@ Ke5trel: Wouldn't mind playing with / against you (though I can't guarantee you I'll give you good competition). Also, bravo for intense exaggeration
Rage! Internet! Demigod eats babies!
I don't know what posts of mine you've been reading, but I am not being unreasonably pessimistic (read: rabid and irrational) in my treatment of the game as it currently stands. Perhaps yes, Evanescent and myself have not been as vocal about the positive aspects of the game as the negative ones. Place us in comparison with a lot of people on here (DEMIGOD IS THE GAME OF THE YEAR!!!!!!!111) and that might make us seem unreasonable. I think we're just trying to counterbalance some of the wildly inflated optimism and praise that gets floated around here. In other words, this is just what happens in a Beta forum, you get doomsayers and you get starry-eyed fanbois. I'd like to think that while I perhaps fall closer to the doomsayer portion, I am at least being reasonable. I may sound like a broken record at times (gameplay depth, gameplay depth, gameplay depth, connectivity, connectivity, connectivity) but that's only because I want this game to succeed and I think it's extremely important that the issues I bring up are addressed.
If I seem to ignore what's best about this game, and don't go around defending it to my last breath at every opportunity, it's because I don't think that there is any point in doing so. As Beta testers, we are not here to pat the developers on the back. It's not our job to just be happy about everything. This game will never improve if we aren't willing to point out what could be better about it, and adamant in doing so. A good Beta tester looks for problems, points them out, and suggests solutions as best they can in a constructive fashion. I've done my best to do that.
@Mike: I think you severely underestimate the DotA playerbase; it's much larger than you think. Apparently you have something against DotA, but I can assure you, given the amount of people that play it (and have played it) on a regular basis, there is no way that it would fail as a commercial game if it were given the same budget and development time that most commercial games receive. That, I believe, was the idea in creating this game in the first place. If what you say were even remotely true, this game would never have been made.