Back in October I wrote a little piece about my first impressions of the Dota 2 beta. This was based on around a dozen hours of play – the equivalent of dipping my toe into an ocean that went all the way down to the abyssal deeps – and at the time none of the teaching functionality such as “tutorials” and “actually telling people how they’re supposed to play the game” had been introduced, and so the only way to learn how to play it was through repeated failure and/or the painstaking help of others. Most people, when they are put in a situation where e.g. a burly man repeatedly punches them in the face, are going to naturally have a reaction along the lines of “I don’t like being punched in the face” and remove themselves from that situation, which is why those first impressions were broadly negative. However, if you’re crazy enough to stick around, eventually you are going to become really good at not being punched in the face.

This is what has happened with Dota. Nearly everything I wrote back in October is still true; they’ve since put in some tutorials that teach basic game concepts, but if you ask me they’re woefully inadequate at preparing people for online matches with other people. The game is still as unforgiving as it ever was. If you tough that learning period out, though, if you have friends willing to coach you through it or just have an inhuman mental resistance to the psychological trauma of crushing defeat, then the game gradually morphs from a brutal, near-sadistic ordeal into something that’s almost beautiful in its complexity and balance. You need to understand what’s going on before you can really appreciate Dota for what it is. It’s not a game for everyone and it still has a ridiculously high barrier to entry, but now that it has passed across the nominal line separating “three-year beta” from “released product” I thought it’d be a good idea to revisit it in the light of my increased experience and perhaps provide a little bit of balance to that first impressions post. That post explains why you shouldn’t play Dota. This post, hopefully, will explain why you should. Or at least why I do.

For this review I have drafted in my old review-crafting partner, Jim. Jim has accompanied me on most of my journey from Dota novice to experienced Dota novice, and even wrote his own first impressions post at around the same time as I did. Say hello, Jim.

Jim: emerges from hidden compartment, waves at crowd Hello!

Hentzau: So Jim, get us started by summarising Dota in 100 words or less.

Jim: Dota is the most serious game alive. You may think that you can bumble about as red dinosaur wizard but, my friend, where are your wards? Why are you stealing my last hits? WHY DID YOU NOT CALL MISSING??? Dota, basically, is about anger management.

Hentzau:  Yes, as somebody with an overabundance of anger I can attest to this. I used to get really, really annoyed at people in competitive multiplayer games. Left 4 Dead sessions with me were nothing but a constant stream of swear words punctuated by the odd tense silence. Dota, though; Dota has forced me to take a calmer, more controlled approach to things. In my case it was that or drop dead from apopleptic fury, such is the power of this game to tickle that primal, atavistic part of your brain that civilized society was meant to have firmly put under lock and key. But in Dota it’s more than that. Dota is a team game, far more than any other game I’ve ever played, and getting angry isn’t just unpleasant, it’s outright counterproductive. Games of Dota are mental duels between you and your opponents as much as — possibly more so — than anything else, and as soon as one team psychologically collapses into infighting and mutual recrimination then the other has as good as won.

Jim: I feel like we’re not really selling this yet. This is more an argument for why our computer access should be permanently removed.

Hentzau: I think this entire blog is pretty good evidence for that, to be honest.

Jim: Hoooooo. So I’m going to be positive instead. I think it’s a really neat trick for the game to be honed enough that these random battles we fight with horrible people, they seem like mighty, intense duels that you care about. Why is that?

Hentzau: I think it’s because despite the hundred heroes available for play, and despite the two hundred plus items you can buy for them, the basic aspects of Dota — the things without which you will not win, no matter how hard you counterpick — are the elemental things that you find in every other competitive game on the market, except turned up to eleven. Things like positioning. Coordination. Reconnaissance. Map awareness. Resource management.

Jim: Shouting.

Hentzau: And yes, a fair amount of shouting. I should probably stress here that I almost never play Dota without an organised team of five communicating over a Teamspeak channel. I feel this is the way to get the most out of the game

Jim: I have been known to dip my toe into dual-queueing but yeah, the idea of only playing with the great unwashed fills me with fear. Anyway, these aspects.

Hentzau: It’s all basic stuff, but the primary one, the one that I think gives Dota its whole contest-of-titans feel, is  the teamwork. In other games I’ve played it’s possible for one person to win a game singlehandedly, simply because their individual skill with the game is so high. That just doesn’t happen in Dota. Sure, that pro player might come out of the jungle at the 30 minute mark farmed to the hilt with a three-level advantage and proceed to lay waste to the enemy team, but he would never have managed to get that far without the rest of the team making the space necessary for it to happen. You might rely on a good player to carry you at the start of the game, or in the middle of the game, or at the end of the game, but you can’t rely on them to carry you for all of it. Everyone has to make a contribution in order for the team to win, and that creates an us-versus-them bond that is thicker than any bodily fluid you care to name.

Jim: It’s very good at involving you in the metagame, too. I’ve never played a game that goes this out of its way to tell me who the best team in the world is, or encourages you to go watch them, or gives you little collectible stickers of their slightly miserable badly-haircutted faces. Okay maybe that last one is less of an incentive. But there is this burgeoning, miasmic cloud of “culture” directly attached to Dota 2 that is designed to keep you involved and learning.

Hentzau: Yeah, I might have dropped the game by now if it wasn’t ever-evolving, and if the professional matches that are woven into Dota’s intrinsic fabric weren’t around it’d be impossible to keep up with the shifting metagame. Heroes who were once dismissed as awful or fiddly suddenly click into place when used in a particular way, and items that I couldn’t see the point of before are unexpectedly picked up by a pro team and end up producing a devastating effect in a tournament game. This all filters down through Dota “culture” from the pro players, down through the spectated games, streaming channels and online forums, to regular chumps like myself. I hear about these metagame changes and it inspires me to try a new hero, or play in a different way with an old one. And because there’s so many heroes in the game there’s every chance this will continue for a good few years to come.

Jim: And, of course, your opponents are going through that same process themselves, so the sides you are arrayed against are constantly shifting and changing like the fashions in a shop window during a time travel sequence. That’s not to say the idea of a metagame was invented here, of course, I know if I searched hard enough I could have got exactly as much “culture” from, for example, Civilization. But it’s that direct fusing into the UI that makes it interesting. Another example of that is with the guides, of course.

Hentzau: Yes, this is the part of Dota’s learning functionality that actually works quite well: when you play an unfamiliar hero you can now load up a player-written guide that will give you recommended skill builds and item loadouts and tooltips telling you how to use everything. Because there’s often several different ways to play a single hero picking the right guide can often be tricky, but once it’s loaded up it’ll keep you from making any stupid mistakes — and because they’re player-created and they’re constantly being updated, the newest ones will reflect the current state of the metagame. It’s this weird informational osmosis; Dota is awful at directly telling you what you should be doing, but once you’re hooked in makes it very easy to keep up with current trends.

Jim: We’re still reluctant to talk about the actual game, aren’t we? All that side stuff is nice but it’s just the information bap for the game burger. What is your best moment in dota in the last month? And why was it awesome?

Hentzau: Jesus, Jim, I can’t remember that far back. I’ll have to go and look at Dotabuff.

Jim: Which, incidentally, is another example of that excellent metagame, you tricky swine.

Hentzau: For sheer hilarity you can’t beat the first time I played Brewmaster in a single draft game (where you’re only given a random selection of three heroes to choose from) and was forced to go mid lane. Going mid lane is a big role in Dota; you get more experience and money than everyone else if you go mid, but your teammates will then rely on you to use that advantage to run to their lane and kill the comparatively-underlevelled enemy heroes there. Your opponents will also send somebody mid, of course, so another part of it is squashing their experience and gold farm as much as possible so that they can’t dash off to gank before you do. It’s a huge responsibility, and giving me the burly Brewmaster to do it with was extra-bad because I am actually the most cowardly Dota player in existence. Any hero that actually requires me to run up and hit people usually ends horribly, so I was quite surprised to find that I not only didn’t screw things up at mid, I actually killed the enemy Invoker after my repeated running away every time he moved forward lured him into a false sense of security. My turning around mid-flee and clobbering him in the face with my beer barrel must have been the Dota equivalent of being savaged by a chicken. One kill isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but I managed to at least turn that temporary advantage into a couple of successful ganks at top lane and give my teammates a bigger advantage.  Again, it’s all about the teamwork; I did well at mid but I couldn’t have won the entire game on my own no matter how hard I tried, so I had to find some way of parlaying that into something that the team could benefit from. It’s rare that it comes across in such black-and-white terms, but it pretty much sums up Dota for me.

Jim: I think the ones I best remember are the breathless back-and-forth struggles. A game is generally over, or all-but-over, by 30-40 minutes but one we played last week took a sodding hour and a half. Past a certain amount of time, all caution and strategy gives way to panic and hysteria. Oaths were screeched, ridiculously flamboyant collections of items were acquired and we decided that we needed to pull out the nuclear option. The Divine Rapier. The most powerful weapon in the game, but also the only one that just drops on the ground when you die. So there we were, pushing deep into the base, just about to win when – shock – the rapier carrier gets nobbled. And now the enemy are doing the exact same thing, pushing right up to our ancient with their stolen rapier. We’d resigned to a loss, until a couple of lucky hits knocks *that* guy over and who should stumble upon this fallen monstrous god item but the weakest, crappiest support character in the game.

Hentzau: Cue screams of “Pick it up! Pick it up!” because there’s an enemy player still lurking in the base and you desperately don’t want him to grab it, only to realise that once the support player had it he couldn’t trade it back to a player who could actually do something with it.

Jim: So the game morphed into this VIP extraction mission where we had to keep this fragile guy out of harm’s way while still pushing back the tide into their base. The support, feeling much like this sloth, is just running around making excited noises about being so powerful. Curses were uttered, everyone on teamspeak was yelling contradictory instructions and, well, we kept him alive long enough to complete the win. Mission accomplished. Now while that is an extreme case, that for me illustrated the amount of emergent options that appear during a game. With hundreds of heroes, items and spells, two matches are never going to be the same, and that’s why I love it.

Hentzau: The thing is, though, if you had lost that game rather than won it, would it occupy such a fond space in your memory? Or would it just be the time that NAME REDACTED threw the game by trying to take on the entire enemy team single-handedly and giving them his rapier?

Jim: It does straddle a fine line, certainly. And as much as I want to say I’m not solely motivated by victory, I think that’s the biggest flaw of dota still as an experience. Losing can be disheartening and, because of that intensity we praised earlier, because you’ve invested about an hour of your life, it can hurt more than in most games.

Hentzau: I’ll be honest, for someone as competitive as I am I’m surprised that I enjoy the close losses almost as much as the wins. Losing’s never great, but as long as I feel that everyone played as well as they could and that we put up a good fight I can let it go. It’s the one-sided stomps I hate, where the hero selection has gone wrong or a certain lane is lost repeatedly or everyone just seems to be having an off day and is making really basic mistakes as a consequence. The ones where it is incontrovertibly your fault that you’re losing. It’s hard to keep your cool when that’s happening, but I’ve seen enough games that I thought were dead and buried be turned around into near-miraculous wins simply because we refused to give up and always kept trying that — like I said at the start — it’s done wonders for my general outlook on life. Because what Dota is about, at the end of the day, is resilience. Having the mental fortitude to put up with the game long enough to learn how to play it well, and then keeping both your and your team’s spirits up in the face of great adversity long enough to see what can be an hour-plus contest of skill and wits end with the fiery collapse of an Ancient. Preferably theirs.

Do you see yourself playing this game for years to come, Jim? I know you’ve got something like a million hours invested in Team Fortress 2, but how much longevity do you think Dota will have? And why?

Jim: Valve have certainly got the long-term in mind, here, what with the continuous development, the store, the workshop, all that. It’s clearly settling down for a long stay, and so the game itself is going to lumber on, in some form or another, until everyone loses interest in MOBAs, and I have no way of knowing what’s going to supplant them as the game of the moment for the nerd on the go. How long will I keep playing? God knows, but if TF2 is a good model, I suspect it will be for as long as they are releasing new content and I can gather five hardy souls together.

Hentzau: It’s interesting, really, that Dota has existed for about ten years now, garnering ever-increasing amounts of interest as time has gone on, but I always perceived it as that weird mod for Warcraft III that everyone kept going on about for some reason. With Dota 2 Valve are making a serious push at taking it mainstream, one that they’re putting their full weight behind, and while stuff like the esports infrastructure and the in-game store may seem ridiculous to anyone who hasn’t played it it’s an essential part of what Dota is, right now, and an essential part of growing the genre out of its niche.

Jim: Look, the minute I pay a single penny for this game I’ve played for nine months, that’s when I quit.

Hentzau: Whereas I just bought a cat courier because I had 360 hours in Dota and I felt Valve should get a little bit more of my money in exchange for the service they provide me. It’s already lasted longer than L4D did, and might actually match Counterstrike in terms of the total amount of my free time it sucks up – and I played Counterstrike when I didn’t have a full-time job to hold down, too. I feel it really does have the legs to go another decade as long as development remains active, and that as large as the playerbase is right now it could really explode if Valve play their cards right. As old as it is, Dota is something that still has a lot of untapped potential, and exploring that is going to take PC gaming to new and interesting places. I actually can’t wait to see what Valve do with it over the next year or two.

The post Thoughts: Dota 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I’m a little bit wary of adding to the hundreds of posts, articles, forum threads and news sites dedicated to the fine art of Dota; it’s hardly a subject that needs more words written about it when there are so many that already exist that could probably do the job just as well. I’ve played Dota for a grand total of eleven hours (this is nothing) and so this ain’t going to be a detailed analysis of Dota’s gameplay by any means, and if you want one of those you should visit one of the other gaming sites. Before I got into the Dota 2 beta, though, I noticed two interesting things about it:

1)      Everyone who has played Dota rapidly undergoes this weird sort of mental break and starts communicating in a bizarre moon language that renders them unintelligible to anyone who isn’t a fellow Dota player.

2)      Everyone who hasn’t played Dota consequently has no idea what the fuck Dota is, except possibly that it does something to people that ensures it retains one of the most toxically unpleasant player communities on the entire internet.

So I thought it might be interesting to tackle the subject from the perspective of a Dota dilettante, before I undergo full metamorphosis and become just another part of the Wall. To start I should stress that Dota 2, the Valve-produced remake of the original Dota mod for Warcraft III, is supposed to be built from the ground up to be as friendly to new players as possible. I was – still am – a new player. I didn’t know a thing about Dota before I started save that it involved towers in some capacity. Much of the learning functionality in Dota 2 isn’t present yet thanks to its beta state, but looking at it I don’t see how you could possibly make any kind of tutorial system for Dota that would ensure a new player could play the game without being crushed repeatedly and mercilessly. It is that bad. The entire thing basically acts as an elaborate hazing ritual for new players where they have to undergo a prolonged period of abject humiliation before they’ll finally be accepted as one of the group.

(One minor positive point is that playing Dota has really brought home to me for the first time just what it is like for a non-gamer to be sat down in front of a common-or-garden FPS or RTS. They flail around pathetically, not understanding the UI or the controls or basic game concepts like “Push button to shoot gun” while anyone who is familiar with games looks on with an aghast expression on their face and wonders how somebody so stupid manages to dress themselves in the morning. If you ever see anyone mocking somebody for not knowing how to play video games I recommend you teach them a little bit of humility by sitting them down in front of Dota for a couple of sessions so that they can finally comprehend just how hard video games are if you have literally no experience with them whatsoever.)

Dota is an evolutionary offshoot of the RTS genre that got trapped on an isolated plateau in the Amazonian basin for ten years and has been evolving into its own distinct thing all throughout the last decade. Despite its shared heritage with RTSes Dota is just so alien that there’s very few touchstones present in mainstream gaming culture that a new player can use to orient themselves. The only thing I’ve experienced which is even remotely comparable is Starcraft league play¹, which requires you to learn all about the metagame relationships between different unit types before you can even think about progressing up the league tiers, but even that only has about 40-50 units grouped into three distinct factions. In terms of the knowledge base you need to play the game effectively Starcraft II is a child’s paddling pool compared to Dota. Dota is a versus matchup between two teams of five heroes each. There are eighty different hero types in Dota 2 at the moment — more are being added all the time – and an opposing team can be made up of any possible combination of those eighty heroes. Each hero has four different abilities and can carry up to six shop-bought items out of a selection of two hundred, many of which confer new abilities on the hero or even change their existing ones.

This is why new players are so totally, completely screwed when they’re starting out in Dota. Just learning what all that shit does is going to take, at minimum, about 50-100 hours by my estimate. Learning how and when to use it well is going to take far longer, and until you do your team is going to wish you were dead because bad players in Dota don’t just drag their own team down, they actively help the enemy team through a mechanic called “feeding”. The ultimate goal of the game is to batter down the enemy defences and destroy their ancient (hence Defence Of The Ancients, or Dota), but the static tower defences you start every game with are very powerful compared to a level one hero. The only way heroes are going to get strong enough to start taking down towers and gradually work their way towards your ancient is by killing stuff (or by standing nearby while stuff is killed) which gets them money and experience. There’s constant streams of weak AI units (“creeps”) being generated by each side’s base structures which are what heroes eat to make them stronger in the early game, but creeps only get you a small amount of experience and – even worse – you only get an equally small cash bounty for killing them if you personally are the one who delivers the killing blow.

So the early game consists of hitting these creeps, gathering experience and trying to get last hits in so that you can get money as well. You hang around near the back, you try not to run in and expose yourself too much, you level up a couple of times and you start to feel pretty good about yourself. “This isn’t too bad,” you think, and you start to wonder why other people find Dota so intimidating. While you’re basking in this false sense of achievement there’ll be a bunch of unintelligible coded messages being spammed in teamchat — “ss bot”, “ss mid” and so on. You have no idea what these mean but they’re fairly regular and nothing bad happened yet, so they can’t be that important, right? You’ve made it this far without slipping up. You can do this. You can do this.

And then the five-man gank squad charges out of the fog of war. Your blood turns to ice. They’re coming for you. How did they know? How did they know? You try to run, to get back to the safety of your base, but one of them throws out a giant meathook that pulls you back to the centre of their formation. Then another imprisons you in a fucking minature wood. Then they all start beating the shit out of you. Then you die. And when you die, a little message pops up saying who killed you and how much gold they looted from your horribly-mutilated still-twitching corpse. One of the few things I know about Dota is that somebody once went to the trouble of analysing one of the professional Dota tournaments that are so popular these days, and one of the things they found was that if one team got just a 10% advantage in the amount of gold they had after twelve minutes that team went on to win the game in 93% of cases. That statistic is based on the performance of professional teams but it broadly translates across into everyday matches pretty well, so never mind the experience bonus they just got for killing you, and never mind that you yourself can’t gather experience and become stronger when you’re dead and waiting to respawn; by letting them kill you early and take your gold you’ve basically just handed them the game on a silver platter. They now have an advantage that springs directly from your own personal ineptitude and inexperience, and because this is going to be just the first of many, many ignominious deaths where you say “What the fuck is he doing? I didn’t know he could do that!” you had better get used to being on the losing team for a long, long time.

This is the mechanic known as feeding. New players who die a lot feed the enemy heroes and make them stronger, and if there’s a team with a feeder player playing against a team without a feeder player than the team that doesn’t have the millstone of you hanging around their necks is going to win regularly and consistently. Your teammates will know it too, and they will hate you for it. This is why Dota is so unfriendly to new people; not only is there a huge knowledge base that new players have to absorb before they can play effectively, but you’ll be worse than useless to your teammates until you do. It doesn’t even matter that you might start to improve slowly after three or four matches of learning the basic game mechanics, because to hear them talk about it (or more accurately to hear them hurl abuse at you whenever you make a mistake) every other Dota player is the best Dota player in the world and was born knowing everything there was to know about Dota because they assimilated that fucking information while they were still in the womb.  They don’t tolerate failure. Sure, they might also die a lot, but that’s because you were feeding the enemy team the whole time, not because they were shit at all.  At times it does seem like the Dota community is 100% composed of assholes, and that’s because playing this game turns you into an asshole. I’ve even felt the first twinges of rage myself when an enemy hero on low health slipped away because my lane partner was too busy shopping to help me kill him. The community reflects the game, and the game is absurdly unfriendly in almost every single mechanical aspect that matters.

It does get to the point of parody at times, like you can’t quite believe what you’re seeing happen in front of you is real. Even adhering to normal gaming conventions can lead you to do the Dota equivalent of farting loudly at the dinner table. For example, last night I was running back through the thick woods separating the creep lanes when I spotted a teammate fighting one of the groups of neutral creeps that can be found loitering within it. I play a lot of multiplayer games, and in every single one of these games when a teammate is fighting something – doesn’t matter what it is – you help them out. Even if they can handle the situation on their own two people will deal with the problem faster than one, so it’s almost always a good idea to lend a hand for a couple of seconds. So I went over there and starting hitting the creeps, almost without thinking, only to have him start shouting at me over team voice chat about stealing “his” creeps. I was later informed by a friend that it’s apparently appalling Dota etiquette to attack a creep that somebody else is already fighting despite it making perfect logical sense to me (after all, somebody on our team is going to get that money). Even helping somebody in this game can get nasty words thrown in your face if you do it at the wrong time. It’s baffling to me, it really is.

This is what you’re letting yourself in for if you’re thinking of getting into Dota and you don’t have a decently large pool of like-minded friends you can team with who won’t get too pissed off when you inevitably fuck something up. It may be compelling and strategic and tactical but it is also impenetrable and unfriendly, and not even in the way that Dwarf Fortress in impenetrable and unfriendly. At least when you screw up in Dwarf Fortress nobody else is around to see your mistakes. When you screw up in Dwarf Fortress there’s nobody shouting “l2p nub!!!!11” into team chat every single time a dwarf dies.  And when you screw up in Dwarf Fortress you can at least spend ten minutes in a wiki learning what you did wrong and how to avoid it next time. There is nothing that will teach you how to play Dota except the bitter, bitter experience of repeated failure and death drawing the crude admonishments of your teammates. It is an awful black hole of hate and despair and humiliation, and you should avoid it at all costs lest it suck you in too.

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1. Not that other RTSes don’t also have detailed metagame elements, but in my experience they have a more leisurely pace than Starcraft II and allow a larger margin for error.

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