as "creeps") simply attack move to the enemy base in three lanes (bottom, middle, and top) and each player in DotA controls one of 100+ heroes, and gains gold and experience to buy items that can drastically boost their powers. As a single game takes around 40-60 minutes and every individual member is integral in the team's success, the game is highly competitive!

DOTA2 has a full team at Valve working on it. Most importantly, Icefrog, the current developer of WC3-DotA is working on DOTA2. There are a few goons on the valve team floating around the thread as well!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akUNmFAzS98


I wrote a history-thing about Dota 1's creation for TMC here.

Who plays DotA?

Today, almost a decade after its inception, DotA has an estimated 10 million players on battle.net, Garena, and other international servers. A patch can get up to six million downloads in a day.

The competitive scene is ridiculously large and alive as well; from the Chinese dynasties CCM and LGD frought with succession drama to the old-school European dominators like MYM, OK, and Na'Vi, competitors are drawn from all over the world. This large playerbase contributes to a diversity of playstyles and strategies, and the large hero pool and monthly patches ensure that the game never gets stale. Recently as well, Starcraft I/II heavy hitters TeamLiquid have officially began supporting DOTA2 as one of their games. You can now find competitive info and a TL team, just check their site!

Gosugamers, JoinDotA, and now TeamLiquid have all the competitive news and streams you could want.

NEW PLAYERS

Most of you fucks wonderful people won't read the whole OP before jumping in, then ask 'hey wat do i do ive never played' in the thread. Here are some things you can do to avoid this unhappy fate

• Watch the 'How to play Dota2 in 4 minutes' video above
  
• Read this
  
• Check out the official guide here
  
• If you have time, watch this.
  

Well should I just do bot games until I'm pro?
Some people find that bot games are less anxiety producing than jumping straight into a normal match. This may be true, but you'll see from even a bot game that there are plenty of people just as bad as you are. Still, I think I'd recommend your first game be a bot game just so you can get a feel of how the game controls, and how you buy things from the shop.

What hero should I play?
General recommendations for new players include
AGI: Viper (Carry, Ranged) or Ursa (Carry/Ganker, Melee)
STR: Sven (Carry/Ganker, Melee) or Tidehunter (Support, Melee)
INT: Lich (Support, Ranged) or Shadow Shaman (Ganker/Support, Ranged)

AVOID: Chen, Enchantress, Meepo, Visage, Invoker

All this being said, if you've done at least one of the above bullet points, and played a single game, feel free to ask any questions you have in the thread. It's just that 'I'm am entirely new and don't know what I don't know' isnt a very helpful point of reference for us!

IF YOU'RE COMING FROM LEAGUE OR HON: Welcome! Read the Transitioning to DOTA guide in the second post!

The International



The International 2014 has started!

It runs this year July 18-21 (Though qualifiers started on the 12th of May)



Here are the invitees this year. There will also be 5 qualifier places this year: NA, SEA, EU, and CN, with a wildcard for the 2nd place from each region.

So, what is The International?

Every year, Valve sponsors an over one million dollar tournament, with free broadcasts in multiple languages.
Yes, you read that correctly. OVER [strike]$1,000,000.[/strike] $4,000,000 loving dollars

All of the VODs for the Internationals past are available here. Be aware that TI2011 is a lot of farming however. Here's some quick info on what's what from each year, be aware that if you want to watch them all there may be spoilers if you click on the matches listed.

TI2011:
Champions:Na'Vi (Ukraine)
Set to Watch: The Semifinals and Finals

TI2012:
Champions: iG (China)
Set to Watch: LGD vs Navi

TI2013:
Champions: The Alliance (Sweden)
Set to Watch: Liquid vs TongFu and Na'Vi vs Alliance

This sounds awfully similar to...

Yes, all those games that seem familiar (LoL, HoN, Demigod, Bloodline Champions, Realm of the Titans) are all DotA-likes (or Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas aka MOBA or Action Real-Time Strategy aka ARTS). Make no mistake though, DotA2 may be prettier and have some new tricks, but in terms of mechanics and gameplay, it is the direct reincarnation of DotA. Direct. As in dont complain about last hitting in this thread, of course it's in. Discussions about mechanics are welcome, just consider that almost every mechanic in dota2 is a direct design decision, and isn't just a legacy feature.

Sounds good, how do I play?

Dota2 has officially launched! Just go to the page in the store and you can play! There's some sort of 'queue' when you go to install it but from what I've heard it goes by very quickly.

Other Info

• DotA2 uses Valve's Source engine: global lighting, cloth simulation, and integrated voice chat are part of the game.
  
• AI bots will eventually take over for disconnected players (maybe), and are available to play against in unranked training matches as well.
  
• Some hero skills work slightly better with the replacement of the Warcraft III engine with the Source engine. Examples include Rubik's Spellsteal.
  
• Valve has integrated Steamworks. You can create and submit new items which get voted on and potentially added on a weekly basis.
  
• There are several available matchmaking modes, currently including All Pick (Any Hero), Single Draft (Select between 1 of 3 heroes, 1 per attribute), Captain's Mode (Draft of most heroes, captain makes picks), Random Draft (Pool of 20 heroes, players make picks), All Random (Everyone gets a random hero + bonus gold), Captain's Draft (Like Random Draft with a banning/picking captain), and Least Played (All Pick, but your top 40 most played heroes are unavailable)
  
• A coaching system where veteran players can help out new players. "The coach sees the pupil's screen, and gets private voice and chat channels to communicate with them. The coach probably won't be able to take control of anything directly (once again, the details are currently under discussion)." This system is nearing release
  
• The game is F2P with a cosmetic shop. All heroes are unlocked, you buy cosmetic items:
  
  

What does this game even look like?

You can watch some streams! See the next post for some recommendations. There are also some pictures/fanart at the end of the post. Some reviews have said it looks dated but they're honestly really mind-numbingly dumb.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cSFPIwMEq4

What's the deal with the store? This poo poo is expensive? What is a chest? I still can't read the op so this section also has TRADING INFO in it?

The store in DOTA2 works very similarly to TF2's store. You can buy individual items for prices varying from about 50 cents to 7+ dollars, or bundles of items for a group priced discount. Anything (not bundles) in the store can also drop in game, with the notable exception of Unusual Couriers, which only drop from chests.

Chests are the other random things you'll see dropping at the end of games. They don't do gently caress all, but you can buy a key for 2.50$ from the store to open it. Opening a chest will yield one random item from the list of items in the chest description, but like all good gambles also has a small (1%) chance of containing something super cool! These super cool things are unusual couriers, which is a courier with a coolio superneat effect attached to it. They can look something like this.


Generally the advice is 'dont open chests', since unusuals aside anything you want from them is probably worth less than that key, and you can just trade for it.

Don't post trades in this thread, we have a thread for that HERE

If you want to spend real money on Dota items but want them cheaper, goon Captain Invictus sells steam things, including dota items, for a discount.

Also for trading, the Steam Marketplace which was recently added currently supports the selling of Chests, Keys, and Vintage (Green Quality) Items all items.

What's this about a Test Beta Client?

Test patches come out occasionally, if no big bugs are left, they push it to live the next day.

When you get in the beta you'll notice a second client: Dota 2 Test. It's purpose is supposedly to find major bugs before they go on to live beta client, in actuality it's a bunch of people sitting in bot games playing the new hero if there is one. There's only 2000 slots available on the test servers, so nobody really uses it. You don't need to bother installing it.

Links

• DotaCinema's VOD archive. Fantastic, check it out!
  
• Valve's DOTA2 Page and Blog
  
• Playdota, DotA's Official Site
  
• Icefrog's Devblog for DotA
  
• TeamLiquid, which now supports DOTA2!
  
• Gosugamers for the Competitive Scene as well
  
• CyborgMatt's blog, Where he analysis patches to see what wasn't in the patch notes.
  
• DotaHut Solomid.net's Dota 2 guides. Featured guides mostly written by professional players.
  
• Tired of trying to figure out prodota streaming habits? Take it easy with this addon for Firefox or Chrome!
  
• OH MY GOD A DOTA2 IN GAME TRANSLATOR / Mirror. WARNING: Nobody really loving knows, but this tool may get you a 30 day dota ban as of 9/23. Again, this hasn't been confirmed!
  
• STATS WEBSITE RIP 2012-2013
  
• More Detailed Stats Site but it takes time to cache your games and whatnot.
  
• Hero stats in pro games
  

Current Events

Check out our PRO DOTA2 THREAD: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3601662
If you want to find the VOD for a match, check out DotaCinema's VOD site, it's real good!

Latest Patch - April 29th (Expected)

http://www.dota2.com/springcleaning/


In-Game Stuff

To join an inhouse:

• Go to the Play tab
  
• Find a Lobby
  
• Private Games
  
• Type in the password given into that box and hit search. The password is usually lljk, or lljk2, etc
  

Console and Autoexec commands:
To input any of these commands, add "-console" to the launch options for DotA2 on steam. You can also make a file called autoexec.cfg in X:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\dota 2 beta\dota\cfg, and put in commands that you would put in console to have the automatically executed when the game starts.

There is also an (new) generator for this here.

• chat_join lljk - Automatically joins a chat channel when you start dota, in this case, lljk.
  
• con_enable 1 - Adds the console to your game, same as adding -console to the launch options. Press ` (by default) in game to toggle console.
  
• dota_health_per_vertical_marker 200 - Changes how much health each of those bars is; by default it's 200, you might want to change it to 100 if you play League or want more accurate health bars.
  
• dota_minimap_misclick_time 0 - You can up the time on this to set how long your mouse has to be on the minimap to click on it, if you constantly click on the minimap by accident.
  
• dota_force_right_click_attack 0 - Right click deny Change the 0 to a 1 to enable it.
  
• dota_disable_range_finder 1 - Range indicators If you set this to 0, you'll see a small red/green bar from your character to your mouse pointer that makes spell ranges much more visible than looking at the mouse cursor changing alone.
  
• dota_sf_old_heropedia "1" Old hero learn tab thing? I dont know why you'd want it but there.
  

^{Credit to Minrad}

Stuff to Change in Options:

• To remove camera pan acceleration, put the 'camera acceleration' bar all the way to the right. I'd also put the camera speed bar to the right.
  
• Your hotkeys start out silly, move the item hotkeys somewhere off of the numpad (like alt qweasd) and change your level-up skill and stats hotkey to something you can get without moving your hand super far (I use Z and X) Forgot to mention: B for buy! I'd like to set C to center on my hero but it wont let me.
  
• Enable double activate item and enable shop hotkeys in Game (if you want, I plan on learning to buy from the shop)
  
• Turn the render slider all the way to the right!
  

^{Credit to Gokuesque}

Changing recommended items:

• Go to your steam/steamapps/common/dota 2 beta/dota/itembuilds folder.
  
• Paste "item" "item_tpscroll" in every hero's core item list.
  
• Don't like having Mask of Madness as a core item on Night Stalker? Want an urn instead? Change that stuff all in the file.
  
• There's a dota2alttab item list here.
  
• http://dota2-itemchanger.googlecode.com/files/dota2itemchanger.zip - A program made to do the same thing, but easier. Requires .NET
  How to use the program:
  
  1. Unzip anywhere
     
  2. Run dota2itemchanger.exe, select a hero, and then drag&drop items from the left to the starting/early/... box in the right (the box appears after you select the item type at the top)
     
  3. Click save (you will get warnings if you don't add any items for a category)
     
  4. A new .txt file (for example, default_antimage.txt) will be created in the current directory. You can open it in notepad and check it, maybe make modifications about the item order
     
  5. Create a backup of the default hero itembuild (for example, c:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\dota 2 beta\dota\itembuilds\default_antimage.txt)
     
  6. Copy the file from 4. to the location mentioned at 5.
     
  7. Start the game, create a practice game and check if everything is ok
     

Other Useful Scripts:

• http://pastebin.com/FxPCueM8 - Adds aliases to search for hon and dota1 item names. Goes into "...\dota 2 beta\dota\scripts\npc", make sure to make a backup. Credit lprsti99
  
• http://pastebin.com/pew7W7A2 - Courier Autofetch script. Goes into autoexec.
  
• AND ON THE THIRD DAY IT WAS REBORN: NBA JAM ACCOUNCER
  
• http://www.dota2layout.com/ - An online layout editor so you can make pretty pictures of dicks jizzing out agi carries and share it with the rest of the world more easily.
  
• http://pastebin.com/EVQKkxgn - If the dota:// links dont work for you, running this (saved as a .reg) will fix it. Make sure you change the M:/ path to the correct drive/path for your dota2 installation
  

Ancient words of wisdom...

Long ago in a distant land, I, Terrorblade, the shape shifting master of darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil. But a foolish samurai juggernaut wielding a magic sword stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final blow was struck, I tore open a portal in time, and flung him into the future where my evil is law. Now the fool seeks to return to the past and undo the future that is Terrorblade.



Don't play with tcjimbo.

Epic Hamcat posted:

Goon Streams

Abadgoon, a shared stream, ask me via PM or IRC or Thread if you want to join!
Wangsbig
Protokoll
chronofx
Skyl3lazer
Lost-Viking/Hiid
Mezmerize
PyrionFlax
Headliner aka SelfKnockout
swmmrmanshen
dickboss
SuicideTrooper
PyronicEX
Shukaro
JollyPubJerk
Minrad
Ussr
MuffinMan
Cyborgmatt (Some DotA2, some datamining)
(if anyone else has a stream let me know via pm or on irc, as Skyl3lazer)

Other Streams

http://streamdota2.com/ tends to have every stream on it
Saltybet Dota!
Tobi-Wan, big-name English dota caster
Beyond the Summit
Luminous, another caster on BTS

Training Materials

• A 'complete' guide to dota on the steam workshop that tries to be both very newbie friendly and incredibly in depth
  
• The Dota 2 Alt-Tab Guides are a great resource once you have basics down
  
• Nigma makes some good guides to dota2.
  
• A good perspective on what you're in for, from Eurogamer.
  
• This guide gives a lot of good tips for brand new players
  
• There's a good in-detail guide on how the game works here on teamliquid. This is mainly for people who are just spectating the game.
  
• Dotacommentaries also has some decently casted games.
  
• The guides on PlayDotA are still relevant for DotA2. These Three Links are a comparison guide for icons from dota1-2 so you can identify what's what. These images are linked because they are huge.
  
• If you use playdota for the guides, this greasemonkey script will automagically convert the images for you!
  
• A super long Three Hour Tour Of Dota For The Uninitiated. Watch this if you have free time and know nothing.
  
• What the gently caress is this animation cancelling poo poo i dont even know
  
• Invoker training!
  
• This is a very very in depth look at skill mechanics. Some of it may be outdated for dota2, or changes to skills since 2009.
  
• A Map that details all/most of the possible pull locations, times, and methods.
  
• A Jungling Guide that I wrote for TMC.
  

Transitioning to DotA
League of Legends

• Where did all my mana just go?
  You spent it all on that one ability! Generally mana pools start out much smaller and abilities are much more expensive. Some Heroes can't even cast a spell more than once off a full bar at level 1. Don't expect to be aggressive from level 1 in the same way you can in LoL. You will eat through your mana potions and sit there vulnerable.
  
• What are all these stats? How do I build Bloodthirster?
  Itemization in DotA is very different than LoL. All Heroes have three stats, Str, Agi, Int. Str increases health and health regen. Agi increases armor and attack speed. Int increases mana and mana regen. Each hero has one stat as their primary, increasing that stat increases your attack damage. Itemization is pretty confusing but you can still build +damage and +attack speed.
  
• That's cool, but where's my AP, how do abilities hit harder?
  As a general rule, ability damage only scales with rank, unless it explicitly scales off something else. Some items and abilities reduce magic resist, which effectively increases damage, but it's impractical to explicitly stack these.
  
• Where are the bushes? How did that guy disappear up some stairs?
  Dota has no tall grass, it does have elevation. You can't see up onto higher ground so try to always ward higher ground as it gives more visibility.
  
• Hey, where did my gold go!?
  You dropped some of it when you died. You can never lose gold from killing other Heroes. Other gold is "unreliable."
  
• What's this courier thing?
  You don't have to go back to the fountain to buy. You can buy from anywhere! However, you can't retrieve the items you bought until you go back to the fountain and pick them up, or have the courier deliver them to you.
  
• How do I b?
  You have to buy teleport scrolls. You can teleport with them to any friendly tower or your fountain. It's a quick cast and isn't interrupted by damage so you can use it as an escape against anyone without an interrupt.
  
• This store is confusing!
  Yeah, pretty much. In addition to the stat stuff, nearly every higher end item has an on use effect or passive or both. Make sure you read up on items and make sure to use their abilites! Also each side has a "Secret Shop" in the jungle you have to go to for certain items.
  
• Some other notes:
  Last hitting during early game is comparatively difficult to LoL since you do a very small amount of damage to creeps.
  Press A then click to last hit your own creeps for denials.
  Top and Bottom are not symmetrical.
  The jungle is huge and confusing as poo poo I'm still working this out also stuff hits hard.
  Alt is ping, Y is a chatwheel.
  There are gems in the river that do things! Just ping them for your team since you don't know what you're doing.
  Places on the map with eyeball graffiti are good places for wards.
  There's like 900x more CC abilities in this than LoL, watch your positioning.
  

^{Credit to mango sentinel}
Heroes of Newerth

• If you played HoN during it's beta, it won't be all that different for you. If not, read on!
  
• Turn rates are drastically slower in dota than in HoN. This is at the top because the first thing you'll think upon playing your first DotA2 game is 'why is it lagging'. It isn't lag, heroes in this game have slower turn rates, and in some cases slower cast times (think pre buff Jereziah or Torturer)
  
• There is a secret shop where HoN has observatories, as well as side shops. Some items are only available at these shops, and cannot be bought in base.
  
• Many heroes that HoN has that came from DotA have been reworked in HoN or DotA since they were transferred. Important examples include Rampage/Spiritbreaker, and Keeper/Treant
  

Smite

• heh
  

Fanart!

Feel free to post fanart in the thread without accompanying dota-related post. Make sure you source your art if you can, and LINK NWS STUFF.

Also note: There is a very loving thin line with NWS art and if you cross it you will probably be banned. NWS art is for funny fanart that shows a tit, not for posting hardcore dota porn you sick gently caress.

http://i.imgur.com/v8lgd.jpg(Slightly NWS)



Lots more, some NWS

Promos (Big versions of these available on the DotA2 Blog site):






also some Here

Epic Hamcat posted:

Posting Guidelines

The DotA threads had historically been areas of incredibly low effort/low content/generally lovely posts. We are breaking this tradition. Keep your posts in this thread congenial and useful. The mods watch this thread very closely so don't think you'll be an exception with your smugpost. Here are some rules to help you avoid getting yourself probated and banned.

• Do NOT import any external drama into this thread. IRC drama especially is generally an instaprobo or ban
  
• Nobody cares what you think of another dota-esque game
  
• Don't gimmickpost about how good you are or whatever
  
• If you disagree with someone, that's fine, but explain why you disagree
  
• Try not be be stupidly insulting to your fellow posters
  
• No callouts
  
• If you post your stats you better loving have some content too. MS Paints of the game are also acceptable.
  
• No racist/homophobic/whatever posts. There are people from all over the world playing, and we are all just as bad as each other.
  
• NO COMPLAINS ABOUT THE CHATMUTE SYSTEM. YOU PROBABLY DESERVED IT STOP TALKING ABOUT IT.
  
• Don't circlejerk. This isn't a war zone, it's a thread.
  
• I guess don't post your stream link a lot
  

If you think someone is breaking the forum rules, report them and let the mods deal with it. DO NOT REPORT MULTIPLE POSTS BY THE SAME PERSON. DO NOT REPORT PEOPLE JUST BECAUSE YOU DISAGREE WITH THEM. The above list is not comprehensive, it's just based on what people have been probated for in the past. Be nice, and have fun discussing DOTA 2!






Length of Probation earned in DotA2 Thread #8: 0 Years 0 Months 2 Weeks 41 Days 0 Hours
Number of Bans: 0

Silver Alicorn posted:

I'm a homogay

Luigi Thirty posted:

The Basics of Video Games

Video-games are an Interactive media with often visual/audio feedback that react to input given by an user, the player. This interactive medium of dota 2's concern, is currently being controlled through a digital computer system (PC/Mac) by the use of external input devices (mouse/keyboard)


Where do these video-games come from?

They come from people that are commonly called software engineers or "programmers" that construct these video-games starting from a ground structure often referred to as an "software development process" once they have a clear documentation of what is to be achieved/built/constructed. The people who creates the due process of designing these documentations are called Game Designers.


What are these "Game Designers"?

They are people who, as described above, either lay out ground-work for an entertainment software product or continue building/developing on an already existing product or a product idea procured by someone else. An example of this would be game-designers hired to continue working on a sequel for a game. These people can arguably be compared to directors of films, except they have been extremely negatively tied down in terms of freedom and creative thought due to a number of reasons including but not limited to: Marketing departments, producers, line producers, inflexible writers, publishers with little/no regard to working conditions/hours and sometimes even political/religious groups demanding changes or removal of content while trying to claim a moral high-ground. Needless to say, going from absolute freedom in your mom's basement to behind a desk inside a big corporate building is a huge downspiral for any designer when it comes to creativity.
What makes me a good Video-Game?
This is a question that can be answered in a multitude of ways but at the end of the road, it will always be dictated by one thing: Fun. I will extend to what kinds of "Fun" one can have in the next section.

While video-games have been progressing well into being considered an art-form, they are still classified as an entertainment medium even though it has been frequently dabbled into aspects of learning as well, be it military simulators or kid-math games. However, the most successful ones are always dictated to how much fun one would have playing them.

Games can also be compared to food, which comes down to everyone having a different taste. This can very often be classified with "genres" such as FPS (First Person Shooters), RTS (Real Time Strategy), RPG (Role Playing Game) and so forth. And with these "tastes" comes different expectations from the people that like these genres (except people that just got introduced to video-games, more on that later) because they played a game with the same genre in the past.

For example, If I came from playing Warcraft and into Starcraft or vice versa, I would have an expectation that I will be able to bind units to quick-selection keys or being able to select multiple units by holding down the mouse button and dragging it, causing a targeting rectangle to appear. If Starcraft would fail to deliver these features, I and other new players would be rendered not only confused over the controls but frustrated as well since I and any other new players are now forced to learn new routines in order to migrate from one game to another.

Things like this will contribute negatively to a game in the form of a steep "Learning curve". More on that later.
Fun you say? What kinds of "Fun" are there?
Life holds many pleasures and while I can state most if not all of them in this guide, i will stick to the kinds of fun that you can expect from the entertainment medium known as a video-game. There are roughly 7-10 types in total and I will explain most of them to the best of my ability while bringing them up in regards to Dota 2 later.

Also keep in mind that one man's pleasure is another man's pain which can be bent further depending on what game you are associating what kind of fun with.

---------------------------------.

1. Challenge.

This is probably the most well known fun one can have from video-games. Overcoming an obstacle, be it beating a difficult boss or finishing a really long, intense game, a strong feeling of accomplishment will always follow.


2. Sensation.

Arguably the second most known "fun" to be found in video games. It is experienced by looking at pretty graphics or listening to some really awesome sound-track as you play. The importance of this "fun" has come under heavy controversy the past few years. More recently, the guy responsible for the graphics in Crysis, AKA the Crytek "boss", has made a public statement believing that graphics account for 60% of a game which is fatuousness by all accounts since history and events of today has shown us that graphics does not even remotely account for 60% of a game, be it the old Ping Pong game that was insanely popular with the very bare minimum of graphics, Minecraft only consisting of blocks or Dwarf Fortress with no graphics at all besides text. The more accurate digit in percentage would be around 12.5-20% of a game. The statement in question can be found across the Internet but here's a link to a random article about it:
http://www.x360magazine.com/general/crytek-graphics-are-60-of-the-game/


3. Story.

There's nothing like experiencing a striking story inside a video-game you are strongly interested in. While it does not have the advantage of books allowing your imagination lay the visual groundwork, it can still have a striking, interactive appeal that is sure to leave a mark when presented right and without sacrifices from other kinds of fun.


4. Social Interaction.

As the Internet has proved countless amounts of times, a community not only pays the fees so a video-game can be made & progressed but also how it is received in the media and on the forums without even having a game to be multiplayer. If a game is multiplayer however, the community of a game/series becomes that more vital. Be it the important "first impressions" game designers work so hard on delivering in order to draw new players into using their product and growing an interest for it or just establishing an social medium in which you interact with other people that have the same interests.


5. Immersion.

This kind of fun comes in conjunction with a story. A game needs to have an intruiging make-believe fantasy world without sacrificing game-play elements. This is where game-designers that have freedom to do as they wish with a wild imagination and a sense of originality becomes invaluable. The current "Indie" market is famous for housing many original titles. While a game's story may be weak or even predictable, a game that has a good immersion can easily make up for those faults.


6. Discovery.

This fun can also be merged with the above Immersion. Having a vast world that lays between your feet to explore as you wish is the ultimate, immersive depth any interactive experience can offer you besides perhaps a game where you are swimming around in an ocean full of sharks with your body submerged in water and your eyes are in a 3d visor.


7. Expression.

Another important aspect of video-games is the ability to be able to express yourself creatively or otherwise culturally/emotionally. Be it building a 56 feet tall diamond genitalia in Minecraft or donning your unusual hats in Team Fortress 2, freedom of creativity and vanity choices can be worth it's weight in gold.


8. Pastime.

The last and arguably least "fun" one can derive of a game is the act of engaging in an activity that is more preferrable than work in order to make time pass faster. As "fun" itself is described as an activity in itself, I got no choice but to include it even though the act of engaging in replayability kills the original experience. There are however, certain positive elements to this "fun" that can be described as a game's replayability if there are a sufficient amount of dynamically changing elements to make it differentiate greatly from the original experience. Sadly, not many video-games have managed to do this as of today.
Learning curves and how they affect you, the Player
As probably most of you know, learning curves decide how difficult it is to learn the ropes of a game. The game in question does not even have to be new to you. Learning curves extend through the entire game, be it in the tutorial or at the end-game where a 10+ year old veteran of the game possess 1337 hax skillz. Fundamentally, all games are best off having a prominently going learning-curve that is smooth by managing to stay inbetween the graph of someone's personal ability and actual hard challenge. Unfortunately, the balance of this in modern games have been ruined due to the entertainment's industry realization of a new group of gamers most commonly referred to as "casuals", causing the learning curve to never achieve a point of actual consistent difficulty because the element of irreduceable complexivity is next to zero.

What is irreduceable complexivity you may ask? It's a bit hard to explain but to very crudely sum it up, It's the ability to use the meaningful choices and possibilities given to you by a game without having to know three books worth of information on the subject before you can use these choices and possibilities to play the game. Another way of summing it up would be to call it getting the most out of a game's depth with the minimal amount of mental stress that comes with putting your brain to it's best ability when learning all the things required to play.

Ironing out the learning curve of a game is the second to last thing a game-designer should do next to fixing critical bugs before even considering release because the learning curve always dictates on how well the features of your game will be picked up by the people that plays the game, least said, it's very vital to have a good one. If your learning curve is too steep in the beginning, there are probably too many elements or features for new players to adapt to. You can correct this by reallocating some excess features to the end-content of your game. An example of this kind of learning curve can be seen in the popular MMO, World of Warcraft.

Blizzard (Creators of World of Warcraft) have been carefully adjusting the learning curve of their game by locking abilities and skills, only to become available to the player bit after bit as he/she levels up the character and they are still adjusting this system with almost every expansion-pack released to this very day. If you have seen the result from someone that have never played wow suddenly buy an account with max-level characters in a MMO, you know what I'm talking about.

There are also more prominent examples such as in the new Planetside 2 where people were brutally thrown into the game (Literally shot in a drop-pod straight into combat at square one) with little to no chance to do stuff like even change options (Mouse sensitivity/graphics tuning) and as a result, a MASSIVE game with huge potential went from tens of thousands playing it to only a couple of thousands due to not only having a very steep learning curve but also boasting very bad community-developer relations. I will however not go into detail with this since I expect you to know what a learning curve is at this point.
Why Matchmaking is so critical
All games that feature multiplayer should have an immense design focus on creating a solid and fair method of pairing together players that are on a equal footing or have a complete removal of all automatic joining methods with the exception of 100% random games (See TF2's/CS server list). Ignoring this may not seem like a big deal at first glance but under the shell lies complete chaos, waiting to get out.

If an interactive medium fails to deliver a truly "fair" experience or otherwise unable to promptly and effectively correct any inbalances, be it technicalities with the system itself, the game concept or as discussed, Matchmaking, it will ultimately tip over, ruining the entire intended experience due to some arguably minor design flaws (that can easily be corrected in a patch or two) which not only runs the risk of building a game on a crooked groundwork but also alienates the fans that play the game from the rest of the world since they are consorting to error, most times without even reaching a point of self-realization by accepting mediocrity and failure on a daily basis.
Community and Developer relations
As I noted above, establishing a solid, trustworthy and open-doors Community & Developer relation is vital in this age of gaming history because the fans are the heart of any modern video-game, be it their ability to partake in the game's development and get their demands/expectations known early on in the development process or creating the content themselves in for example, the Steam Workshop. Having old fans beta-test new titles in a series or providing alpha/kickstarter funding to aspiring developers can also have immensively large impacts and as such, Community is key. if you use it right.

Normally, one would consider that creating a poll to change factor X to factor Y or factor Z on for example, a forum would be the most "fair" and "best" way to conduct game-design changes or to just listen to a public opinion overall. But they would be wrong in most cases if such votes would somehow affect the game-play balance. For every decision and choice made by an individual playing the game, they have a reason and a back-story for making this choice. Be it "nerfing" or "buffing" something, a personal gain is often included in such opinions one way or another.

To truly take a design "vote" into consideration, you would need to know the in-and-outs of decisions, compare them to the interests of your game's success as a whole (the fun factors) and then make a change, addition or substraction to the best of your ability.

This means, by par with logic, any player of your game that is inbetween the line of "Casual" and "Professional" (Actual job playing games) is a bad candidate to participate in any vote that involves the fundamentals or otherwise gameplay changing aspects of your game. Casuals will give you the most valuable insight of seeing from a brand-new neutral perspective which will allow you to lay out the vital ground-work every good game needs while professionals will be able (after prolonged playing) to give you technical details and modifications required for the end-game content.

This is why the middle-ground is considered one of the trickiest things to "get right" in games. You got a start and an ending but nothing in-between and there's no real shortcut to getting it right besides taking as much statistical data as humanly possible from people playing your game.

This is also a point where Dota 2 has failed immensively. They went from having a 2+ year ongoing beta, a fundamentally very good opportunity and borderline luxury for developers to receive loads of feedback and make changes to their game before release. Dota 2 received tons and tons of feedback along with hundreds of forum post pages & ingame reports of bugs and they did next to nothing to correct/change things before kicking the game into a "Released" status before taking another dive by making a violent change from making weekly updates to monthly ones. A big reason for this insanely stiff development process is both due to an seemingly experimental collection of methods on just how to manage a game along with some very incompetent staff that has been high-lighted quite nicely in the Diretide catastrophy.

Then again, all of these issues origin from mostly one thing. The pressure from the tournament players of the game. Since any significant change could seriously compromise their performance (that they have gotten from ages of repetition before competition), the developers cannot even fanthom the idea of perhaps remaking a hero almost completely as necessary (I'm looking at you, Chen/Visage/Broodmother).

Unfortunately, choosing tournament over us regular people means you cannot and never will have a game being used for competitive/professional purposes and at the same time have something regular or casual gamers can enjoy. Why? Because for example:


A Starcraft II professional player can hit up to 400 keystrokes, or "actions" being given out to troops per minute. The game designers sees some over-extravagant issue that can be abused by being able to have that amount of speed and control and make changes to perhaps reduce the efficiency of some agile unit the professional player was using. Now, the other races have a definitive weakness to go on due to the loss of agile firepower and the designers see another power-lapse problem and compensate it by boosting a more powerful, slower unit in the same race.

Now everyone gives up on using those agile units and instead resort to spamming these recently "buffed" powerful units with no way to balance or otherwise alter this in the same race and the result is a massive out-cry from the community, demanding changes so they go onto the next race and start to alter there instead, in turn creating more dilemmas that will go in an endless circle because they want to make all professional changes into the standard game which is not going to work out if mixed with several audiences at once. It is also a prime example of building a game ontop of crooked groundwork.
Video-game content, Quality over Quantity?
The amount of raw content a game has can either be deducted from how large the game-files are, how long it takes one to "finish" the game, amount of different dynamics and overall depth of it.

As attractive as it is to have several football fields of content, it's not going to matter much if the people playing it are not given enough meaningful choices from all the possibilities on your football fields or if it becomes too complex for someone to learn, reaching back to the learning curve section.

Essentially when you do have a sizeable chunk of content, filled with information, features, complex maps and ways to get around these maps, it will be the game-designers job to get as much accessability as humanly possible with the minimal amount of sacrifices to either the targeted audience while also keeping as much depth as possible. Unfortunately, this has not been the case for recent games on the market.

Instead of making a quality product for a selected audience, recent producers in today's world have instead decided to dilute entire games themselves in effort to reach out to all possible audiences, hoping to maximize profits made off said product and when a buzz is created due to this "everyone plays It so I will too" phenomenon, they would immediately start spewing out content in quick succession in order to "ride the wave". The recent occurance of this has been the Call of Duty series, which I have never seen a studio lose respect faster than Infinity Ward.
Summed Up / TL;DR :: Part 1
1. Community

This has to be the biggest problem of them all in Dota 2. Never In my entire life have I witnessed a worse community revolving around a video-game. The players/fans are: Egotistic, ego centric, unsporting, aggressive, hostile, uncaring, mean, mistrusting, immature, callous, apathetic, biased and incredibly pretentious while at every loss prompting everyone inside the current game to "Report player X" if someone on their team was even remotely new to the game or did any other action not sanctified by them, be it going in what lane you want, not purchasing courier/wards on demand or simply just having an unlucky run. Along with being completely miserable to be around, they frequently never speak the language in the region you're playing and nowhere else is this more apparent than the russian being spammed into the chat at all times thanks to the developers blatant denial to implement region-locks/other methods to encourage people to stick to their original regions. And if they do know English, trolling & false reports are nothing short but assured to come from all directions to all teams.

You can test for yourself and see just how wretched the community is at a whole by simply comparing the waiting times for low-priority (Supposed "punishment" automatically banished out by Valve if someone gets 2-3+ reports) and normal matchmaking. At an almost guaranteed rate even after they strangled the amount of reporting possible, Low priority matchmaking is very often much faster than the regular which means an almost majority of people playing the game are being put into the LP queue for "bad behavior".

Even Valve themselves have openly come out and shared their opinion about the Dota 2 fanbase/players being "Entitled Pricks" and that's saying alot. http://puu.sh/7vU35.jpg



2. Elitism

Second biggest problem with this game. Any behavior that breaks the typical dota 2's player routine of buying tango, healing salve, clarity potions, iron branches (perhaps with some boots of speed if they're feeling adventurous) and not casually kill-stealing mobs off teammates will result in a wave of F-bombs, intentional feeding, votes of surrender (LoL), rampant ragequits, spam prompts to report player X, inflammatory harassment and disconnecting users as far as the eye can see. I even had cases where players left the game because some guy forgot to buy a courier at the start of the game. In LoL, you can even report people for "being unskilled". As in, anyone. Even if they're level 1.To put it bluntly, it's a special kind of disgusting behavior that next to all MOBA games encourage.


3. Matchmaking

Coming close to nr 2 is the dota match-making. Broken, poorly thought through and executed horribly. You are prompted to select a variety of regions before initiating the match-making system and the more regions you have selected, the less waiting time.. Which begs the question, what is the point with the regional system if nobody sticks to their region? And why is the possibility to meet 4-5 organized people in a group, all sitting in ventrilo/teamspeak while packing thousands of hours in Dota 2 each as a new player with less than 10 hours can realistically get matched up against them with no complaints from the match-making system? This happens particulary often if you want to play with a friend or two and the last time I checked, the purpose of match-making was to find equally skilled opponents. Not Tyrannosaurus rex VS a duckling. Im reluctant to say that Dota 2 even has a match-making at all once you look at the facts and all the people creating new accounts just to stomp down the already bullied beginners.


4. Learning Curve

Accompanying Elitism comes the ferocious learning curve of Dota games. There are hundreds upon thousands upon millions of combinations available between the dozens of heroes to choose from and a large sum of different items. But don't expect to be able to actually try out combinations as your team screams their lunges out as you just bought the gloves of haste instead of wards, a courier, tango, potions and other "necessities", threatening to report, go AFK or simply outright leave the game if their demands are not met. Having a low-budget sight on things is nothing but mandatory as you attempt to try out your own builds in secret because any teammates you'll play with together in the lane WILL kill-steal from YOU whenever humanly possible, even standing idle for times on end, waiting to land the last hit instead of actively contributing DPS towards killing the opposite team's mobs diligently like one should. This screaming is especially loud and angry if you decide to play a support character.

I am well aware that there are dozens of bloated "tutorial" or "ai" modes all with laughable difficulties for you to try item combinations and the sort but it will have the same learning impact as an emulated store with grind required inbetween each purchases. Not being able to test things in actual hard practice without suffering from harassment by everyone you come across and all-around bullying will always leave you with an extreme disadvantage in the terms of knowledge & experience with little to no opportunities to learn or thrive unless you put the mindset of "Win or Rage" on which is the customs of dota players as seen in point 1. And the more time you play tutorials (Collecting Dota 2 hours), the even bigger chance you'll get from being ganked by people that only have played against other players.
Summed Up / TL;DR :: Part 2
5. Griefers

As of today, DotA 2 offers literally no punishment for exceedingly bad behavior. The current "Low Priority" matchmaking is nothing short of an laughing-stock disaster. Why? Let me go over some of the "consequences" It gives you.

--------------

1. No item drops - That's okay, I didn't want my inventory get filled with useless crates anyways.

2. Longer matchmaking - Uhh.. Sorry to break it to you but the "LP" matchmaking is more than often faster than normal priority. Why? Because the entire player-base is qualified to enter said low priority at any time by being as described in TL;DR 1. Even If it is seldomly a bit "longer" by 30 seconds, tabbing out of the game and watching a 1-2 minute youtube video is standard practice to begin with while waiting.

3. No Battle-Points - Seriously? The only loss from this is no treasure chests. And said content "Treasure chests" are less worth than unopened crates. Needless to say, It's like punishing someone at level 15 in an MMO by temporarily removing their chances of perhaps earning some level 2 items that are worth less than 0.01€ as everyone already have them.

4. Friends/Party will enter LP - Brilliant. Let's cripple the already mutilated friendship lists of those who play Dota 2 and subsequently turn down on the volume of future real-life death threats which fly around like poo from monkeys whenever a loss is aquired.

--------------

To test just how bad this system truly is, I decided to go ahead and join a couple of normal priority games, play for 5 minutes and then abandon, instantly queue up again and repeat the process. I managed to do so a whopping 5-6 times before I finally was aquired to LP. This means mathematically that you can ruin the game for 54+ people before ANY punishment is put on you. And from there, you can simply grief your way up from LP matches by playing KOTL (teleporting people to places they can't leave or just intentionally feeding/griefing) and repeat the process all over again because the genius developers for Dota 2 decided It was a good idea to remove 95% of people's ability to report actual abuse by restricting it to 3 reports per week.


6. Effect on People

Making the commitment to play DotA changes everyone as a person. For the worse. Why? Because the game inhabits "addictive" qualities similar with that of jamming needles full with dopamine into your spine every half hour. It's physically and mentally painful, it hurts your emotional stability, it hurts you as a person and it hurts the people around you and for what? A small kick of pleasure/self satisfaction as you managed to win a fundamentally unbalanced game that has an emphasis on gank above all else due to chance of getting a few players that have created new accounts to avoid the "ingame hours" matchmaking on your team or otherwise hope that no pre-meditated pubstomping will occur? Not worth it in so many ways as there are only very scarce cases of people actually starting to realize what the game is doing to them:

http://puu.sh/838Ie

http://puu.sh/838FF

http://puu.sh/7u8oD

This isn't just a coincidental thing. It is an reoccuring phenomenom that literally everyone will be guaranteed to feel not once but at several occassions as they helplessly continue to exposing themselves in harms way by playing. There's a scientific term for this and It's called Operant Conditioning. What does It sum up to and what's it's relation to Dota 2 you ask?

Positive Reinforcement, Appetite Stimulus: - Do something good (win a match or score a kill) and get a small dopamine release in your brain as a reward.

Consequence: Euphoria, Promotion of self-value/Self-entitlement, Agression towards threats of sourcing reinforcement.

----------

Negative Reinforcement, Disinclination/Disciplinary Stimulus: - Do something bad (die, lose a match, fail to meet your expectations) and get an ever growing yearning of a higher frequenting Appetite Stimulus.

Consequence: Increased aggression, Heightened expectations, Desperation, Growth of Yearning.

Summed up, Dota 2 is bad cocaine.



7. System Design

Dota 2, much like LoL, HoN and all the other Warcraft 3's Defenders of the Ancient Ripoffs, integrates roughly 95% of the original game-play, the only few changes being in a slightly different selection of heroes (Don't worry, they ripped plenty of old ones), very minor changes to items and different graphical designs, UI, shadows, etc. which is an incredibly stupid move considering there is so much that can be improved upon from letting a replacement join if someone leaves, adjusting gold-income for support characters, reducing the amount of "unreliable gold" which is lost at death since you can buy items anytime from a distance, punishing repetitive offenders more harshly such as banning/muting them or just giving the game an actual end-game or objective besides rince-and-repeat gank refined through decades of pub-stomping practice.

There is so much that can be done with ease to yield massive quality increases and yet Valve insists on tiny, miniscule changes, being afraid that altering something too much will cause their fancy hourly tournaments to collapse utterly because people who play the game for money (professionals) have only aquired the necessary knowledge to compete through rigorious repetivity rather than inhabiting any actual talent.

One can probably even learn to looking past on how'd they make such a dumb decision to go from weekly updates to monthly ones from the beta when It has now been a little over 3-4 months since the developers have introduced any new heroes to the mix which just shows that they have either too much on their plates or that they are too scared to act which is the opposite of what expanding MOBA's need, AKA a constant addition of new content.

But the real unforgiveable sin here is how they have over 500,000 active players (a big percentage of them wanting genuinely make Dota 2 a better playing experience for all) and utterly neglect the possibility to spearhead radical game changes in their test version of the game which can easily assimilate more data than the large hadron collider in a couple of weeks of testing thanks to the playerbase. I mean, come on Valve. You got the biggest player-base in the world, billions of cash, hundreds of talented developers, a practical infinite amount of servers and a game (which is currently rubbish) with a lot of potential. What are you waiting for?


8. Imbalance

For a company that made such an incredibly balanced game called Team Fortress 2, they sure haven't put much emphasis on making the game fair across all the oblivious ganking>skill habits and the horrendous mind-set they make people that play the game get into. I rarely play dota but from the rough thousands of hours I have played, I have seen (and still see) gigantic concerns on the Internet revolving the abilities or overall usage of certain heroes including but not limited to: Zeus, Drow Ranger, Viper, Sniper, Pudge, Spirit Breaker and more while also seeing these heroes partake in almost every dota 2 game I play.

It may seem inconsequental at first. Sure, a few heroes may be popular. But when there's over a hundred of them to choose from and a handful (5-7) of them are being played at a gross majority of all games being played, you're doing something wrong at a developer's standpoint. Be it having the hundreds of other heroes be too hard to get into for some players/looking too weak or just having said couple of heroes be too easy to play/too powerful.
Notes for Valve & Updates
On the off-chance that an employee of Valve or any other person that have any kind of influence over the games they make reads this, here are three golden pointers on what you can do to massively improve your games to avoid nasty guides like this one popping up.



1. LISTEN TO THE COMMUNITY!

I can't stress enough how important this is. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that all have people behind them. If you're a big-shot on the Internet with a big-shot multiplayer game, carefully listening to these people is pretty darn obviously important for any developer & producer worth his/her salary.


2. COMMUNICATE WITH THE COMMUNITY!

Almost equally as important is TALKING with these people and as with any serious conversation, you have to be able to fulfill the 5 golden R's since in this case, you are a company talking to your customers. I'll list these golden R's in the off-chance that you forgot.

Respect. Without respect.. Well, you wouldn't really be able to care for your customers and even less so be able to communicate with them properly so If you don't have any respect for your customers, you can stop reading right now.

Rapport. Having a close relation with the person/audience you're trying to talk to is the only real way you're gonna be able to understand what the other guy is thinking. You've kinda messed this one up at a number of occassions be it closing Valve's twitter account down, wildly permanently banning people on the Steam Forums or just having an overall huge lack of actual public statements whenever the community is involved (Yes, Including Give DIRETIDE༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ).

Relationship. No, not the part where we give you money and you give us games. That's called a business. Read the Community and Developer relations section of my guide for this one.

Reciprocity. Yes, this is the part where we give you money and you give us the privlege of playing your games. But think as it of this way: We would be a lot happier with giving you our money if we could see what you are up to now and then. Maybe even indulge us a small chat.

Respect. Yup, respect again. For this to work, we (the community) would have a need to respect you besides the quality of your games. Did you do something good and ethical recently like not having exclusive titles for the steamOS? Good! Did you do something bad lately like having the catastrophy that is no Diretide happen and still don't give the community any kind of serious action taken (firing/rehiring employees) and have no public statements made after a week while there's still on-going chaos and instead insult them http://puu.sh/57DRO.jpg Bad.

There's so much you can do to make us like you with ease but you insist on making change after change after change to make us hate you with big d!ckmoves like trying to take away our lawful right to file a class-action lawsuit against you by making us agree to something in your Terms of Use or the small things like taking away the /me functions in all steam chats which millions of users have been accustomed for years because some stupid brats allegedly got ripped off even with countless warnings to never give out account details every time you open up a chat window and the way you're going about doing things right now really Isn't working for either of us.


3. USE YOUR ASSETS TO CREATE A BETTER EXPERIENCE!

How about those servers huh, Valve? You kinda struggled for a couple of years after making Team Fortress 2 free, causing your entire infrastructre to be like a regular yo-yo for all the millions of users on Steam. Or how about the superB customer support you USED to have? Now it's seemingly all automatic and you still manage to have very lengthy response time with regular warnings of high customer support ticket traffic up while your Better Business Bureau profile now boasts over 200+ complaints that you have failed to respond to, all sent to your main complaint department PO box in Washington.

We understand that you're all big and complicated but when you are running an admittedly "all hands free" thing at your company and still have screw-ups like getting no halloween event to the most played game on Earth, It's one of the many signs that you probably need to put more people on that and a little bit of management here and there. Just sayin'



UPDATE 1: It's been quite a while now since the collosal f*ck up that was Diretide and while Valve still inherit the attitude of saying "Oh yeah.. That." whenever It's brought up, RockPaperShotgun recently asked the tough question of "What the hell are you guys doing?" and Valve's response was pretty much nothing short of disgusting:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/10/valve-talks-steamos-and-diretide-defends-communication/#more-183761

The entire interview sums up to the editor, Nathan, questioning a few business fellas over at Valve on just how they plan to build their entire SteamOS/Steam Machine projects by using user feedback when they have effectively not been talking with the community whatsoever at all fronts for the past couple of years, be it Valve's own game development or just anything else over here on Steam and all It's other games/events.

He got the usual, generic Valve response that "Oh, we don't discuss with the community. We just read the forums" (which is quite depressing when one consider just how blatantly easy permanent bans are being thrown out left and right on the Steam forums, both by Valve employees, volunteer moderators and independant developers while things like the previous solo-matchmaking feature got removed shortly after the community gets it after asking for it for over 1-2 years and 60-70+ forum posts in one big thread in the devdota forums)

And when Nathan pointed out the fact that perhaps It would be in good order to change this since It has clearly not been working now for a multitude amount of times, the "business guy" called Jan-Peter (who is effectively a lawyer over at Valve) gave a disgusting response saying that "I don't think there is a lot of improvement to be done there" when Nathan brought up on just how they dealt with the Diretide catastrophy, effectively confirming that the company as a whole thought there was nothing they could have done better and that It's gonna happen in the exact same manner again in the future repeatedly without putting any blame or consequences on anyone.


This effectively confirms on what I have been saying all along. You cannot possibly ever hope to have a proper, healthy relationship with someone if you are not TALKING with them. It is completely null and impossible for any kind of solid respect or rapport to be formed since talking to a wall gets you nowhere. Even if said wall happens to mutate and bend a little differently If you yell hard enough at it, the damage of reaching the point where you have the anger and urge to sdo said yelling has already been done.

Epic Hamcat posted:

Posting Guidelines

The DotA threads had historically been areas of incredibly low effort/low content/generally lovely posts. We are breaking this tradition. Keep your posts in this thread congenial and useful. The mods watch this thread very closely so don't think you'll be an exception with your smugpost. Here are some rules to help you avoid getting yourself probated and banned.

• Do NOT import any external drama into this thread. IRC drama especially is generally an instaprobo or ban
  
• Nobody cares what you think of another dota-esque game
  
• Don't gimmickpost about how good you are or whatever
  
• If you disagree with someone, that's fine, but explain why you disagree
  
• Try not be be stupidly insulting to your fellow posters
  
• No callouts
  
• If you post your stats you better loving have some content too. MS Paints of the game are also acceptable.
  
• No racist/homophobic/whatever posts. There are people from all over the world playing, and we are all just as bad as each other.
  
• NO COMPLAINS ABOUT THE CHATMUTE SYSTEM. YOU PROBABLY DESERVED IT STOP TALKING ABOUT IT.
  
• Don't circlejerk. This isn't a war zone, it's a thread.
  
• I guess don't post your stream link a lot
  

If you think someone is breaking the forum rules, report them and let the mods deal with it. DO NOT REPORT MULTIPLE POSTS BY THE SAME PERSON. DO NOT REPORT PEOPLE JUST BECAUSE YOU DISAGREE WITH THEM. The above list is not comprehensive, it's just based on what people have been probated for in the past. Be nice, and have fun discussing DOTA 2!






Length of Probation earned in DotA2 Thread #8: 0 Years 0 Months 2 Weeks 41 Days 0 Hours
Number of Bans: 0

Epic Hamcat posted:

6.81 is upon us



Welcome to the 8th DOTA2 Thread! We have a long OP, but you should read it! Zeus help you if you post before reading the third post of this op!
For totally new players check out the frog sirened NEW PLAYERS section before posting! Remember: One Game and One Training Bullet Point before posting!

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/dotagoons is the steam group
In game we have guild GOON, just ask in the LLJK chat in game and you'll get an invite.

4th Thread^* (Archives)
Probation Earned: 5 Months 2 weeks 3 days 6 Hours
Number of Bans: 2
5th Thread^* (Archives)
Probations Earned: 4 Months 1 weeks 1 days 12 Hours
Number of Bans: 4
6th Thread^* (Archives)
Probations Earned: 2 Months 1 Weeks 2 Days 6 Hours
Number of Bans: 3
7th Thread^*
Probation Earned7: 3 Months 3 Weeks 5 Days 12 Hours
Number of Bans: 3


What is DotA/2?

DOTA2, simply, is the new engine sequel/remake to/of DotA. It makes sense to start with that then:

DotA, or Defense of the Ancients, is a Warcraft III mod that involves two teams of five players competing against each other to take down their opponents' bases. While the base engine of DotA may have been an RTS, the game plays more like a hourlong RPG; each team's army units (known as "creeps") simply attack move to the enemy base in three lanes (bottom, middle, and top) and each player in DotA controls one of 100+ heroes, and gains gold and experience to buy items that can drastically boost their powers. As a single game takes around 40-60 minutes and every individual member is integral in the team's success, the game is highly competitive!

DOTA2 has a full team at Valve working on it. Most importantly, Icefrog, the current developer of WC3-DotA is working on DOTA2. There are a few goons on the valve team floating around the thread as well!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akUNmFAzS98


I wrote a history-thing about Dota 1's creation for TMC here.

Who plays DotA?

Today, almost a decade after its inception, DotA has an estimated 10 million players on battle.net, Garena, and other international servers. A patch can get up to six million downloads in a day.

The competitive scene is ridiculously large and alive as well; from the Chinese dynasties CCM and LGD frought with succession drama to the old-school European dominators like MYM, OK, and Na'Vi, competitors are drawn from all over the world. This large playerbase contributes to a diversity of playstyles and strategies, and the large hero pool and monthly patches ensure that the game never gets stale. Recently as well, Starcraft I/II heavy hitters TeamLiquid have officially began supporting DOTA2 as one of their games. You can now find competitive info and a TL team, just check their site!

Gosugamers, JoinDotA, and now TeamLiquid have all the competitive news and streams you could want.

NEW PLAYERS

Most of you fucks wonderful people won't read the whole OP before jumping in, then ask 'hey wat do i do ive never played' in the thread. Here are some things you can do to avoid this unhappy fate

• Watch the 'How to play Dota2 in 4 minutes' video above
  
• Read this
  
• Check out the official guide here
  
• If you have time, watch this.
  

Well should I just do bot games until I'm pro?
Some people find that bot games are less anxiety producing than jumping straight into a normal match. This may be true, but you'll see from even a bot game that there are plenty of people just as bad as you are. Still, I think I'd recommend your first game be a bot game just so you can get a feel of how the game controls, and how you buy things from the shop.

What hero should I play?
General recommendations for new players include
AGI: Viper (Carry, Ranged) or Ursa (Carry/Ganker, Melee)
STR: Sven (Carry/Ganker, Melee) or Tidehunter (Support, Melee)
INT: Lich (Support, Ranged) or Shadow Shaman (Ganker/Support, Ranged)

AVOID: Chen, Enchantress, Meepo, Visage, Invoker

All this being said, if you've done at least one of the above bullet points, and played a single game, feel free to ask any questions you have in the thread. It's just that 'I'm am entirely new and don't know what I don't know' isnt a very helpful point of reference for us!

IF YOU'RE COMING FROM LEAGUE OR HON: Welcome! Read the Transitioning to DOTA guide in the second post!

The International



The International 2014 has started!

It runs this year July 18-21 (Though qualifiers started on the 12th of May)



Here are the invitees this year. There will also be 5 qualifier places this year: NA, SEA, EU, and CN, with a wildcard for the 2nd place from each region.

So, what is The International?

Every year, Valve sponsors an over one million dollar tournament, with free broadcasts in multiple languages.
Yes, you read that correctly. OVER [strike]$1,000,000.[/strike] $4,000,000 loving dollars

All of the VODs for the Internationals past are available here. Be aware that TI2011 is a lot of farming however. Here's some quick info on what's what from each year, be aware that if you want to watch them all there may be spoilers if you click on the matches listed.

TI2011:
Champions:Na'Vi (Ukraine)
Set to Watch: The Semifinals and Finals

TI2012:
Champions: iG (China)
Set to Watch: LGD vs Navi

TI2013:
Champions: The Alliance (Sweden)
Set to Watch: Liquid vs TongFu and Na'Vi vs Alliance

This sounds awfully similar to...

Yes, all those games that seem familiar (LoL, HoN, Demigod, Bloodline Champions, Realm of the Titans) are all DotA-likes (or Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas aka MOBA or Action Real-Time Strategy aka ARTS). Make no mistake though, DotA2 may be prettier and have some new tricks, but in terms of mechanics and gameplay, it is the direct reincarnation of DotA. Direct. As in dont complain about last hitting in this thread, of course it's in. Discussions about mechanics are welcome, just consider that almost every mechanic in dota2 is a direct design decision, and isn't just a legacy feature.

Sounds good, how do I play?

Dota2 has officially launched! Just go to the page in the store and you can play! There's some sort of 'queue' when you go to install it but from what I've heard it goes by very quickly.

Other Info

• DotA2 uses Valve's Source engine: global lighting, cloth simulation, and integrated voice chat are part of the game.
  
• AI bots will eventually take over for disconnected players (maybe), and are available to play against in unranked training matches as well.
  
• Some hero skills work slightly better with the replacement of the Warcraft III engine with the Source engine. Examples include Rubik's Spellsteal.
  
• Valve has integrated Steamworks. You can create and submit new items which get voted on and potentially added on a weekly basis.
  
• There are several available matchmaking modes, currently including All Pick (Any Hero), Single Draft (Select between 1 of 3 heroes, 1 per attribute), Captain's Mode (Draft of most heroes, captain makes picks), Random Draft (Pool of 20 heroes, players make picks), All Random (Everyone gets a random hero + bonus gold), Captain's Draft (Like Random Draft with a banning/picking captain), and Least Played (All Pick, but your top 40 most played heroes are unavailable)
  
• A coaching system where veteran players can help out new players. "The coach sees the pupil's screen, and gets private voice and chat channels to communicate with them. The coach probably won't be able to take control of anything directly (once again, the details are currently under discussion)." This system is nearing release
  
• The game is F2P with a cosmetic shop. All heroes are unlocked, you buy cosmetic items:
  
  

What does this game even look like?

You can watch some streams! See the next post for some recommendations. There are also some pictures/fanart at the end of the post. Some reviews have said it looks dated but they're honestly really mind-numbingly dumb.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cSFPIwMEq4

What's the deal with the store? This poo poo is expensive? What is a chest? I still can't read the op so this section also has TRADING INFO in it?

The store in DOTA2 works very similarly to TF2's store. You can buy individual items for prices varying from about 50 cents to 7+ dollars, or bundles of items for a group priced discount. Anything (not bundles) in the store can also drop in game, with the notable exception of Unusual Couriers, which only drop from chests.

Chests are the other random things you'll see dropping at the end of games. They don't do gently caress all, but you can buy a key for 2.50$ from the store to open it. Opening a chest will yield one random item from the list of items in the chest description, but like all good gambles also has a small (1%) chance of containing something super cool! These super cool things are unusual couriers, which is a courier with a coolio superneat effect attached to it. They can look something like this.


Generally the advice is 'dont open chests', since unusuals aside anything you want from them is probably worth less than that key, and you can just trade for it.

Don't post trades in this thread, we have a thread for that HERE

If you want to spend real money on Dota items but want them cheaper, goon Captain Invictus sells steam things, including dota items, for a discount.

Also for trading, the Steam Marketplace which was recently added currently supports the selling of Chests, Keys, and Vintage (Green Quality) Items all items.

What's this about a Test Beta Client?

Test patches come out occasionally, if no big bugs are left, they push it to live the next day.

When you get in the beta you'll notice a second client: Dota 2 Test. It's purpose is supposedly to find major bugs before they go on to live beta client, in actuality it's a bunch of people sitting in bot games playing the new hero if there is one. There's only 2000 slots available on the test servers, so nobody really uses it. You don't need to bother installing it.

Links

• DotaCinema's VOD archive. Fantastic, check it out!
  
• Valve's DOTA2 Page and Blog
  
• Playdota, DotA's Official Site
  
• Icefrog's Devblog for DotA
  
• TeamLiquid, which now supports DOTA2!
  
• Gosugamers for the Competitive Scene as well
  
• CyborgMatt's blog, Where he analysis patches to see what wasn't in the patch notes.
  
• DotaHut Solomid.net's Dota 2 guides. Featured guides mostly written by professional players.
  
• Tired of trying to figure out prodota streaming habits? Take it easy with this addon for Firefox or Chrome!
  
• OH MY GOD A DOTA2 IN GAME TRANSLATOR / Mirror. WARNING: Nobody really loving knows, but this tool may get you a 30 day dota ban as of 9/23. Again, this hasn't been confirmed!
  
• STATS WEBSITE RIP 2012-2013
  
• More Detailed Stats Site but it takes time to cache your games and whatnot.
  
• Hero stats in pro games
  

Current Events

Check out our PRO DOTA2 THREAD: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3601662
If you want to find the VOD for a match, check out DotaCinema's VOD site, it's real good!

Latest Patch - April 29th (Expected)

http://www.dota2.com/springcleaning/


In-Game Stuff

To join an inhouse:

• Go to the Play tab
  
• Find a Lobby
  
• Private Games
  
• Type in the password given into that box and hit search. The password is usually lljk, or lljk2, etc
  

Console and Autoexec commands:
To input any of these commands, add "-console" to the launch options for DotA2 on steam. You can also make a file called autoexec.cfg in X:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\dota 2 beta\dota\cfg, and put in commands that you would put in console to have the automatically executed when the game starts.

There is also an (new) generator for this here.

• chat_join lljk - Automatically joins a chat channel when you start dota, in this case, lljk.
  
• con_enable 1 - Adds the console to your game, same as adding -console to the launch options. Press ` (by default) in game to toggle console.
  
• dota_health_per_vertical_marker 200 - Changes how much health each of those bars is; by default it's 200, you might want to change it to 100 if you play League or want more accurate health bars.
  
• dota_minimap_misclick_time 0 - You can up the time on this to set how long your mouse has to be on the minimap to click on it, if you constantly click on the minimap by accident.
  
• dota_force_right_click_attack 0 - Right click deny Change the 0 to a 1 to enable it.
  
• dota_disable_range_finder 1 - Range indicators If you set this to 0, you'll see a small red/green bar from your character to your mouse pointer that makes spell ranges much more visible than looking at the mouse cursor changing alone.
  
• dota_sf_old_heropedia "1" Old hero learn tab thing? I dont know why you'd want it but there.
  

^{Credit to Minrad}

Stuff to Change in Options:

• To remove camera pan acceleration, put the 'camera acceleration' bar all the way to the right. I'd also put the camera speed bar to the right.
  
• Your hotkeys start out silly, move the item hotkeys somewhere off of the numpad (like alt qweasd) and change your level-up skill and stats hotkey to something you can get without moving your hand super far (I use Z and X) Forgot to mention: B for buy! I'd like to set C to center on my hero but it wont let me.
  
• Enable double activate item and enable shop hotkeys in Game (if you want, I plan on learning to buy from the shop)
  
• Turn the render slider all the way to the right!
  

^{Credit to Gokuesque}

Changing recommended items:

• Go to your steam/steamapps/common/dota 2 beta/dota/itembuilds folder.
  
• Paste "item" "item_tpscroll" in every hero's core item list.
  
• Don't like having Mask of Madness as a core item on Night Stalker? Want an urn instead? Change that stuff all in the file.
  
• There's a dota2alttab item list here.
  
• http://dota2-itemchanger.googlecode.com/files/dota2itemchanger.zip - A program made to do the same thing, but easier. Requires .NET
  How to use the program:
  
  1. Unzip anywhere
     
  2. Run dota2itemchanger.exe, select a hero, and then drag&drop items from the left to the starting/early/... box in the right (the box appears after you select the item type at the top)
     
  3. Click save (you will get warnings if you don't add any items for a category)
     
  4. A new .txt file (for example, default_antimage.txt) will be created in the current directory. You can open it in notepad and check it, maybe make modifications about the item order
     
  5. Create a backup of the default hero itembuild (for example, c:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\dota 2 beta\dota\itembuilds\default_antimage.txt)
     
  6. Copy the file from 4. to the location mentioned at 5.
     
  7. Start the game, create a practice game and check if everything is ok
     

Other Useful Scripts:

• http://pastebin.com/FxPCueM8 - Adds aliases to search for hon and dota1 item names. Goes into "...\dota 2 beta\dota\scripts\npc", make sure to make a backup. Credit lprsti99
  
• http://pastebin.com/pew7W7A2 - Courier Autofetch script. Goes into autoexec.
  
• AND ON THE THIRD DAY IT WAS REBORN: NBA JAM ACCOUNCER
  
• http://www.dota2layout.com/ - An online layout editor so you can make pretty pictures of dicks jizzing out agi carries and share it with the rest of the world more easily.
  
• http://pastebin.com/EVQKkxgn - If the dota:// links dont work for you, running this (saved as a .reg) will fix it. Make sure you change the M:/ path to the correct drive/path for your dota2 installation
  

Ancient words of wisdom...

Long ago in a distant land, I, Terrorblade, the shape shifting master of darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil. But a foolish samurai juggernaut wielding a magic sword stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final blow was struck, I tore open a portal in time, and flung him into the future where my evil is law. Now the fool seeks to return to the past and undo the future that is Terrorblade.



Don't play with tcjimbo.

Wangsbig posted:

good thread

Tipme posted:

Stoat posted:

hey just making the only good post on this page ok bye

Luigi Thirty posted:

The Basics of Video Games

Video-games are an Interactive media with often visual/audio feedback that react to input given by an user, the player. This interactive medium of dota 2's concern, is currently being controlled through a digital computer system (PC/Mac) by the use of external input devices (mouse/keyboard)


Where do these video-games come from?

They come from people that are commonly called software engineers or "programmers" that construct these video-games starting from a ground structure often referred to as an "software development process" once they have a clear documentation of what is to be achieved/built/constructed. The people who creates the due process of designing these documentations are called Game Designers.


What are these "Game Designers"?

They are people who, as described above, either lay out ground-work for an entertainment software product or continue building/developing on an already existing product or a product idea procured by someone else. An example of this would be game-designers hired to continue working on a sequel for a game. These people can arguably be compared to directors of films, except they have been extremely negatively tied down in terms of freedom and creative thought due to a number of reasons including but not limited to: Marketing departments, producers, line producers, inflexible writers, publishers with little/no regard to working conditions/hours and sometimes even political/religious groups demanding changes or removal of content while trying to claim a moral high-ground. Needless to say, going from absolute freedom in your mom's basement to behind a desk inside a big corporate building is a huge downspiral for any designer when it comes to creativity.
What makes me a good Video-Game?
This is a question that can be answered in a multitude of ways but at the end of the road, it will always be dictated by one thing: Fun. I will extend to what kinds of "Fun" one can have in the next section.

While video-games have been progressing well into being considered an art-form, they are still classified as an entertainment medium even though it has been frequently dabbled into aspects of learning as well, be it military simulators or kid-math games. However, the most successful ones are always dictated to how much fun one would have playing them.

Games can also be compared to food, which comes down to everyone having a different taste. This can very often be classified with "genres" such as FPS (First Person Shooters), RTS (Real Time Strategy), RPG (Role Playing Game) and so forth. And with these "tastes" comes different expectations from the people that like these genres (except people that just got introduced to video-games, more on that later) because they played a game with the same genre in the past.

For example, If I came from playing Warcraft and into Starcraft or vice versa, I would have an expectation that I will be able to bind units to quick-selection keys or being able to select multiple units by holding down the mouse button and dragging it, causing a targeting rectangle to appear. If Starcraft would fail to deliver these features, I and other new players would be rendered not only confused over the controls but frustrated as well since I and any other new players are now forced to learn new routines in order to migrate from one game to another.

Things like this will contribute negatively to a game in the form of a steep "Learning curve". More on that later.
Fun you say? What kinds of "Fun" are there?
Life holds many pleasures and while I can state most if not all of them in this guide, i will stick to the kinds of fun that you can expect from the entertainment medium known as a video-game. There are roughly 7-10 types in total and I will explain most of them to the best of my ability while bringing them up in regards to Dota 2 later.

Also keep in mind that one man's pleasure is another man's pain which can be bent further depending on what game you are associating what kind of fun with.

---------------------------------.

1. Challenge.

This is probably the most well known fun one can have from video-games. Overcoming an obstacle, be it beating a difficult boss or finishing a really long, intense game, a strong feeling of accomplishment will always follow.


2. Sensation.

Arguably the second most known "fun" to be found in video games. It is experienced by looking at pretty graphics or listening to some really awesome sound-track as you play. The importance of this "fun" has come under heavy controversy the past few years. More recently, the guy responsible for the graphics in Crysis, AKA the Crytek "boss", has made a public statement believing that graphics account for 60% of a game which is fatuousness by all accounts since history and events of today has shown us that graphics does not even remotely account for 60% of a game, be it the old Ping Pong game that was insanely popular with the very bare minimum of graphics, Minecraft only consisting of blocks or Dwarf Fortress with no graphics at all besides text. The more accurate digit in percentage would be around 12.5-20% of a game. The statement in question can be found across the Internet but here's a link to a random article about it:
http://www.x360magazine.com/general/crytek-graphics-are-60-of-the-game/


3. Story.

There's nothing like experiencing a striking story inside a video-game you are strongly interested in. While it does not have the advantage of books allowing your imagination lay the visual groundwork, it can still have a striking, interactive appeal that is sure to leave a mark when presented right and without sacrifices from other kinds of fun.


4. Social Interaction.

As the Internet has proved countless amounts of times, a community not only pays the fees so a video-game can be made & progressed but also how it is received in the media and on the forums without even having a game to be multiplayer. If a game is multiplayer however, the community of a game/series becomes that more vital. Be it the important "first impressions" game designers work so hard on delivering in order to draw new players into using their product and growing an interest for it or just establishing an social medium in which you interact with other people that have the same interests.


5. Immersion.

This kind of fun comes in conjunction with a story. A game needs to have an intruiging make-believe fantasy world without sacrificing game-play elements. This is where game-designers that have freedom to do as they wish with a wild imagination and a sense of originality becomes invaluable. The current "Indie" market is famous for housing many original titles. While a game's story may be weak or even predictable, a game that has a good immersion can easily make up for those faults.


6. Discovery.

This fun can also be merged with the above Immersion. Having a vast world that lays between your feet to explore as you wish is the ultimate, immersive depth any interactive experience can offer you besides perhaps a game where you are swimming around in an ocean full of sharks with your body submerged in water and your eyes are in a 3d visor.


7. Expression.

Another important aspect of video-games is the ability to be able to express yourself creatively or otherwise culturally/emotionally. Be it building a 56 feet tall diamond genitalia in Minecraft or donning your unusual hats in Team Fortress 2, freedom of creativity and vanity choices can be worth it's weight in gold.


8. Pastime.

The last and arguably least "fun" one can derive of a game is the act of engaging in an activity that is more preferrable than work in order to make time pass faster. As "fun" itself is described as an activity in itself, I got no choice but to include it even though the act of engaging in replayability kills the original experience. There are however, certain positive elements to this "fun" that can be described as a game's replayability if there are a sufficient amount of dynamically changing elements to make it differentiate greatly from the original experience. Sadly, not many video-games have managed to do this as of today.
Learning curves and how they affect you, the Player
As probably most of you know, learning curves decide how difficult it is to learn the ropes of a game. The game in question does not even have to be new to you. Learning curves extend through the entire game, be it in the tutorial or at the end-game where a 10+ year old veteran of the game possess 1337 hax skillz. Fundamentally, all games are best off having a prominently going learning-curve that is smooth by managing to stay inbetween the graph of someone's personal ability and actual hard challenge. Unfortunately, the balance of this in modern games have been ruined due to the entertainment's industry realization of a new group of gamers most commonly referred to as "casuals", causing the learning curve to never achieve a point of actual consistent difficulty because the element of irreduceable complexivity is next to zero.

What is irreduceable complexivity you may ask? It's a bit hard to explain but to very crudely sum it up, It's the ability to use the meaningful choices and possibilities given to you by a game without having to know three books worth of information on the subject before you can use these choices and possibilities to play the game. Another way of summing it up would be to call it getting the most out of a game's depth with the minimal amount of mental stress that comes with putting your brain to it's best ability when learning all the things required to play.

Ironing out the learning curve of a game is the second to last thing a game-designer should do next to fixing critical bugs before even considering release because the learning curve always dictates on how well the features of your game will be picked up by the people that plays the game, least said, it's very vital to have a good one. If your learning curve is too steep in the beginning, there are probably too many elements or features for new players to adapt to. You can correct this by reallocating some excess features to the end-content of your game. An example of this kind of learning curve can be seen in the popular MMO, World of Warcraft.

Blizzard (Creators of World of Warcraft) have been carefully adjusting the learning curve of their game by locking abilities and skills, only to become available to the player bit after bit as he/she levels up the character and they are still adjusting this system with almost every expansion-pack released to this very day. If you have seen the result from someone that have never played wow suddenly buy an account with max-level characters in a MMO, you know what I'm talking about.

There are also more prominent examples such as in the new Planetside 2 where people were brutally thrown into the game (Literally shot in a drop-pod straight into combat at square one) with little to no chance to do stuff like even change options (Mouse sensitivity/graphics tuning) and as a result, a MASSIVE game with huge potential went from tens of thousands playing it to only a couple of thousands due to not only having a very steep learning curve but also boasting very bad community-developer relations. I will however not go into detail with this since I expect you to know what a learning curve is at this point.
Why Matchmaking is so critical
All games that feature multiplayer should have an immense design focus on creating a solid and fair method of pairing together players that are on a equal footing or have a complete removal of all automatic joining methods with the exception of 100% random games (See TF2's/CS server list). Ignoring this may not seem like a big deal at first glance but under the shell lies complete chaos, waiting to get out.

If an interactive medium fails to deliver a truly "fair" experience or otherwise unable to promptly and effectively correct any inbalances, be it technicalities with the system itself, the game concept or as discussed, Matchmaking, it will ultimately tip over, ruining the entire intended experience due to some arguably minor design flaws (that can easily be corrected in a patch or two) which not only runs the risk of building a game on a crooked groundwork but also alienates the fans that play the game from the rest of the world since they are consorting to error, most times without even reaching a point of self-realization by accepting mediocrity and failure on a daily basis.
Community and Developer relations
As I noted above, establishing a solid, trustworthy and open-doors Community & Developer relation is vital in this age of gaming history because the fans are the heart of any modern video-game, be it their ability to partake in the game's development and get their demands/expectations known early on in the development process or creating the content themselves in for example, the Steam Workshop. Having old fans beta-test new titles in a series or providing alpha/kickstarter funding to aspiring developers can also have immensively large impacts and as such, Community is key. if you use it right.

Normally, one would consider that creating a poll to change factor X to factor Y or factor Z on for example, a forum would be the most "fair" and "best" way to conduct game-design changes or to just listen to a public opinion overall. But they would be wrong in most cases if such votes would somehow affect the game-play balance. For every decision and choice made by an individual playing the game, they have a reason and a back-story for making this choice. Be it "nerfing" or "buffing" something, a personal gain is often included in such opinions one way or another.

To truly take a design "vote" into consideration, you would need to know the in-and-outs of decisions, compare them to the interests of your game's success as a whole (the fun factors) and then make a change, addition or substraction to the best of your ability.

This means, by par with logic, any player of your game that is inbetween the line of "Casual" and "Professional" (Actual job playing games) is a bad candidate to participate in any vote that involves the fundamentals or otherwise gameplay changing aspects of your game. Casuals will give you the most valuable insight of seeing from a brand-new neutral perspective which will allow you to lay out the vital ground-work every good game needs while professionals will be able (after prolonged playing) to give you technical details and modifications required for the end-game content.

This is why the middle-ground is considered one of the trickiest things to "get right" in games. You got a start and an ending but nothing in-between and there's no real shortcut to getting it right besides taking as much statistical data as humanly possible from people playing your game.

This is also a point where Dota 2 has failed immensively. They went from having a 2+ year ongoing beta, a fundamentally very good opportunity and borderline luxury for developers to receive loads of feedback and make changes to their game before release. Dota 2 received tons and tons of feedback along with hundreds of forum post pages & ingame reports of bugs and they did next to nothing to correct/change things before kicking the game into a "Released" status before taking another dive by making a violent change from making weekly updates to monthly ones. A big reason for this insanely stiff development process is both due to an seemingly experimental collection of methods on just how to manage a game along with some very incompetent staff that has been high-lighted quite nicely in the Diretide catastrophy.

Then again, all of these issues origin from mostly one thing. The pressure from the tournament players of the game. Since any significant change could seriously compromise their performance (that they have gotten from ages of repetition before competition), the developers cannot even fanthom the idea of perhaps remaking a hero almost completely as necessary (I'm looking at you, Chen/Visage/Broodmother).

Unfortunately, choosing tournament over us regular people means you cannot and never will have a game being used for competitive/professional purposes and at the same time have something regular or casual gamers can enjoy. Why? Because for example:


A Starcraft II professional player can hit up to 400 keystrokes, or "actions" being given out to troops per minute. The game designers sees some over-extravagant issue that can be abused by being able to have that amount of speed and control and make changes to perhaps reduce the efficiency of some agile unit the professional player was using. Now, the other races have a definitive weakness to go on due to the loss of agile firepower and the designers see another power-lapse problem and compensate it by boosting a more powerful, slower unit in the same race.

Now everyone gives up on using those agile units and instead resort to spamming these recently "buffed" powerful units with no way to balance or otherwise alter this in the same race and the result is a massive out-cry from the community, demanding changes so they go onto the next race and start to alter there instead, in turn creating more dilemmas that will go in an endless circle because they want to make all professional changes into the standard game which is not going to work out if mixed with several audiences at once. It is also a prime example of building a game ontop of crooked groundwork.
Video-game content, Quality over Quantity?
The amount of raw content a game has can either be deducted from how large the game-files are, how long it takes one to "finish" the game, amount of different dynamics and overall depth of it.

As attractive as it is to have several football fields of content, it's not going to matter much if the people playing it are not given enough meaningful choices from all the possibilities on your football fields or if it becomes too complex for someone to learn, reaching back to the learning curve section.

Essentially when you do have a sizeable chunk of content, filled with information, features, complex maps and ways to get around these maps, it will be the game-designers job to get as much accessability as humanly possible with the minimal amount of sacrifices to either the targeted audience while also keeping as much depth as possible. Unfortunately, this has not been the case for recent games on the market.

Instead of making a quality product for a selected audience, recent producers in today's world have instead decided to dilute entire games themselves in effort to reach out to all possible audiences, hoping to maximize profits made off said product and when a buzz is created due to this "everyone plays It so I will too" phenomenon, they would immediately start spewing out content in quick succession in order to "ride the wave". The recent occurance of this has been the Call of Duty series, which I have never seen a studio lose respect faster than Infinity Ward.
Summed Up / TL;DR :: Part 1
1. Community

This has to be the biggest problem of them all in Dota 2. Never In my entire life have I witnessed a worse community revolving around a video-game. The players/fans are: Egotistic, ego centric, unsporting, aggressive, hostile, uncaring, mean, mistrusting, immature, callous, apathetic, biased and incredibly pretentious while at every loss prompting everyone inside the current game to "Report player X" if someone on their team was even remotely new to the game or did any other action not sanctified by them, be it going in what lane you want, not purchasing courier/wards on demand or simply just having an unlucky run. Along with being completely miserable to be around, they frequently never speak the language in the region you're playing and nowhere else is this more apparent than the russian being spammed into the chat at all times thanks to the developers blatant denial to implement region-locks/other methods to encourage people to stick to their original regions. And if they do know English, trolling & false reports are nothing short but assured to come from all directions to all teams.

You can test for yourself and see just how wretched the community is at a whole by simply comparing the waiting times for low-priority (Supposed "punishment" automatically banished out by Valve if someone gets 2-3+ reports) and normal matchmaking. At an almost guaranteed rate even after they strangled the amount of reporting possible, Low priority matchmaking is very often much faster than the regular which means an almost majority of people playing the game are being put into the LP queue for "bad behavior".

Even Valve themselves have openly come out and shared their opinion about the Dota 2 fanbase/players being "Entitled Pricks" and that's saying alot. http://puu.sh/7vU35.jpg



2. Elitism

Second biggest problem with this game. Any behavior that breaks the typical dota 2's player routine of buying tango, healing salve, clarity potions, iron branches (perhaps with some boots of speed if they're feeling adventurous) and not casually kill-stealing mobs off teammates will result in a wave of F-bombs, intentional feeding, votes of surrender (LoL), rampant ragequits, spam prompts to report player X, inflammatory harassment and disconnecting users as far as the eye can see. I even had cases where players left the game because some guy forgot to buy a courier at the start of the game. In LoL, you can even report people for "being unskilled". As in, anyone. Even if they're level 1.To put it bluntly, it's a special kind of disgusting behavior that next to all MOBA games encourage.


3. Matchmaking

Coming close to nr 2 is the dota match-making. Broken, poorly thought through and executed horribly. You are prompted to select a variety of regions before initiating the match-making system and the more regions you have selected, the less waiting time.. Which begs the question, what is the point with the regional system if nobody sticks to their region? And why is the possibility to meet 4-5 organized people in a group, all sitting in ventrilo/teamspeak while packing thousands of hours in Dota 2 each as a new player with less than 10 hours can realistically get matched up against them with no complaints from the match-making system? This happens particulary often if you want to play with a friend or two and the last time I checked, the purpose of match-making was to find equally skilled opponents. Not Tyrannosaurus rex VS a duckling. Im reluctant to say that Dota 2 even has a match-making at all once you look at the facts and all the people creating new accounts just to stomp down the already bullied beginners.


4. Learning Curve

Accompanying Elitism comes the ferocious learning curve of Dota games. There are hundreds upon thousands upon millions of combinations available between the dozens of heroes to choose from and a large sum of different items. But don't expect to be able to actually try out combinations as your team screams their lunges out as you just bought the gloves of haste instead of wards, a courier, tango, potions and other "necessities", threatening to report, go AFK or simply outright leave the game if their demands are not met. Having a low-budget sight on things is nothing but mandatory as you attempt to try out your own builds in secret because any teammates you'll play with together in the lane WILL kill-steal from YOU whenever humanly possible, even standing idle for times on end, waiting to land the last hit instead of actively contributing DPS towards killing the opposite team's mobs diligently like one should. This screaming is especially loud and angry if you decide to play a support character.

I am well aware that there are dozens of bloated "tutorial" or "ai" modes all with laughable difficulties for you to try item combinations and the sort but it will have the same learning impact as an emulated store with grind required inbetween each purchases. Not being able to test things in actual hard practice without suffering from harassment by everyone you come across and all-around bullying will always leave you with an extreme disadvantage in the terms of knowledge & experience with little to no opportunities to learn or thrive unless you put the mindset of "Win or Rage" on which is the customs of dota players as seen in point 1. And the more time you play tutorials (Collecting Dota 2 hours), the even bigger chance you'll get from being ganked by people that only have played against other players.
Summed Up / TL;DR :: Part 2
5. Griefers

As of today, DotA 2 offers literally no punishment for exceedingly bad behavior. The current "Low Priority" matchmaking is nothing short of an laughing-stock disaster. Why? Let me go over some of the "consequences" It gives you.

--------------

1. No item drops - That's okay, I didn't want my inventory get filled with useless crates anyways.

2. Longer matchmaking - Uhh.. Sorry to break it to you but the "LP" matchmaking is more than often faster than normal priority. Why? Because the entire player-base is qualified to enter said low priority at any time by being as described in TL;DR 1. Even If it is seldomly a bit "longer" by 30 seconds, tabbing out of the game and watching a 1-2 minute youtube video is standard practice to begin with while waiting.

3. No Battle-Points - Seriously? The only loss from this is no treasure chests. And said content "Treasure chests" are less worth than unopened crates. Needless to say, It's like punishing someone at level 15 in an MMO by temporarily removing their chances of perhaps earning some level 2 items that are worth less than 0.01€ as everyone already have them.

4. Friends/Party will enter LP - Brilliant. Let's cripple the already mutilated friendship lists of those who play Dota 2 and subsequently turn down on the volume of future real-life death threats which fly around like poo from monkeys whenever a loss is aquired.

--------------

To test just how bad this system truly is, I decided to go ahead and join a couple of normal priority games, play for 5 minutes and then abandon, instantly queue up again and repeat the process. I managed to do so a whopping 5-6 times before I finally was aquired to LP. This means mathematically that you can ruin the game for 54+ people before ANY punishment is put on you. And from there, you can simply grief your way up from LP matches by playing KOTL (teleporting people to places they can't leave or just intentionally feeding/griefing) and repeat the process all over again because the genius developers for Dota 2 decided It was a good idea to remove 95% of people's ability to report actual abuse by restricting it to 3 reports per week.


6. Effect on People

Making the commitment to play DotA changes everyone as a person. For the worse. Why? Because the game inhabits "addictive" qualities similar with that of jamming needles full with dopamine into your spine every half hour. It's physically and mentally painful, it hurts your emotional stability, it hurts you as a person and it hurts the people around you and for what? A small kick of pleasure/self satisfaction as you managed to win a fundamentally unbalanced game that has an emphasis on gank above all else due to chance of getting a few players that have created new accounts to avoid the "ingame hours" matchmaking on your team or otherwise hope that no pre-meditated pubstomping will occur? Not worth it in so many ways as there are only very scarce cases of people actually starting to realize what the game is doing to them:

http://puu.sh/838Ie

http://puu.sh/838FF

http://puu.sh/7u8oD

This isn't just a coincidental thing. It is an reoccuring phenomenom that literally everyone will be guaranteed to feel not once but at several occassions as they helplessly continue to exposing themselves in harms way by playing. There's a scientific term for this and It's called Operant Conditioning. What does It sum up to and what's it's relation to Dota 2 you ask?

Positive Reinforcement, Appetite Stimulus: - Do something good (win a match or score a kill) and get a small dopamine release in your brain as a reward.

Consequence: Euphoria, Promotion of self-value/Self-entitlement, Agression towards threats of sourcing reinforcement.

----------

Negative Reinforcement, Disinclination/Disciplinary Stimulus: - Do something bad (die, lose a match, fail to meet your expectations) and get an ever growing yearning of a higher frequenting Appetite Stimulus.

Consequence: Increased aggression, Heightened expectations, Desperation, Growth of Yearning.

Summed up, Dota 2 is bad cocaine.



7. System Design

Dota 2, much like LoL, HoN and all the other Warcraft 3's Defenders of the Ancient Ripoffs, integrates roughly 95% of the original game-play, the only few changes being in a slightly different selection of heroes (Don't worry, they ripped plenty of old ones), very minor changes to items and different graphical designs, UI, shadows, etc. which is an incredibly stupid move considering there is so much that can be improved upon from letting a replacement join if someone leaves, adjusting gold-income for support characters, reducing the amount of "unreliable gold" which is lost at death since you can buy items anytime from a distance, punishing repetitive offenders more harshly such as banning/muting them or just giving the game an actual end-game or objective besides rince-and-repeat gank refined through decades of pub-stomping practice.

There is so much that can be done with ease to yield massive quality increases and yet Valve insists on tiny, miniscule changes, being afraid that altering something too much will cause their fancy hourly tournaments to collapse utterly because people who play the game for money (professionals) have only aquired the necessary knowledge to compete through rigorious repetivity rather than inhabiting any actual talent.

One can probably even learn to looking past on how'd they make such a dumb decision to go from weekly updates to monthly ones from the beta when It has now been a little over 3-4 months since the developers have introduced any new heroes to the mix which just shows that they have either too much on their plates or that they are too scared to act which is the opposite of what expanding MOBA's need, AKA a constant addition of new content.

But the real unforgiveable sin here is how they have over 500,000 active players (a big percentage of them wanting genuinely make Dota 2 a better playing experience for all) and utterly neglect the possibility to spearhead radical game changes in their test version of the game which can easily assimilate more data than the large hadron collider in a couple of weeks of testing thanks to the playerbase. I mean, come on Valve. You got the biggest player-base in the world, billions of cash, hundreds of talented developers, a practical infinite amount of servers and a game (which is currently rubbish) with a lot of potential. What are you waiting for?


8. Imbalance

For a company that made such an incredibly balanced game called Team Fortress 2, they sure haven't put much emphasis on making the game fair across all the oblivious ganking>skill habits and the horrendous mind-set they make people that play the game get into. I rarely play dota but from the rough thousands of hours I have played, I have seen (and still see) gigantic concerns on the Internet revolving the abilities or overall usage of certain heroes including but not limited to: Zeus, Drow Ranger, Viper, Sniper, Pudge, Spirit Breaker and more while also seeing these heroes partake in almost every dota 2 game I play.

It may seem inconsequental at first. Sure, a few heroes may be popular. But when there's over a hundred of them to choose from and a handful (5-7) of them are being played at a gross majority of all games being played, you're doing something wrong at a developer's standpoint. Be it having the hundreds of other heroes be too hard to get into for some players/looking too weak or just having said couple of heroes be too easy to play/too powerful.
Notes for Valve & Updates
On the off-chance that an employee of Valve or any other person that have any kind of influence over the games they make reads this, here are three golden pointers on what you can do to massively improve your games to avoid nasty guides like this one popping up.



1. LISTEN TO THE COMMUNITY!

I can't stress enough how important this is. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that all have people behind them. If you're a big-shot on the Internet with a big-shot multiplayer game, carefully listening to these people is pretty darn obviously important for any developer & producer worth his/her salary.


2. COMMUNICATE WITH THE COMMUNITY!

Almost equally as important is TALKING with these people and as with any serious conversation, you have to be able to fulfill the 5 golden R's since in this case, you are a company talking to your customers. I'll list these golden R's in the off-chance that you forgot.

Respect. Without respect.. Well, you wouldn't really be able to care for your customers and even less so be able to communicate with them properly so If you don't have any respect for your customers, you can stop reading right now.

Rapport. Having a close relation with the person/audience you're trying to talk to is the only real way you're gonna be able to understand what the other guy is thinking. You've kinda messed this one up at a number of occassions be it closing Valve's twitter account down, wildly permanently banning people on the Steam Forums or just having an overall huge lack of actual public statements whenever the community is involved (Yes, Including Give DIRETIDE༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ).

Relationship. No, not the part where we give you money and you give us games. That's called a business. Read the Community and Developer relations section of my guide for this one.

Reciprocity. Yes, this is the part where we give you money and you give us the privlege of playing your games. But think as it of this way: We would be a lot happier with giving you our money if we could see what you are up to now and then. Maybe even indulge us a small chat.

Respect. Yup, respect again. For this to work, we (the community) would have a need to respect you besides the quality of your games. Did you do something good and ethical recently like not having exclusive titles for the steamOS? Good! Did you do something bad lately like having the catastrophy that is no Diretide happen and still don't give the community any kind of serious action taken (firing/rehiring employees) and have no public statements made after a week while there's still on-going chaos and instead insult them http://puu.sh/57DRO.jpg Bad.

There's so much you can do to make us like you with ease but you insist on making change after change after change to make us hate you with big d!ckmoves like trying to take away our lawful right to file a class-action lawsuit against you by making us agree to something in your Terms of Use or the small things like taking away the /me functions in all steam chats which millions of users have been accustomed for years because some stupid brats allegedly got ripped off even with countless warnings to never give out account details every time you open up a chat window and the way you're going about doing things right now really Isn't working for either of us.


3. USE YOUR ASSETS TO CREATE A BETTER EXPERIENCE!

How about those servers huh, Valve? You kinda struggled for a couple of years after making Team Fortress 2 free, causing your entire infrastructre to be like a regular yo-yo for all the millions of users on Steam. Or how about the superB customer support you USED to have? Now it's seemingly all automatic and you still manage to have very lengthy response time with regular warnings of high customer support ticket traffic up while your Better Business Bureau profile now boasts over 200+ complaints that you have failed to respond to, all sent to your main complaint department PO box in Washington.

We understand that you're all big and complicated but when you are running an admittedly "all hands free" thing at your company and still have screw-ups like getting no halloween event to the most played game on Earth, It's one of the many signs that you probably need to put more people on that and a little bit of management here and there. Just sayin'



UPDATE 1: It's been quite a while now since the collosal f*ck up that was Diretide and while Valve still inherit the attitude of saying "Oh yeah.. That." whenever It's brought up, RockPaperShotgun recently asked the tough question of "What the hell are you guys doing?" and Valve's response was pretty much nothing short of disgusting:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/10/valve-talks-steamos-and-diretide-defends-communication/#more-183761

The entire interview sums up to the editor, Nathan, questioning a few business fellas over at Valve on just how they plan to build their entire SteamOS/Steam Machine projects by using user feedback when they have effectively not been talking with the community whatsoever at all fronts for the past couple of years, be it Valve's own game development or just anything else over here on Steam and all It's other games/events.

He got the usual, generic Valve response that "Oh, we don't discuss with the community. We just read the forums" (which is quite depressing when one consider just how blatantly easy permanent bans are being thrown out left and right on the Steam forums, both by Valve employees, volunteer moderators and independant developers while things like the previous solo-matchmaking feature got removed shortly after the community gets it after asking for it for over 1-2 years and 60-70+ forum posts in one big thread in the devdota forums)

And when Nathan pointed out the fact that perhaps It would be in good order to change this since It has clearly not been working now for a multitude amount of times, the "business guy" called Jan-Peter (who is effectively a lawyer over at Valve) gave a disgusting response saying that "I don't think there is a lot of improvement to be done there" when Nathan brought up on just how they dealt with the Diretide catastrophy, effectively confirming that the company as a whole thought there was nothing they could have done better and that It's gonna happen in the exact same manner again in the future repeatedly without putting any blame or consequences on anyone.


This effectively confirms on what I have been saying all along. You cannot possibly ever hope to have a proper, healthy relationship with someone if you are not TALKING with them. It is completely null and impossible for any kind of solid respect or rapport to be formed since talking to a wall gets you nowhere. Even if said wall happens to mutate and bend a little differently If you yell hard enough at it, the damage of reaching the point where you have the anger and urge to sdo said yelling has already been done.

Epic Hamcat posted:

6.81 is upon us



Welcome to the 8th DOTA2 Thread! We have a long OP, but you should read it! Zeus help you if you post before reading the third post of this op!
For totally new players check out the frog sirened NEW PLAYERS section before posting! Remember: One Game and One Training Bullet Point before posting!

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/dotagoons is the steam group
In game we have guild GOON, just ask in the LLJK chat in game and you'll get an invite.

4th Thread^* (Archives)
Probation Earned: 5 Months 2 weeks 3 days 6 Hours
Number of Bans: 2
5th Thread^* (Archives)
Probations Earned: 4 Months 1 weeks 1 days 12 Hours
Number of Bans: 4
6th Thread^* (Archives)
Probations Earned: 2 Months 1 Weeks 2 Days 6 Hours
Number of Bans: 3
7th Thread^*
Probation Earned7: 3 Months 3 Weeks 5 Days 12 Hours
Number of Bans: 3


What is DotA/2?

DOTA2, simply, is the new engine sequel/remake to/of DotA. It makes sense to start with that then:

DotA, or Defense of the Ancients, is a Warcraft III mod that involves two teams of five players competing against each other to take down their opponents' bases. While the base engine of DotA may have been an RTS, the game plays more like a hourlong RPG; each team's army units (known as "creeps") simply attack move to the enemy base in three lanes (bottom, middle, and top) and each player in DotA controls one of 100+ heroes, and gains gold and experience to buy items that can drastically boost their powers. As a single game takes around 40-60 minutes and every individual member is integral in the team's success, the game is highly competitive!

DOTA2 has a full team at Valve working on it. Most importantly, Icefrog, the current developer of WC3-DotA is working on DOTA2. There are a few goons on the valve team floating around the thread as well!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akUNmFAzS98


I wrote a history-thing about Dota 1's creation for TMC here.

Who plays DotA?

Today, almost a decade after its inception, DotA has an estimated 10 million players on battle.net, Garena, and other international servers. A patch can get up to six million downloads in a day.

The competitive scene is ridiculously large and alive as well; from the Chinese dynasties CCM and LGD frought with succession drama to the old-school European dominators like MYM, OK, and Na'Vi, competitors are drawn from all over the world. This large playerbase contributes to a diversity of playstyles and strategies, and the large hero pool and monthly patches ensure that the game never gets stale. Recently as well, Starcraft I/II heavy hitters TeamLiquid have officially began supporting DOTA2 as one of their games. You can now find competitive info and a TL team, just check their site!

Gosugamers, JoinDotA, and now TeamLiquid have all the competitive news and streams you could want.

NEW PLAYERS

Most of you fucks wonderful people won't read the whole OP before jumping in, then ask 'hey wat do i do ive never played' in the thread. Here are some things you can do to avoid this unhappy fate

• Watch the 'How to play Dota2 in 4 minutes' video above
  
• Read this
  
• Check out the official guide here
  
• If you have time, watch this.
  

Well should I just do bot games until I'm pro?
Some people find that bot games are less anxiety producing than jumping straight into a normal match. This may be true, but you'll see from even a bot game that there are plenty of people just as bad as you are. Still, I think I'd recommend your first game be a bot game just so you can get a feel of how the game controls, and how you buy things from the shop.

What hero should I play?
General recommendations for new players include
AGI: Viper (Carry, Ranged) or Ursa (Carry/Ganker, Melee)
STR: Sven (Carry/Ganker, Melee) or Tidehunter (Support, Melee)
INT: Lich (Support, Ranged) or Shadow Shaman (Ganker/Support, Ranged)

AVOID: Chen, Enchantress, Meepo, Visage, Invoker

All this being said, if you've done at least one of the above bullet points, and played a single game, feel free to ask any questions you have in the thread. It's just that 'I'm am entirely new and don't know what I don't know' isnt a very helpful point of reference for us!

IF YOU'RE COMING FROM LEAGUE OR HON: Welcome! Read the Transitioning to DOTA guide in the second post!

The International



The International 2014 has started!

It runs this year July 18-21 (Though qualifiers started on the 12th of May)



Here are the invitees this year. There will also be 5 qualifier places this year: NA, SEA, EU, and CN, with a wildcard for the 2nd place from each region.

So, what is The International?

Every year, Valve sponsors an over one million dollar tournament, with free broadcasts in multiple languages.
Yes, you read that correctly. OVER [strike]$1,000,000.[/strike] $4,000,000 loving dollars

All of the VODs for the Internationals past are available here. Be aware that TI2011 is a lot of farming however. Here's some quick info on what's what from each year, be aware that if you want to watch them all there may be spoilers if you click on the matches listed.

TI2011:
Champions:Na'Vi (Ukraine)
Set to Watch: The Semifinals and Finals

TI2012:
Champions: iG (China)
Set to Watch: LGD vs Navi

TI2013:
Champions: The Alliance (Sweden)
Set to Watch: Liquid vs TongFu and Na'Vi vs Alliance

This sounds awfully similar to...

Yes, all those games that seem familiar (LoL, HoN, Demigod, Bloodline Champions, Realm of the Titans) are all DotA-likes (or Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas aka MOBA or Action Real-Time Strategy aka ARTS). Make no mistake though, DotA2 may be prettier and have some new tricks, but in terms of mechanics and gameplay, it is the direct reincarnation of DotA. Direct. As in dont complain about last hitting in this thread, of course it's in. Discussions about mechanics are welcome, just consider that almost every mechanic in dota2 is a direct design decision, and isn't just a legacy feature.

Sounds good, how do I play?

Dota2 has officially launched! Just go to the page in the store and you can play! There's some sort of 'queue' when you go to install it but from what I've heard it goes by very quickly.

Other Info

• DotA2 uses Valve's Source engine: global lighting, cloth simulation, and integrated voice chat are part of the game.
  
• AI bots will eventually take over for disconnected players (maybe), and are available to play against in unranked training matches as well.
  
• Some hero skills work slightly better with the replacement of the Warcraft III engine with the Source engine. Examples include Rubik's Spellsteal.
  
• Valve has integrated Steamworks. You can create and submit new items which get voted on and potentially added on a weekly basis.
  
• There are several available matchmaking modes, currently including All Pick (Any Hero), Single Draft (Select between 1 of 3 heroes, 1 per attribute), Captain's Mode (Draft of most heroes, captain makes picks), Random Draft (Pool of 20 heroes, players make picks), All Random (Everyone gets a random hero + bonus gold), Captain's Draft (Like Random Draft with a banning/picking captain), and Least Played (All Pick, but your top 40 most played heroes are unavailable)
  
• A coaching system where veteran players can help out new players. "The coach sees the pupil's screen, and gets private voice and chat channels to communicate with them. The coach probably won't be able to take control of anything directly (once again, the details are currently under discussion)." This system is nearing release
  
• The game is F2P with a cosmetic shop. All heroes are unlocked, you buy cosmetic items:
  
  

What does this game even look like?

You can watch some streams! See the next post for some recommendations. There are also some pictures/fanart at the end of the post. Some reviews have said it looks dated but they're honestly really mind-numbingly dumb.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cSFPIwMEq4

What's the deal with the store? This poo poo is expensive? What is a chest? I still can't read the op so this section also has TRADING INFO in it?

The store in DOTA2 works very similarly to TF2's store. You can buy individual items for prices varying from about 50 cents to 7+ dollars, or bundles of items for a group priced discount. Anything (not bundles) in the store can also drop in game, with the notable exception of Unusual Couriers, which only drop from chests.

Chests are the other random things you'll see dropping at the end of games. They don't do gently caress all, but you can buy a key for 2.50$ from the store to open it. Opening a chest will yield one random item from the list of items in the chest description, but like all good gambles also has a small (1%) chance of containing something super cool! These super cool things are unusual couriers, which is a courier with a coolio superneat effect attached to it. They can look something like this.


Generally the advice is 'dont open chests', since unusuals aside anything you want from them is probably worth less than that key, and you can just trade for it.

Don't post trades in this thread, we have a thread for that HERE

If you want to spend real money on Dota items but want them cheaper, goon Captain Invictus sells steam things, including dota items, for a discount.

Also for trading, the Steam Marketplace which was recently added currently supports the selling of Chests, Keys, and Vintage (Green Quality) Items all items.

What's this about a Test Beta Client?

Test patches come out occasionally, if no big bugs are left, they push it to live the next day.

When you get in the beta you'll notice a second client: Dota 2 Test. It's purpose is supposedly to find major bugs before they go on to live beta client, in actuality it's a bunch of people sitting in bot games playing the new hero if there is one. There's only 2000 slots available on the test servers, so nobody really uses it. You don't need to bother installing it.

Links

• DotaCinema's VOD archive. Fantastic, check it out!
  
• Valve's DOTA2 Page and Blog
  
• Playdota, DotA's Official Site
  
• Icefrog's Devblog for DotA
  
• TeamLiquid, which now supports DOTA2!
  
• Gosugamers for the Competitive Scene as well
  
• CyborgMatt's blog, Where he analysis patches to see what wasn't in the patch notes.
  
• DotaHut Solomid.net's Dota 2 guides. Featured guides mostly written by professional players.
  
• Tired of trying to figure out prodota streaming habits? Take it easy with this addon for Firefox or Chrome!
  
• OH MY GOD A DOTA2 IN GAME TRANSLATOR / Mirror. WARNING: Nobody really loving knows, but this tool may get you a 30 day dota ban as of 9/23. Again, this hasn't been confirmed!
  
• STATS WEBSITE RIP 2012-2013
  
• More Detailed Stats Site but it takes time to cache your games and whatnot.
  
• Hero stats in pro games
  

Current Events

Check out our PRO DOTA2 THREAD: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3601662
If you want to find the VOD for a match, check out DotaCinema's VOD site, it's real good!

Latest Patch - April 29th (Expected)

http://www.dota2.com/springcleaning/


In-Game Stuff

To join an inhouse:

• Go to the Play tab
  
• Find a Lobby
  
• Private Games
  
• Type in the password given into that box and hit search. The password is usually lljk, or lljk2, etc
  

Console and Autoexec commands:
To input any of these commands, add "-console" to the launch options for DotA2 on steam. You can also make a file called autoexec.cfg in X:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\dota 2 beta\dota\cfg, and put in commands that you would put in console to have the automatically executed when the game starts.

There is also an (new) generator for this here.

• chat_join lljk - Automatically joins a chat channel when you start dota, in this case, lljk.
  
• con_enable 1 - Adds the console to your game, same as adding -console to the launch options. Press ` (by default) in game to toggle console.
  
• dota_health_per_vertical_marker 200 - Changes how much health each of those bars is; by default it's 200, you might want to change it to 100 if you play League or want more accurate health bars.
  
• dota_minimap_misclick_time 0 - You can up the time on this to set how long your mouse has to be on the minimap to click on it, if you constantly click on the minimap by accident.
  
• dota_force_right_click_attack 0 - Right click deny Change the 0 to a 1 to enable it.
  
• dota_disable_range_finder 1 - Range indicators If you set this to 0, you'll see a small red/green bar from your character to your mouse pointer that makes spell ranges much more visible than looking at the mouse cursor changing alone.
  
• dota_sf_old_heropedia "1" Old hero learn tab thing? I dont know why you'd want it but there.
  

^{Credit to Minrad}

Stuff to Change in Options:

• To remove camera pan acceleration, put the 'camera acceleration' bar all the way to the right. I'd also put the camera speed bar to the right.
  
• Your hotkeys start out silly, move the item hotkeys somewhere off of the numpad (like alt qweasd) and change your level-up skill and stats hotkey to something you can get without moving your hand super far (I use Z and X) Forgot to mention: B for buy! I'd like to set C to center on my hero but it wont let me.
  
• Enable double activate item and enable shop hotkeys in Game (if you want, I plan on learning to buy from the shop)
  
• Turn the render slider all the way to the right!
  

^{Credit to Gokuesque}

Changing recommended items:

• Go to your steam/steamapps/common/dota 2 beta/dota/itembuilds folder.
  
• Paste "item" "item_tpscroll" in every hero's core item list.
  
• Don't like having Mask of Madness as a core item on Night Stalker? Want an urn instead? Change that stuff all in the file.
  
• There's a dota2alttab item list here.
  
• http://dota2-itemchanger.googlecode.com/files/dota2itemchanger.zip - A program made to do the same thing, but easier. Requires .NET
  How to use the program:
  
  1. Unzip anywhere
     
  2. Run dota2itemchanger.exe, select a hero, and then drag&drop items from the left to the starting/early/... box in the right (the box appears after you select the item type at the top)
     
  3. Click save (you will get warnings if you don't add any items for a category)
     
  4. A new .txt file (for example, default_antimage.txt) will be created in the current directory. You can open it in notepad and check it, maybe make modifications about the item order
     
  5. Create a backup of the default hero itembuild (for example, c:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\dota 2 beta\dota\itembuilds\default_antimage.txt)
     
  6. Copy the file from 4. to the location mentioned at 5.
     
  7. Start the game, create a practice game and check if everything is ok
     

Other Useful Scripts:

• http://pastebin.com/FxPCueM8 - Adds aliases to search for hon and dota1 item names. Goes into "...\dota 2 beta\dota\scripts\npc", make sure to make a backup. Credit lprsti99
  
• http://pastebin.com/pew7W7A2 - Courier Autofetch script. Goes into autoexec.
  
• AND ON THE THIRD DAY IT WAS REBORN: NBA JAM ACCOUNCER
  
• http://www.dota2layout.com/ - An online layout editor so you can make pretty pictures of dicks jizzing out agi carries and share it with the rest of the world more easily.
  
• http://pastebin.com/EVQKkxgn - If the dota:// links dont work for you, running this (saved as a .reg) will fix it. Make sure you change the M:/ path to the correct drive/path for your dota2 installation
  

Ancient words of wisdom...

Long ago in a distant land, I, Terrorblade, the shape shifting master of darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil. But a foolish samurai juggernaut wielding a magic sword stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final blow was struck, I tore open a portal in time, and flung him into the future where my evil is law. Now the fool seeks to return to the past and undo the future that is Terrorblade.



Don't play with tcjimbo.

Stoat posted:

hey just making the only good post on this page ok bye