Valve releasing Dota2 for Linux
dev.dota2.com
dev.dota2.com
Dota2 is a massively popular AAA game created by Valve which just came out of beta yesterday. The game is known to be difficult to play and master.
Why Linux release is important: Valve released Steam for Linux couple of months back but apart from TF2 and other Valve titles, Steam for Linux is picking up pace very slowly. Even games like TF2 and L4D are more or less last generation titles. Dota2 on the other hand is brand new, it uses all the new features from source engine and hopefully is capable of pushing Gaming on Linux like no other title.
"As of October 2012, Riot Games claims League of Legends has over 32 million registrations and averages 12 million players worldwide per day;[5] global concurrent users online regularly peak at over 5 million players, as of March 2013.[6] In July 2012 Xfire released a report stating that League of Legends was the most played PC game in North America and Europe, with 1.3 billion hours logged by players in those regions between July 2011 and June 2012.[48]"
Source for LoL numbers: http://www.riotgames.com/articles/20130312/700/league-legend...
League of Legends on the other hand add a bit of depth to the genre by giving customisation options to champions outside of the main game (runes, masteries, summoner spell). The learning curve should be smoother, as people need to reach level 30 on their "summoner" (account) before they can enter ranked games. They also need to "buy" at least 16 champions on order to participate in ranked games. This will force the player to learn a bit of the game before entering the competitive scene.
Currently League of Legends is definitely the most competitive MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game around and Riot invests heavily in keeping it that way.
IMO, that's really what makes DOTA/clones uninteresting to me - an interesting and strategic action game saddled with a non-relevant RTS interface.
It's a RTSS Real Time Strategy Shooter sort of thing. It's an FPS game that is sort of like a strategy. Not really any of those, but sort of close.
I personally prefer Dota 2 but it's largely subjective.
The biggest difference is probably in business models. While both games use micro-transactions Dota 2 only sells cosmetic items, League of Legends requires you to buy (either via $ or points earned in game) access to champions/heroes.
runes also let you massage a champion a teeeeny bit towards your preferred style of play for a character (defensive or offensive).
untrue. you can get full rune page quite fast (~ month). and once it's done, there's no disadvantage anymore. if you play smartly from very beginning, you can get that done around lvl 30, right when you are allowed to start playing game competitively.
also - champion choice is not that important. especially in low level. and it's better to learn few champions thoroughly than "gotta catch em all" and being good at none.
When you start playing LOL you have to choose from, I think 6 different champions? Which is pretty limited but let you master those 6 before changing them the next week to 6 new champions. I learned the game without problems this way.
DOTA2 let you play with all the champions directly, oh boy was I lost and still am 200hours of games later. I only play "random" so I can learn every hero but I still haven't played 25% of them I would guess.
Also I know many friends who bought champions on LoL, I think it's a very good source of income.
* Much higher level of polish in terms of graphics, animations, voice acting, music, sound effects, ambiance. It has the Valve touch.
* More varied hero play styles, lane formations, and overall build and game strategies.
* Items are much more varied and there are many more items that have abilities.
* Higher skill cap.
It's easier to master mechanically, but I feel it is all around a much better made game. For one, it actually runs smoothly. This could just be my PC, but super lowest settings and custom config on DotA2 still runs sluggishly, while LoL is very responsive and satisfying to play.
Gameplay-wise, DotA is very cutthroat in that a single hero can go rambo and 1v5 the other team if he gets out of control, while LoL generally allows you to come back if you play smartly with your team. The item shop in DotA is terribly confusing, but I suppose you'll learn it if you play long enough.
The only negative things I can say about LoL is: the leveling system and runes/masteries, while helping new players ramp up to competitive level, seem to take a long time to fill out to get on par with a "normal" player. DotA 2 allows you to jump in straight away on the same level of play and with all heroes available. You have to unlock champions in LoL (it takes a while if you take the free route as most do).
TL;DR - LoL is a polished, simplified, beautiful take on the MOBA genre that DotA popularized. Hardcore DotA fans will call it easy/noob-friendly/etc, but in reality it's just different and in my (biased) opinion, better.
Also, 'buying' champions to play with did not sit well with me at all.
Edit: Also, yes, LoL was made to run with much lower-spec PC's than DOTA2. That being said, DOTA2 has much higher levels of polish when it comes to characters, voicing and environment.
The same thing happens in Dota, too (especially if you play smart). The game has very good comeback mechanics. If you're losing you'll be fighting closer to your base (so it takes less time to buy stuff and to go back and heal), you'll probably be around your towers (so you'll have additional firepower), you'll also have better vision and a position on higher ground (same as in real war - higher ground = better position to fight), you'll probably be underleveled and respawn faster if you die, so you can come back into the fights faster, if you kill the higher leveled enemy you get a LOT of gold and experience, etc.
1v5ing in Dota only happens in very low level games where most people don't know the game and their characters. Sadly, many players don't know it and think it's Quake or something :)
Well it only happens if there's too much of a skill gap between the 1 and the 5. The same exact thing would happen between an experienced Quake 3 player vs 5 noobies.
It's quite fun running around with fully stacked: mob boots, infini, lich bane, mejai, occult, rabadon Shaco
and finishing game with score something like 25/2/whatever
Dota 2 is really hard to get around for beginners as compared LoL. But once you are use to it, believe me it is much much better.
As the case of Rambo, it is really a team effort to make one carry hero be given farm and experience, that's the motive of the carry class here for late game.
I single well fought team clash can easily turn the table around. I have won many games playing smart with other team being overpowering. So there is a chance most the time to comeback. Valve has cleverly created suggested items for each phase of the game very well for an easier shopping experience.
I think valve has done a really good job in bringing Dota 2 with perfected balancing.
That all said I think the individual opinion is mostly affected by the game he has played more and start to love the characters and feel of the game.
Another main difference is that League of Legends has scaling magic damage. Because of this, spells are significantly weaker in the early game (due to the fact that you can get items to boost their power as the game progresses). There are no +magic damage items in DotA, so spells are significantly more powerful early game but become less effective compared to auto attack damage as the game progresses.
>Good examples would be denying friendly creeps / towers, lack of stuns and CC, and the inability to dive towers early in the game.
this applies to denying creeps/towers only. there are lot of stuns, snares, slow in LoL. also - tower diving early in the game is a common thing.
Are Dota pro players also LoL pro players? No.
The biggest different between Dota 2 and LoL is pricing model.
Dota 2 is free. Really free. You have access to 100+ heroes from your first game and there isn't a single thing you can buy that has an effect on winning or losing a match. It's all skins, alternate announcers, and other stuff just for fun.
LoL is free... to play. There are a set of heroes that are free at any given time which is constantly rotating. You have to pay to unlock heroes permanently or can unlock them very slowly over time. You will never unlock everyone without paying money. There are additional other systems you have to level up, or can pay to level more quickly, that provide small bonuses to character attributes in game.
This effects more than the price.
For example in Dota 2 one of my favorite modes is "Reverse Draft" where each team picks the OTHER team's heroes. So you try and give your opponent the worst team you can think of. Something like this is impossible in LoL because every person only has access to a small set of heroes.
Runes on the other hand, do allow for slight advantages during a game. They're also free (as in, you can't even buy them with real money), but once you've gathered an amount of in game currency (Influence Points), you have to choose between using those IP to buy runes or champions. So while everything that's able to give you an advantage in the game is free, those investing real money will have a wider range of champions and/or runes sooner.
After all, we talk about a game where you have over 100 champions with completely different skill sets, over 100 in-game items to buy, all creating a huge array of possible plays and counterplays... That at the same time requires split-second reflexes, maintaining map awareness and, the hardest part, good teamwork.
Actually my main problem with LoL is that you have to spend money to access champions. In DotA I'm used to having access to a huge complement of heroes, and a common strategy is choosing heroes specifically because they are powerful against the enemy team (counter-picking). In LoL it's a lot harder since you only have like 20 (or fewer?) heroes available.
Paying for champions is paying for additional content -- content that's free in DotA 2.
No you don't because of Influence points. Playing games acquires you IP which you can use to buy champions. All champions can be bought with IP
[1]: http://steamgraph.net/index.php?action=graph&jstime=1&appid=...
Furthermore, even though they've just announced that they've come out of Beta, almost none of the new players have been invited in yet as they're inviting people via waves.
Once all new players actually get in, and Dota 2 opens up in other countries such as China and Korea, these figures will skyrocket by several magnitudes - probably well overtaking World of Warcraft in number of players.
I wouldn't say it's difficult to play, you get the jist pretty quick, but yes it is hard to master as there are a lot of good/seasoned players and takes a lot of time learning all of the playable characters skills. It's really fun.
However, there are currently many indie games available for linux. Even some well-known hits, like Kerbel Space Program and Surgeon Simulator (by chance, they both happen to use the Unity engine, which natively includes linux support).
Just out of interest, what was the timeline for OSX steam like? I don't use a Mac, so I'm not sure.
I think it essentially comes from the nature of the game: as an individual, you're suddenly stuck with a bunch of other people you have to cooperate with. It's not like tf2 or CS. The teams are smaller and the stakes are much higher. People care about winning games in DotA a lot more than they do in most FPS games, where the journey is the destination. In DotA, the win is the destination and it's the validation of your abilities (k/d ratio doesn't cut it).
You would think having the win be so important would make it easier or better to work together, but the fact of the matter is most DotA players suck. Even people who consistently win public games still suck. Players hold everyone else to incredibly high standards and get frustrated when they feel like their team "drags them down." This is compounded by a feeling that, if you're doing badly yourself, you should scapegoat a team member in order to shift the blame.
DotA 2 is actually a lot better. I'm not sure why exactly, and it depends on your level. Maybe there's hope.
The fact that you are launched into a game where your fun depends on the performance of a bunch of strangers in a fast -paced, hostile environment that penalizes mistakes heavily with only short bursts of text to communicate is a recipe for vile players.
The weird thing is that the stakes are largely only whether the game will meet the player's expectations.
Also, humans are generous when judging their own abilities and are miserly when judging a stranger's abilities.
I don't find this genre fun whether I'm succeeding or not, for me it's 100% journey (casually and socially exploring the way mechanics combine into interesting gameplay - including failures as much as successes) and these games and their player base seem to be the precise opposite of that.
This game is massively popular in both of those regions.
I think MOBA games (except for the kiddie ones like LoL) are popular there because they like their games to be challenging. Most games today are rich in graphics but poor in gameplay, dumbed down for the masses to enjoy. At least in D2 and HoN even the most dedicated players still get a thrill out of sharpening their skills and being better then the other guy.
I played HoN before matchmmaking, and it was quite interesting: you created a lobby, people would join, and you as leader could vet your teammates and kick the ones you didn't want to play with. Then the game proceeded once both sides were happy.
It took about ~10mins to get a game going, but the games were far higher quality.
There wasn't really a good way to tell who was going to be an asshole, and who wasn't going to be one.
The real hazard in DOTA / AOS / MOBA games are the people who slowly (or quickly) transform from quiet or reasonable people into insanely angry trash talking monsters. After all, the DOTA community got its reputation for being awful back in WC3, totally independent of any matchmaking.
Imagine that baseball games were played using a non-discriminatory matchmaking service. So start of the "Dodgers vs Giants" game there would be a pause and then 25 "players" would materialize. Some of them would be athletes in their 20s with strong skills, some would be 40+ year old veterans who have good skills but aren't in shape, some would be 10 year old little leaguers who are very knowledgeable but inexperienced and out of shape, and some would be people who just randomly picked "play baseball" as their selected activity, not really knowing even what the rules of the game were. Then there is a "manager" who has to create a starting lineup, assign positions, and win the pennant.
Extremely frustrating.
Blizzard was working on "fixing" this by segregating selection of players into "twinks" and "non-twinks", "experienced" vs "non-experienced" and "hardcore" vs "casual" which helped but it still made for a crappy experience a lot of the time.
Also, I realized that I feel around ten times worse when losing than how good I feel when winning, so the expected derived pleasure from the game is really really negative, so I scaled my playing down a whole lot.
Because that's what the system was designed to do. If you're winning more than 50% it means that some percentage of the time, the game can't find 5 people who are better than you to put in a game. You'd have to compete at a semi-pro level to get this to happen.
Other games such as Dota 2, Starcraft 2 and League of Legends feature excellent match making. Anyone who takes these games seriously usually has a set group of people to play with, and only do public games when they have to.
A lot of games involve team work, but it isn't crucial: that is you'll play better if you work as a team, but you don't need to and you can still enjoy the game if you ignore your team.
This is manifestly untrue for Dota. if you ignore your team you'll have a horrible time and so will the rest of your team.
As result this is actually an interesting social experiment: based on dota it looks like a lot of people don't like working as a team.
You could be contributing to the problem a lot more than you think, e.g. by way of the Broken Windows theory[1].
Just moved from Wordpress to Flask, got the Valve Dota2 replay-parser running on Linux and am preparing some cool stuff with that on the back end.
tl;dr: get on teamspeak (voice.dotanoobs.com) and play with people who aren't mean.
TeamSpeak's serverquery let me do a lot of cool things easier than Mumble/ice. There is a TeamSpeak client for linux (http://www.teamspeak.com/?page=downloads)!
Did you ever submit any feature requests or talk to the Mumble people about those integrations you use? Being an open-source project, it may not be too far-fetched to see them added in.
This block of text here explains why I consider the entire genre to be fundamentally flawed.
To deal with trolls/toxic people, they have a reporting system. If someone gets reported by a number of people they will be muted and/or put into the low priority queue. Muting lasts X duration (depending on repeat offences) and prevents that person from talking at all in game (they can still use the chat wheel I believe).
The low-priority queue is a separate match-making queue, where only people in this queue will play against one another. It is for people that regularly abandon games (or are toxic players). It tends to be filled with the trouble-making players.
In DOTAlike games? You're married to the bad teammate. If you drop, the game brands you a leaver. You won't be scrambled. The round won't even end any time soon - you're just stuck with him for many, many minutes of play. But the worst part is, he's actually feeding power to the enemy. Every time you get in a fight and get your ass kicked, you're going to think of the screwups your bad teammate did.
And there's no perspective, no fog-of-war between teammates. You can see his every screw-up. Can watch it in hateful detail.
And then the other team just reams you and clobbers you because they've cranked their power up.... but the game doesn't even have the dignity of ending quickly, you're stuck while they pummel you until the game ends properly instead of being trapped in this moribund state.
And all the time, your hatred for that idiotic scrub boils.
The game is practically designed to make you hate the weakest player on your team.
It sounds like you need to do the opposite -- help the bad teammate. Yelling at the person is just going to make them less cooperative. How is it that we've been programmed to yell at these people when that makes it worse? (or have we learned that yelling works and we apply it to everything?)
The Dunning-Kruger effect gets in the way of this. A lot of unskilled people take offense at unsolicited advice, particularly if they're so unskilled as to deem themselves the best player on the team. It doesn't help that the game tracks somewhat superficial stats such as kills and deaths; a score that can run counter to the actual hidden score in the game: gold/experience differential. Like a basketball player who shoots all the time and refuses to pass, bad players will often prioritise individual success in lieu of team success. Then when you try to help them they lash out at you for not having as many kills as them; seemingly ignorant of the different roles on a team.
From personal experience, I disagree with the implication that the dunning-krueger effect gets in the way of it.
I have a hard time explaining how precisely atm, but you can often get the weaker players to work with you, and at the same time create a team even in the middle of a pub game.
TO give an example of some of the core tricks: in WoW battlegrounds the simple act of constantly YELLING the enemies incoming to a node, and keeping up the communication banter (even alone in local chat) will result in a spate of wins.
If I were to simplify it, it would be know what to communicate, and communicate simply. Your greatest enemy is discord, and poor communication.
Further: in pub games its probably easier because a modicum of co-ordination will get you quick battle wins over the opponents and so solidify camaraderie. Strong opponents who know what they are doing better than you can assist will leave you with few opportunities on the field to capitalize on.
----
For weak players in DoTA 1 and 2.
No one likes being cursed, and become more receptive to someone who steps in, while also providing some space to enjoy themselves and win. I've found myself saying
> "Chill out. All of us were noobs once. Player X, you did screw up, but it happens. Next time, call out, or let us know." Or
> "mate, we're bugged because we NEED your skill to land, thats why they are pissed, they depend on you."
Those lines sound cheesy when I write them down, but context, delivery and crafting of the appropriate sentence matters a lot more.
Side note: In DoTA I've found you can control your team better playing a support role.
I've never played these games so I may be missing something, but why is that a problem? Somebody else in this thread mentioned that lossing in Dota is worse than losing in other games, but didn't explain why either.
I'm getting the sense that the real cause of the issue is that for some reason people take Dota way too seriously. If you lose, what's the big deal? You still had fun right?
A coworker told me a few days ago that he use to play "league of legends" but quit when he realized he wasn't actually having fun since the experience become too stressful.
When you start getting better in such games, you need to be very concentrated, very nervous. It isn't all fun and casual gaming anymore. When this concentration pays off and you win, it feel amazing, when it doesn't and you lose, you feel miserable. Anyway, you can't get back to lower level casual gaming (make a new account, for example) since it becomes so easy that you could play blindfolded.
Of course you could somewhat alleviate the negative effect of losses by having good permanent teammates, also whole game becomes much more interesting if you coordinate with fellows you know. Still, blame shifting happens even in the friendliest of teams.
I've stopped playing MOBA (HoN is my poison of choice) when I understood how nervous and unpleasant I am after the game session.
Knowing that those people are out there, what you can do is be the moral leader. When the game starts, give the all-chat "good luck have fun" greeting, start discussing lane strategy, team strategy (push/turtlefarm/gank), etc. If you make a mistake, live up to it. The only time the trolls really ruin games is if everyone else is silent and lets the person continue ranting.
Learning to float above the trolls' guilt trips while still being able to admit your mistakes is an interesting emotional exercise.
Valve's commitment to tweaking behaviour through player feedback has been surprisingly effective. You can read a bit about it here: http://blog.dota2.com/2013/05/communication-reports/
Please please please please don't be That Guy. I encourage muting individuals who are annoying. But I use mic exclusively and how are we supposed to cooperate?
I play League of Legends, and while there's a decent chance that you'll run into a few toxic players every 3 or 4 games, most of the time if you set the tone at champion select or the start of a game with "gl hf" and, more impoartantly something like, "hey guys, how's it going?" or "let's have a good time" (as cheesy as it sounds) things end up going really smoothly. Silliness and joking helps too (such as, "Party at our nexus!" or "ey yo [champion name], what u doin later tonight?"). I've played 4 games over the past 2 days and only one person came close to raging.
The worst of the worst tend to have the lowest ratings, so if you're halfway decent (which is pretty easy to achieve) then you'll be alright, barring the occasional crazy person.
This scenario makes it very easy to get agitated when a person on your team screws up badly and ends up costing your team the game.
Dota 2 has recently introduced a robust muting system that has really done a good job changing the behavior of the more... voiceful members online - this has led to an overall much more pleasant in-game chat experience.
The best solution to enjoy your game when a scumbag is in your team (or the other):
1. Mute him/her. Both the chat and microphone will be muted. 2. Report. 3. Keep playing.
I've done this since day one, I've muted about 5 people during the last month. It's acceptable for me. And if you team up with friends in a party, you'll have so much more fun.
Please remember to commend the people helping you out. I love being commended, and that's why I'm trying to help out and staying friendly during all of my games no matter how it turns out.
Long high-commitment match-ups make it bad for people with other committments, a hyperlong list of powers and heroes makes for a tremendous amount of trivia to learn, there's the various play mechanics that make you hate the weakest man on your team (and can examine his failings in detail), and the way DOTA2 embraces counterintuitive hardcore tweaks that were eradicated in other iterations (like killing your own troops to deny the opponents XP).
I like the pro gaming circuit, but a truly good game is one that's approachable, friendly, and deep.
MOBA games aren't really that hard to get into. Millions of players find it rather easy to get into. In fact, if numbers are anything to take into account, MOBA games may be the easiest type of competitive game to actually get into.
Dota2 seems to be a lot more newbie-friendly than the original DotA. Eg: you get hints on which items to buy and how to combine them to create better items. But I would still put it in the newbie-unfriendly category. Nothing, nothing can generate so much hate and rage as a DotA match. I have lost IRL friends to it.
Just to be clear, I love the game and I still play it when I want some adrenaline.
To be clear, my complaint is not about skill-intensive gaming. My problem with the DOTA format is that it makes you hate the weak teammates in so many different ways, and putting together a single match requires such a large commitment of time from so many players.
Compare vs. TF2 where the 6v6 pro circuit exists but casual players still have access to 12v12 pubs where nobody cares if you suck or you drop. Or compare vs. StarCraft where there's an extensive single-player campaign and a 1v1 community online, and the only person who hates you if you screw up in 1v1 is yourself, and at least when you fail in a 1v1 starcraft game the end will come blissfully swiftly. And nobody would say that SC or TF2 are low-skill games.
Do you hate rocket jumping and wall hugging in Quake as well? Both are essential to playing Quake at a decent level. Both started as accidental features (call them bugs if you will) but were then given the official stamp of approval and carried forward through all the sequels.
In other words, you are committing the genetic fallacy.
Denying started as an accidental feature or bug. But it was found to be interesting and the game has since been balanced around it. Now, you can only auto-attack allied creeps when they are below 50% health, the XP from denied creeps is higher for melee heroes, etc. As a game mechanic, it emphasizes that the laning phase is a head-to-head contest between adversaries that can disrupt each other's progression through means other than direct harassment. The usual retort is that it's bad because it's counterintuitive. But what does that really mean? Not every game mechanic can be intuited. The rules of chess are not intuitive. Games are formal systems with a veneer of verisimilitude.
That's a subjective opinion. Creep denial is typically one of these game mechanics that differentiate skilled players from unskilled ones. I find it a highly valuable feature. It defines so much of the meta-game, particularly for the middle lane.
League of Legends addresses many of your apparent concerns with Dota's game design. But guess what? Its online community is every bit as toxic and obnoxious. Both are skill-based team games that are played over the Internet, require a lot of coordination, and usually take over 30 minutes per match. You can address in-game bad manners at the margins with something like Riot's tribunal system or Valve's reporting system, but I doubt you can do much to eliminate the problem without also eliminating those essential features of their game design.
I mean, look at the great online games of yesteryear - say, Quake for example. Quake's mechanics are fundamentally simple. Run, jump, pickup stuff, shoot. There's only 9ish weapons to figure out in the average Quake-like game, and in most cases the behavior is "point at what you want to die and click the button". Learn the maps so you can control the pickups. The hardcore players will have to learn to exploit the bugs in the motion model to get a little speed edge, but that basic stuff is all there.
And in a Deathmatch game, you know what happens if you suck? You die. Over and over and over and over again. But since it's a free-for-all, there's no teammates you're letting down. Nobody screaming at you about how much you suck. And even in a teamgame, the teams are larger so one weak player can fade in the back. And none of his teammates are watching him suck and screaming at him, they're all too busy playing and can't see what he's doing through walls. If he drops out, nobody cares.
But you can't say Quake et al are low-skill. See also RTS games - RTS team-games face many of the same problems as DOTAlikes, but in most RTSes the 1V1 matchups reign supreme, and FFA is also a popular option. In a 1V1 a newbie will get utterly annihilated repeatedly and there's the same bad slippery slope of DOTAlikes, but nobody will hate the loser like you'll see in a teamgame where everybody just watched one idiotic ally spend the last 25 minutes ruining their fun. Plus, RTS games at least will give you the dignity of a quick death unlike a DOTAlike where you'll still spend several minutes watching the towers go down before the victor is declared.
You could make a super-simple DOTA-like game with only one hero to choose from and super-simple combat mechanics and you'd still see all the cultural and mechanical problems you see in modern DOTAlikes. You'd still have players screaming at the newbie who's accidentally feeding. You'd still have players hurling verbal abuse at each other while they get pointlessly pummeled because the game is functionally over but doesn't have the dignity to end even though the leveling has made it completley moribund.
It's not about skill, it's about a long-form team-game with bad slippery slopes. A low-skill game with that format would still be cruel to newbies, just like high-skill games that avoid that insanity are newbie-friendly (see any twitch-FPS for example).
Games like that already exist and they don't capture any of the aspects of Dota I find compelling. The new Infinite Crisis game is essentially the Dominion game mode from League of Legends with DC superheroes and villains. There was another game like that announced recently for iOS with the slogan "No farming, just fighting." Those games all sound terrible to me. They're tailor-made for the attention-deficient iPhone gaming generation. Can the rest of us have a few games to play?
Quake was a great game but it's strategically and tactically shallow. Dota is an intrinsically team-based game with the tactical and strategical depth of a game like Starcraft. Arguably it surpasses Starcraft's depth in some areas owing to the many 5v5 match-ups you can generate from a pool of over 100 heroes. I disagree with nearly every adulteration Riot made in designing League of Legends, but even they realize that you cannot alter these features without making a different kind of game entirely.
Not every game has to be like chess where the rule set can be learned in five minutes.
Classic FPS's in minstagib mode are generally very simple to play with a total of about 3/4 controls and are very much skill, not trivia based, and an anathema to console gamers and noobs. Skill is not about memorizing dictionaries of trivia.
Anyway, key word is trivia.
Not to say that there isn't a fair share of unintuitive things. A good example is how even though the objective of the game is destroy the enemy base most of the times a team will avoid attacking the enemy buildings until the very end of the game.
There are built in user contributed guides that suggest what what to build and why, with the guide's author comments on both individual items and skills, for every hero and numerous alternative builds. There is in game voting on the quality of each guide. It's a cinch now in Dota 2 to buy basic stuff even if you've literally never played a hero before, and also easy to try experimental builds for fun right in game.
The skill is all judgement calls and spacing. Memorizing item or skill progressions is irrelevant and indeed "trivial" in the sense that it plays little part in the game or your thinking during it. On the other hand, having the skill to use the blink dagger and catch opponents or save yourself is essential.
You're saying that because obviously you haven't progressed past the trivia plateau.
There's a LOT of skill involved in DotA. You need a few hours of play to acquire the basic mechanics and principles of the game, but you need a lot more hours to become a good player - even if you already know your heroes and your builds. I've spent more than 1000 hours playing the original DotA (since 2004) and Heroes of Newerth, and I've seen a lot of mediocre players with a shitload of experience, as well as a lot of absolutely terrific players with only a few hours of play behind them.
Memorizing the basic knowledge required to play the game doesn't make you instantaneously a good player.
Besides, there is a great portion of skill in laning. You can watch best players like dendi winning 9 times of 10 on the middle lane against other top players. It's a spectacular feat.
The difference in skill between the ex-pro, or even several of the just very talented players and the rest of us is immense.
The trivia helps, knowing counter items and the like helps but at high level play all sorts of things become very important. For example positioning of your unit(s), to either miss a spell being cast or to physically block the person you are trying to kill makes the difference between a major win or complete loss of a fight. Or your ability to farm, last hitting creeps, stacking/jungling and maximizing your gold per second.
So yes at low level Dota is all about the trivia. I'm a better player then a random new player because I know the characters, their abilities and the items. But at the end of the day despite putting in hundreds of hours I pale in comparison to a Excellent player because I don't have the reflexes, or the split second analytical mind. In addition, and most importantly, I've not put in the hours upon hours of purposeful practice that a pro dota player has.
Dota is a skill based game.
http://web.archive.org/web/20090624132302/http://www.gotfrag...
The skill level with DOTAlikes is not the problem.
The problem isn't DOTA (though for obvious reasons its more extreme) - its the general format of unorganized online competitive team play. If I'm bad at Starcraft for instance, and get thrown onto a ranked team game - my team suffers, and balance can only control so much of that. The social infrastructure is too limited to be effective at preventing things like rude comments, scapegoating, lack of mentoring, or easy pairing with people you enjoy playing with. Immature young adults + no consequences + people they'll never see again = crap behavior. And sadly, the social features haven't progressed (in some cases regressed) since I played TF 15 years ago.
There is a concede vote option in HoN, it can be called after 15 minute with 5 of 5 votes (which becomes 4 of 5 after 25 min), so if whole team agrees, you can end the misery.
It sounds weird but I think it taught me to be patient and to fight till the end.
It's a third person, heavily skill shot based MOBA. So no you don't have to be pro to learn how to play. The skills rollover from other games (especially WoW), so you don't really have to relearn basic mechanics. And new players are matched with all new players (so besides from smurfs), you should have a relatively easy time.
As a side note, Valve has recently crowdsourced the prizepot for The International 3 with great success (their large DotA2 tournament) [2].
[1] https://twitter.com/MasterCard/status/354621397135409152 [2] http://www.dota2.com/international/compendium/
Eventually I overcame the addiction by replacing the habit with going to the gym 4-5 times a week. Now I spend my time in windows playing with the directx sdk instead of on Dota.
Not really sure what value this comment adds, but I guess soon even Linux won't be a semi-safe-haven for Dota addicts (p.s. I have an ATI card so wine wasn't an option for me).
It has been the first online game that I've really become hooked upon since my old days of playing Warcraft 3 custom maps.
The engine is nice, but until I no longer have any need to boot into Windows, I'm only mildly impressed.
Photoshop though...
But even then, ignore Linux for the moment, and just pretend I said Mac OS X instead. My point definitely applies there even with the pre-requisite you have for running Maya and Photoshop.
However, you're right that for some members of the asset pipeline, they may continue to use Windows. But for the developer who is debugging in-engine scripts and/or engine problems, being able to build and debug on the same platform would be a huge win.
My guess is that if you can get the editor running on Linux, you can also have it on OS X and vice-versa.
> Dota 2 Linux Minimum System Requirements:
> Ubuntu 12.04
> Dual core from Intel or AMD at 2.8 GHz
> 4GB RAM
> 4GB Hard Drive Space,
> nVidia GeForce 8600/9600GT, ATI/AMD Radeaon HD2600/3600 (Graphic Drivers: nVidia 310, AMD 12.11), OpenGL 2.1
> OpenAL Compatible Sound Card
I run Dota 2 at 720p on my Windows 7 PC with substantially lower spec hardware - A Core 2 Duo clocked at 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, Intel IGP GMA X4500 (G41 chipset)
This proves that the Source Engine on Linux isn't exactly efficient as its Windows counterpart as Valve claimed a few months back.
Alternative takes on it tend to be fun for me (things like MNC), and I really feel like the genre would work a lot better with a more action-oriented control scheme. Something like a GW2 sPvP mode with a dota-style objective/flow would be quite excellent, in my opinion.
I have to use vgaswitcheroo to disable my discrete ATI 4550 card, because it causes artefacts and crashes and consumes too much power. The proprietary driver doesn't even work at all.
That may be the reason, but I think it's the upcoming Steam console/PC that is driving all these linux releases.