Dota 2

Worst. Gank. Ever.

Congratulations to DK, the winner of TI4!◊

Well, we can now try to guess who's changing teams in the wake of the Post-TI team shuffling.

Aui was the one who decided the level 1 Rosh for C9 (9 minutes in).

And so comes official custom game support.

I love the shots that Valve fired at Arteezy.

Anyway, I'm hopeful that the custom game tools are at least slightly beginner friendly. I finally got the patience to really get into making custom maps, and by that time practically nobody plays WC 3 multiplayer anymore :(

I didn't watch the International (don't pay much attention to that kind of thing, even for games I play), so what were the shots fired over? Was it for a pro dying a lot while playing a(?) hero he never had a chance to try out?

http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/785923491

Arteezy has the highest number of deaths. And I'm fairly certain that he has played the WC 3 version before (and thus should have been able to play Techies as a result). Considering that he knows how to first blood with Techies (even if he didn't get the kill anyway), it's certainly not the first time he played Techies. He also knew that he would be using Techies as well, since he said "It's gonna be explosive" while he was waiting to get the last pick.

Besides, it was all in good fun, the shots included, otherwise Techies wouldn't have been included in the All Stars match in the first place.

A hero that has been in vanilla Dota for ages and whose abilities only require you to know chokepoints on the map, something a "pro" should know a thing or two about.

edited 7th Aug '14 11:15:12 AM by Kiefen

The new Hammer is really good. It even has a WC3 styled tile editor. I think it's even running in Source 2, which Valve pretty much soft launched with this. Of course the current PC requirements to run the tools are pretty insane right now, but Valve might tone them down later. But man, DOTA 2 was already the most popular game on Steam, I think it just got a massive boost to it's popularity and lifespan with this update. Custom games really helped WC3. Now to see if someone will try to make Warcraft 3's campaign in the editor and we will have gone full circle. Or for lols, someone recreates League in DOTA 2.

Part of it in action.

edited 7th Aug '14 7:49:58 AM by Marioguy128

There's probably someone working on a remake of the WC 3 campaign right now.

Some chinese guy is even making LoL.

edited 7th Aug '14 7:48:03 AM by Eldrake

DOTA started out as just a mod for WC3 that became really popular, and then League of Legends and DOTA 2 came from that. I wonder if someone will make something like that, a mod that gets really popular and becomes it's own standalone game, or new genre. The possibilities are endless.◊

I can't wait for someone to hire that guy to make Penis 2. It's going to be revolutionary.

A game could benefit from a dedicated ARAM map.

The only game mod that's become a separate game, like Dota, is Day Z.

Actually a lot of valve games are pulled from mods, TF 2, Portal, Counterstrike...

Yep. Counter Strike even started as a mod from Half life. TF2 was based on the original TF, which was a Quake mod. Mods have tons of potential.

edited 7th Aug '14 9:31:24 AM by Marioguy128

I've noticed that someone went around the character pages a week ago and replaced every mention of "MOBA" with "ARTS". Given that fans of the genre can't agree on what to call the object of their fandom, I'm not sure why this person felt that the changes were a good idea. Besides, it's tagged as "MOBA" on Steam's store website, though that's admittedly a user-defined tag.

Also, while trying out some bot matches in preparation for when I get a non-sucky computer, I learned that Wraith King was Strength, not Intelligence as I had previously thought. I somehow didn't notice his great health and sub-par mana until then. The fact that he's composed of multiple souls really threw me off there. But I still think that supplying him with Power Treads: Intelligence is a good idea.

Hmm, may want to take that up with the higher ups on the site then.

He was originally Skeleton King (never forget), but because of copyright issues with Blizzard (Heroes of the Storm), they changed him into Wraith King (there was a big Christmas Frostivus event surrounding it too) to avoid that. Yeah, he only has 1 active spell, but yes, he does want a bit of a bigger mana pool because of his ultimate. In fact, his int got buffed a few patches ago, just so he was able to cast his stun twice in the laning stage.

He can be played as a carry (which was the old way to play him, and he was never that good at it until his ultimate got a huge buff), or a support, a role he is far more effective as. No matter which way you play him though, he's a really strong initiator.

Valve call Dota 2 an ARTS. They even went as far as to tell several websites to call it an ARTS whenever there's an article on it.

I am surprised that nobody is talking about Kuroky and Puppey leaving Na'Vi. I hope that they do well with their future team.

If I have to say my opinion about this whole MOBA/ARTS debacle... I will say one thing. Will spoiler because it's not exactly nice.

It means nothing but to perpetuate the war between the two fandoms. It's absolutely useless. Call it whatever you like. Just shut the fuck up and play (... and befriend each other I guess).

edited 20th Aug '14 5:49:42 PM by ChrisX

ARTS sounds even weirder than MOBA though.

It sounds like a sad attempt at backronyming an art society

I tried playing it on my brother's gaming computer, but a lot went wrong. The game would not let me set my abilities and items to "Quick-cast", no matter how many times I set the options. The computer's pings were in the low 200s if I was lucky, so it took forever to find a human vs. bots match. And when I did play, the top-right wouldn't display my K/D/A or creeps killed/denied. It was all quite frustrating.

Despite all that, Brewmaster was very fun to play. I quickly fell in love with playing as him.

Sorry for the double-post, but a weird thing happened to me today. I was playing my first normal match (limited heroes, Wraith King) and at the end I checked the match stats and the enemy Sniper had a KDA of 0/0/0. That was weird, since I distinctly remember personally killing him a couple times (I might have died to him once, but that memory's less distinct).

During that match, I typed "Monkey King Bar!" in the team chat for no reason other than I bought it and the item sounded awesome.

MKB is a great item, especially if the enemy team has a hero with innate evasion like Phantom Assassin. The only evasion hero it won't work on is Faceless Void, who's supposed to faceroll everything in the lategame anyway.