Oh hey this thread popped up.
Dota 2 is a very, very, very well done game, but I don't have to tell you that when the competition is Vanilla DotA, which suffers from a lot of engine limitations and control difficulty; League of Legends, which is promising yet has an awful community and lacks the polish to succeed; and Heroes of Newerth, because frankly what has S2 made in its 5 year lifespan that wasn't a buggy, unbalanced pile of crap? Dota 2 is a Valve game, and let me say that even missing half of its features, it still has an incredible level of detail and polish.
YM has a point when he says there's a steep learning curve. A
steep learning curve. But it's very easy to overcome with the power of reading. Dota is not for the faint of heart. It requires a lot of analysis and thought to play properly, which is why it's very competitive. Like chess, there's a lot more than meets the eye, and it takes a lot of watching and reading to get a grasp on the game. You will play poorly, you will play poorly for a while. But in the end, Dota is a game of skill, knowledge, and luck. Heroes and items take a lot less to memorize than you'd think. Even skimming through a hero's information will give you enough to know about them. Most Heroes follow basic patterns that become easy to pick up with experience.
Dota's learning curve is comparable to most fighting games, where you end up associating things like Dragon Punches or characters that are Akuma. You see something, then you can associate that with a number of other things. You'll have trouble jumping in, but if you read a few beginner's guides you start to snowball in information. When you grasp the gameplay, you grasp the mechanics. When you grasp the mechanics, you grasp the skills. Eventually you'll understand enough to be able to wing a few matches.
But the reason that Dota is so loved is because, not only is a lot of the game sheer skill and knowledge, there's also always more to learn. How can I make my Dragon Knight build better? How can I be more effective as Slardar? You start to improve yourself autonomously, doing experiments in matches, and getting a feel for everything. At the start you'll probably stick to two or three heroes and learn them, then start playing more heroes and more until you've mastered everyone.
Here's a few things that can help to get you started:
- The Dota 2 Wiki - Contains a lot of the information for the currently implemented heroes. Good for checking facts and information on the fly. Better written and more accurate than PlayDotA, but with less facts overall.
- The List of Heroes on PlayDotA - This is a complete listing of all heroes - implemented and unimplemented - in DotA. Poorly written at times, but complete, and contains a lot of guides.
- Welcome to DotA, You Suck - A harsh, yet excellent guide for new players. Walks you through what you should and shouldn't do.
- Masterja's Total Newbie Guide - Less harsh than Purge's, but not as good overall in my opinion. Still useful for new players to read through.
If you're still interested, and want to get into the Dota 2 Beta, finding a key is going to be difficult. Some places, like PlayDota, are giving away keys constantly, and there's a lot of contests. The Steam Surveys will sometimes drop keys, and they go out in waves a bunch. Another avenue is to do something that gets IceFrog's attention (mine was with the wiki.) The beta is closed, but keys are generally available.
Until you can get into Dota 2, feel free to play a few dotalikes. Heroes of Newerth is the most recent, and most like DotA, that you can get if you want playability. But it has a rather crappy community and the game isn't very balanced. If you want to play the original DotA, you just need Warcraft 3 and the Frozen Throne, then you can download the map from PlayDota. There are AI maps available that'll let you play by yourself so you can get some practice in before actually playing games. I haven't used the platforms much, so don't ask me how they work, and it's fairly archaic. League of Legends is... well it's not really DotA at this point. It's an option, and it's more newb friendly, but the experience you'll get will be a lot different from Dota 2.
tl;dr: YM is half right/half raged - DotA, and Dota 2, have a steep learning curve but you can read some guides to get over it.
Part 2 - DotA with a Vengeance
Okay, so I responded to YM's comments without reading the thread first. Here's a little about why I like Dota 2 so much: my experience with DotA goes back about five or six years when me and some friends would play it during computer classes in middle school. We weren't very good, but then again none of us really played it that seriously. The reason we played it at all was because one of my friends' brothers showed it to him and he thought it was the shit. When the summer rolled about we weren't able to get together and I ended up finding the DotA Allstars website and managed to get pretty decent at it. I played online for a little while until high school when I got bored of playing. I tried playing HoN once, but it was a real kick in the teeth and didn't have any sort of balance between heroes.
So Dota 2 shows up on radar and I got real excited. Func_door ended up finding a very young wiki by random Google searches, and he and I managed to add a lot of information and generally spruce it up. Some time around October, IceFrog showed up in our IRC and handed out keys to the major editors, and we ran a contest a couple of weeks later. I've been playing a few games a week, though much more after they started sending out waves of invites.
There's my history, now a little about everything else: Dota 2's niche is to be Dota 2.0. There are still millions of players playing DotA, and a lot of them refuse to play HoN for the same reason as me. HoN started as Dota 2.0, but S2 evolved it to be a terrible thing. Because there's no cast or turn animations, and because of some abilities and items have been completely changed, it's not unexpected to be one-shot. And that's a big thing. Even Tiny, who can deal over 1000 points of damage in seconds, doesn't regularly one-shot enemies, but his HoN equivalent eats supports for breakfast. There's a lot of issues with it, and when Dota 2 goes public, odds are a lot of its playerbase is going to roll over to Valve.
Valve's interest in DotA is, "we like DotA, what if we made it better?" They want to make a new IP, might as well make one they like. Okay, that's not the best way to use their money, but what I've seen has been generally positive so thumbs up for that. Why are they making this when there are so many other games like it? Because Valve thinks they can do it better. Why would you make another gritty war shooter? Why would you keep making open world GTA clones? Imagine four games on the edge of a cliff. Dota 2 works the same way.
Trotim - there were a ton of awesome maps out there for Warcraft 3, and fuck yes I loved Tech Wars too. DotA's popularity is tied a lot to luck, and the fact that a bunch of mappers grabbed it up and added new heroes and items to it. Allstars, which combined the best additions, got grabbed up and somehow became extremely competitive, especially when IceFrog took over. He ended up rebalancing a lot of problems, and paid a lot of attention to how the game was played. Because of the balance and attention he gave DotA, it grew and for some reason tipped. LoL took DotA and took it in its own direction, HoN tried to improve on it and ended up crashing and burning, and Dota 2 is trying to go 1:1, copying out DotA while fixing the engine issues.
