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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

I'm a long time Dota player, I started playing in 2005. Pendragon, one of the original Riot employees (maybe co-founder? can't really remember), owned the official Dota site, dota-allstars.com.

Not long after launching LoL, Pendragon replaced the whole site, including: hero page descriptions, various Dota related web-tools, forum, etc., with a JPEG link thanking the Dota community for all the fish and pointing everyone to the LoL site.

He released the forum database available 5 years later, I think, when it didn't matter anymore.

The LoL advertising during the early period was extremely Dota-hostile. Dota 1 had its flaws, but they were basically pissing all over it.

Tournaments where LoL was played were paid to ban any kind of LoL competitors (generally aimed directly at Dota 2).

Etc., etc.

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As one of the people who lived through/was affected by this, I can't ever in good faith support or work for Riot because I just can't shake the "this is the kind of person I would never want to work with" feeling Pendragon earned himself. Since he's one of the primary founders, that feeling is inextricably emotionally tangled up with how I feel about the company as a whole.

Here's a video that goes in depth if y'all are wondering what this is about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBI9NlPqRi0

Thankfully it doesn't matter anyway, because Dota 2 is simply a better game ;)

ALL LIES - Pendragon replaced the whole site.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100712013033/http://www.dota-a...

The wayback machine is great. I heard these rummors years ago and they never stop. Look up the site from whatever date you want. Mescon closed allstars.com on July 22, 2010 citing dropping statistics and his love of League of Legends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients

DoTA -Allstars is a variant of DoTA and had been passed down from one person to the next in development and is stil developed by IceFrog at Valve.

Minor correction: DotA-Allstars is no longer actively maintained, as of a few Dota 2 patches ago.

http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Game_Versions

Not lies the thing he took down is the forum. https://www.reddit.com/r/DOTA/comments/12zjm6/access_to_the_...

So the forum went down but not the website. AND the website didn't redirect to League of Legends and it is actually the wrong name?

Altered Truths?

Dude, you even have the guts to use caps. I was there, I had an account with basically the same name (http://da-archive.com/index.php?showuser=725213). Then one day my account went poof, with not much notice. Not a problem for a free service, but a lot of people volunteered to get the forum database and migrate it.

Guess what... he released it when LoL was entrenched, a few years later. That's how you can see my profile, on a tribute site where someone imported the database dump.

But at that point the community had already left and the valuable Dota web property was used to ramp up LoL. LoL would have made it without it, but these tactics where shady.

Blizzard Shut eventually shut down the website. It was actually there in the way back machine and then Riot bought the website then sold it to Blizzard. Blizzard then shut down the website.

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