Draginol

[quote]2 things, DotA is a game that is not for the casual player (unless you know how to pay), there are 91 current heroes, and each takes time to learn and master, I have heard my friends say (and they play it alot) that DotA has about a year learning curve, no joke, and I would agree, DotA has actual depth that I am suprised at, if you think it doesnt, then your not thinking of it all: ganking, juking, fogging, creep juggling, orb walking, dening, last hitting... I could go on, but ya, to know what to do for each hero takes a while (OFF NOTE: in the original DotA it was all about tower killing and winning, back dooring was legal [and encouraged] in those days)

2nd: heres something that I might help out a few of you with the DotA heroes being influences, I asked a few interview questions back in the day, so heres one:


Me: GPG is a supposed fan of DotA, do you have a favorite hero? why? and did it have any impact on making any of the Demigods? (dont need to say which demigod)


Scathis: a tough one, I mean they're up to like 90 heroes now. I'm pretty partial to the Necrolyte , Shadow Shaman and the Ursa Warrior.
Some of them did. I will say that some of the heroes in DotA helped inspire the idea of creating the "General" demigods. Heroes like Keeper of Light, Phantom Lancer and Prophet who tend to have a lot of extra units to manage made us think there's a group of people who want to play the game like that. That was not the only reason we created the generals, we are an RTS developer after all.

Blizzard doesn't technically own DotA, the intellectual rights of the code, fluff, and new game play concepts belong to ice frog, or one of the other developers. But the map itself is blizzards technology so they technically own the technology, but DotA as a game is a third party mod owned by it's developers and community.

Also how do you know what the triggers of their newest versions look like? Either:

A) you're talking about an out dated version (about 2 years or so)
or you spent a lot of time cracking a map which you seem to find boring and stupid...

(I make and protect my maps my self, and have cracked a couple of maps to see how they do what they do, never succeeded at DotA though. Not that I tried hard)

Blizzards license agreement on the editor(all mentions, not the entire thing):







Nowhere does it mention the editor or any property thereby created as their's except for "any titles, computer code, themes, objects, characters, character names, stories, dialog, catch phrases, locations, concepts, artwork, animations, sounds, musical compositions, audio-visual effects, methods of operation, moral rights, any related documentation, and "applets" incorporated into the Program" that they created. Nor does it seem that they care if you use the editor to create your own stuff, as long as you realize that all of that ^ that they created belongs to them


P.S. In the second half of my previous post I was talking to the guy who said DotA's JASS was horrible

Yes, but the map as a whole belongs to DotA's developers and their community, the hours they've spent making, designing it, bug testing it, playing it, it's theirs not some conglomerate's who didn't even bother putting a clause in the license agreement. (Remember I'm arguing the fact that it DOESN'T belong to blizzard, not that it does belongs to Icefrog)

Yes i was talking about DotA though in response to some one saying DotA belongs to blizzard jesh >.<

wtf? windexglow. are u f***ing retarded?
one thing DotA very old so complaining about its concept or its appearance is stupid since it was one of the first to try it at that scale. then u said u got "kicked" but in DotA that can't be because there no way of kicking a player without the player willingly quitting the game. if u say that its concept sucks then tell that to the hundreds of thousands of people that play it. even though it isn't really that popular in the US its played by almost 500,000 people in Asia.

in ur first game, u said that u bought the wrong item then stop buying scroll or recipes because u need the items first before being the recipe scrolls in making them in better equipment.

no seriously, killing 2 creeps and u got kicked, what did u actually do? my guess is that u charged the enemy without any common sense of seeing if ur going to die in the process. stop making up stories just because u suck at a game or doesn't get the actual game play. in a game usually a player kills about 100 creeps.

in ur third game, the enemy gets money or gold from killing an opponent so probably having committed so much stupid decisions that ended in ur death caused the enemy to gain there proper item so quickly that ur teammates couldn't no longer fight with the slightest chance of winning.

- stop whining about a game u suck at. and it takes more than 3 incomplete tries to fully experience that game since from ur description u took about 25 mins in total playing that game while one complete game usually takes about an hour in average.

Seriously Dota Player, not needed here. This is the sort of response you would see online or in the Dota-allstars.com forums. Yes, I play DOTA, and have for several years. Alot of the things that windex was complaining about were incorrect or misrepresented. However, by coming here, calling names, telling someone they suck, blah blah blah, you completely lose any credibility with your post.

There is a kick program available to the host which severs that players connection, so it is possible that he was kicked. That he was kicked in 3 consecutive games is very unlikely. However, I do not doubt that as he did things that a beginner player will do, that his team berated him and called him noob, feeder, *&%)#*, #*&%!, and #*%&!))(*1%&*. They probably stayed on him till either they left, or he left. Not a good experience for a beginner player.

DOTA is a serious time investment. A good game will take anywhere from 45 minutes up to a couple of hours. However, good games are hard to come by. It has gotten better with banlists, list checker, regional checks, and pingers, but as much time or more can be spent trying to get a match that lasts more than 10 to 15 minutes. There is little to no penalty to just leaving a game. As a result, frustrated players will leave for whatever slight, maybe they randomed a hero they consider bad, maybe no one on their team would yield to their demands of switching, maybe their team wouldn't let them solo, maybe they died in the first couple minutes by either their own stupidity or they were ganked, maybe this or that. All it takes is for a couple of players to leave a team and the game is busted.

Because of the time going in to it, the community has grown very impatient and unforgiving (see Dota Player's post). I sincerely hope that the same problems (matchmaking, no penalties for leaving, etc) will be much less in Demigod. These forums have been overall, positive, very little flaming, and posters are respectful to each other. I would hate to see this community digress to the DOTA mob mentality.

The DotA community is the way it is because of the nature of the game. The game has a huge learning curve. It is true the game is playable with little knowledge, but that is not really how the game is meant to be played. It is created to be competitive. You could just scan a DotA forum to see it's depth in just the number of techniques. Each person who is any good has spent immense amounts of time invested in playing these games. Many players live, sleep, and eat DotA.

It is a sport in a sense. With any sport you have the aggressive nature of competition. It is a matter of winning and losing and no one plays to lose. Even in public games we are competitive, probably more than we should be. But imagine this, you start playing soccer tomorrow and you go try to play a game with soccer pros. If you can't do anything to help them win, what do think they are going to do? They are going to kick you from a game.

This kind of game is different than a game like Halo or other competitive games. It requires the whole team's involvement. In Halo, one person can dominate and bring his team to victory. This is because of the fact that death in Halo is nothing more than just a number, possibly a loss of a good item. While in Dota, one person can help their team gain an advantage, but he is one person and still can be taken down. If killed it is loss of gold for the player, gain of gold for the other team as well as exp. Which closes the gap of items and experience. Also by killing the best player you receive more gold.

So when someone who has never played before joins a game and dies a few times early, it hurts the team greatly. Back to the soccer analogy, if you were playing soccer and you pass the ball to the new guy and he gives it to the opposing player which helps him score, you'd be pissed as hell. Sure, he might not have known what was going on, but it still hurts.

So in conclusion, think of most games on b.net (TDA or not) as soccer matches. It is where everyone brings their A-game. If you need practice, don't do it during a match, do it against friends or against computers.

Well despite that, some heroes ARE overpowered as far as hero killing or creeping is concerned. Lanaya in the right hands (not necessarily experienced hands) can kill before level 6, and not stop for the rest of the game. Pudge with some know how can be an excellent enabler, if not an outright hero slaughterer. Just takes someone who can tell you what does what in your beginning days and it's all gold.

DotA has a murderous learning curve at times. It's not just the game you're fighting against, it's the player base. If the player base were supportive rather than dismissive of newbies there would be a lot more decent, if not high rank players.

I'm a DotA Allstars player, and I heard about Demigod on the forums there. I must say, Demigod looks pretty awesome.

I must agree with most people here about the player base: most DotA players are jerks. I like to think I'm not one of them. The problem is, in every team-based game which is online (providing anonymity), you're going to get jerks who blame their team for their loss. And that's what team games are all about. The DotA community has taken this to an extreme, though, and is pretty elitist. There's quite a few nice players there, but also a whole lot of retards. If you post an item build which branches out into the "it's so crazy it might just work" category, odds are you're going to get flamed. It's a sad state of affairs, but I mostly play DotA with friends I know in real life, so there's no retard interference. If I lose, I lose, but at least I had fun along the way.

I like the look of the Demigod community much better, I must say. But the problem is that with Demigod's similarity to DotA (speaking as one who's read very little about Demigod, but the whole point of this newspost is that it is DotA-like) is that you're going to attract DotA players. And they're gonna be angry, because that's what Battlenet DotA players tend to be like. ALL THE TIME. The Demigod community might well go downhill when it gets a bigger reputation, which would be a shame.

DotA is not extremely imbalanced, and that's why there's a new version released every couple of weeks - excuse the illogic. Minor tweaks to particularly out-of-line heroes, yes, but in general the community (excepting the trolls) accepts that DotA is pretty balanced. Pudge can absolutely own at level 8, but he tends to taper off late game (punnily a "meat shield" with no bite). Keeper of the Light simply cannot hold his own in hero-vs-hero fights, but his pushing ability is legendary. You may end up with a terrible Kills-Deaths ratio, but played right KotL is going to push the creepwave right to the enemy's throne. Which is just as important as raping every other enemy hero. What noobs (I use the term accurately) don't understand is that you *can* have a K-D of 0-12 (12 deaths is a lot) but can have still contributed to the team. All noobs want to do is run around getting a huge K-D and bragging about it, even while their base is being razed in two lanes. Who cares that the enemy creepwave is about to destroy the throne, the noob just pwned two enemy heroes!

I don't really ever play on Battle.net any more (the official Warcraft servers), because of the rampant noobs. I only play on private servers, even though I have a legal copy of the game and a CD-key, because getting on to a private server requires more effort (and a small amount of skill) than getting on to Battle.net. People are far more respectful of each other there.

Just to change topics for a second, DotA does not belong to Blizzard. I'm not sure of the exact legal details, but it's currently under the wing of IceFrog (who took over with Guinsoo's approval after Guinsoo stopped updating the map, and Guinsoo originally did the same thing from Eul). Or possibly it was originally made by Guinsoo and then Eul took over, I'm not entirely certain.

It looks like Demigod is using the good features of DotA and updating them for 2008. I think the end result is going to be a very good game. However, I'm not sure where I stand on loyalty - while it may be *legal* to use DotA's key elements, the morality of it is different. I'm not exactly saying "idea theft", don't get me wrong, but it does seem that there's a lot of DotA uniqueness used here. Which could well be a good thing; I'll wait until StarCraft 2 comes out, and see if DotA is decently ported to that engine.

To sum up: DotA is full of jerks and noobs, but other good people play too. Some of the posters in here obviously had experience with the jerks and noobs. I like how Demigod uses DotA's elements, but I'm not sure about the ethicality of it.

Good post eternal cat. Sums up alot of nice points well.

Nowadays if someone makes a scifi real time strategy game, its considered part of a genre (command and conquer, starcraft, heck even dune) rather than a rip off a previous game with updated graphics. Perhaps Demigod is starting a new genre that falls nicely in with that of DOTA. Time will tell.

Again, I also hope that the Demigod community does not become sour with the influx of DOTA players. I think the matchmaking system and online stats/clan organization may help with some of the anonymity and "noobs".

DOTA simply does not have the support to combat these problems. Sure it has a good group of developers and a large online community, but Battle net and the fact that Warcraft III wasn't set up for DOTA severely limit their response to issues such as leavers, abuse, and matchmaking.

For Demigod, voice chat will be a good and bad thing (mute option is a must, see COD4). Good in that some things that are typed in the heat of battle can easily be misinterpreted and offensive. Bad, because now you can hear the idiots rather than just read their words.

Online ranking/matchmaking should ideally put you with people of the same level of play (new players with new players, experienced "pro players" with others of the same). This should improve greatly the expectation players have of their teams.

Perhaps a player reputation meter (with possibly a few different traits) could be implemented. Sure there will be some abuse, but it seems to work with many online sites such as Ebay, craiglist, etc.

They're all addicting.

Addictive, possibly, but addicting is just a word I have issues with.

Lol, dota player... you're really helping the whole "DotA community are assholes" argument. So many trolls on so few interwebs.

Windexglow: It's probably that I only go on the DA forums and a couple of private friend forums, but a compliment feels odd. I must disagree with "DotA is not a concept in any major aspect", though - there's nothing out there which matches the creep-tide gameplay.