Only if the players are 10-year-old wannabe singers. :heh:

Eh. I find your tennis example a bit strange. To me it's like saying in tennis you're only allowed to hit top spin and no slices, thus removing a very effective shot in distancing yourselves in skill from your opponents. That'd be a more effective analogy than comparing things like denying to a snap of the fingers.

I think it's very hard to argue that LoL is designed more competitively than DoTA when it lacks such key features.

I know it's going nowhere, but let's make it clearer for each point:

I don't know if you judge the amount of salary to consider one to be "profession", but being low income from playing the game 8 to 10 hours a day doesn't make it less profession than those with higher income, you know?

Just recently last week, Nix_water (former FF|THORI) and Itachi with couple of players from StarBoba in Vietnam. D4rkness, chewy in Xen team from Singapore. Obviously I have no proof, since those remark is strictly prohibited to publicly from those players, seeing the DotA is still a biggest MOBA in Asia, and they still have income for joining DotA tournament, but they are mostly paid to train in LoL. I hope you don't believe everything that those so called "interview" you reading across the web, do you? I've seen the progress several times, and it never cease to amuse me at how the reporter could pull thing out of their asses all the times to have a 500 words interview, even though the people in question only say from 2 to 3 sentences.

Now you are biased. I said the concept, not the feature. Less harsh on mistake? You will still lost a tower at 5 minutes if you made a mistake in laning phase. Or worst, be underlevel hard. I don't see any difference in DotA. In competitive play, the limited hero pool isn't a problem, since pretty much everyone is given a special account with everything available.

[QUOTE=Forsaken_Infinity;3718410]
Did you seriously just imply that the concept of reliable gold is a ripoff from LOL? Rofl. You do realize that LOL doesn't incur gold loss on death at all right? Reliable gold is a completely different mechanism that has actually been on consideration since as far back as 6.5x era. How do I know? I have been in active correspondence with IceFrog since before 6.43 O_O And it is born of a completely different reason than making the game easier for newbies. It was designed with the intention of promoting an aggressive style of play (otherwise known as ganking). It was a balance fix at best and not at an influence from a game which takes away the primary incentive to ganking - the very thing this reliable gold concept was introduced for - by not making the enemy carry lose the game upon death. You are so far off the mark with that argument, bro, that you lost most of your credibility if you had any. It's like (but worse than) saying the whole new dominion thing that riot games are planning is but a ripoff of -CP mode in DotA but that doesn't mean its going to be implemented exactly the same so it's a void argument. And unfortunately, the reliable gold mechanism didn't do the expected job by itself anyway. Smoke did that job for it so its all cool.
[quote]

Yes, I did. It's been suggested since 6.37, and yet after LoL was released for a while, suddenly it's implemented? Isn't that strange no matter how you think about it? There were many suggestions from the old dota-allstar forum that got ignored until it appeared in LoL, and suddenly DotA has them (HP cost for spell, or some obvious heroes concepts like Gyro).

[QUOTE=Forsaken_Infinity;3718410]
Also, you haven't been keeping an eye on the evolution of the metagame in DotA, have you? DotA metagame is like fashion, it changes every so often. The farm for fame metagame has been away for quite a while now. Action starts before creepspawn in actually competitive DotA. You have to put the wards up in proper places - level one teamfights are not uncommon at all since the introduction of smoke and heck even as far back as the RUSH3d touring China with lots of games against 7L era, level one teamfights were not at all rare. Farming is a valid strategy like any other but it's only a choice. And the current dominant metagame is actually to push and end the game as soon as you can. So farming for thirty mins is most likely going to make you lose the game.
[quote]

Yes, you got the point. I haven't been following DotA since 6.65.

A simple mistake could cost the whole team battle, and lead to the loss at one equally match at the mere 30 minutes mark. I don't see how it's less harsh on punishment for mistake. You could call back, with 8 seconds and disappear on hit, and you have no TP back unless you choose summoner skill for it. I see you're biased about this. You think LoL's free TP is great (even better, it has 3 minutes cooldown), I think DotA's TP with 3 seconds channeling that didn't disappear on hit and a cooldown at 60 seconds is even better and more convenient.
And you may like the denying of DotA, but I'm not. I used to like it, until I know keeping track of the enemy movement and zoning them outside of exp range is far better way than focusing only to the creep, and it's less boring, too. Beside, doesn't lose gold on dead doesn't make the death less hard. Considering the amount of gold you get from farming is about 1/3 of what you make by ganking/pushing, being killed give more advantage to the enemy team than you think.


But each to his own. I consider convenient is different to being more casual. It's like saying those people who have 300 apm is better Starcraft player than those with lower apm value. You probably think that using QWER hotkey is less competitive than spreading the hotkey across the keyboard, too.


It's lacking the feature for competitive play that needs a 3rd party programs to fill in those spot, but that doesn't mean the game concept is less competitive.

@Reckoner, regarding Felix. His point is valid enough as long as you don't push it around. There is little point in keeping artificial difficulty around - the massive hate for mana bars and channeling bars come to mind the most when it comes to DotA community. There is nothing wrong with them imho. As long as the game provided other ways to access the info. If the game was supposed to be a game where no info on enemy was available then it'd make no sense to include them but given that DotA lets you see complete info on enemy by selecting them, that hate against graphical representation is unfounded and only there because of elitism. Ironically, people don't see that those bars can be used to mislead the enemy far more often than those bars helping your enemy demolish you. Anyone good would select you to know the actual number anyway.

Where do you guys play DotA anyway? I am kinda curious and up for a game or two lol ._. I can play on any client with any of the gazillion ids I use.

Oh and since I see you viewing this thread, let me ask you Duo Maxwell, how the hell have you been involved with DotA for 11 years when it started 8 years ago? Unless you are implying you were involved with AoS but that sounds very dubious to me.

And I have made my arguments, no point in reiterating them. To each his own indeed.

But your claim that competitive DotA people prefer LOL by themselves is false. I know players from SB personally (one of my best friend lives in the same block as SB.Soso.on) and they sure as hell don't prefer LOL over DotA.

And I dislike artificial barriers. I use QWER hotkeys. I wish to see mana bars and channeling bars in game. But denying isn't an artificial barrier. That LOL doesn't have it doesn't make LOL a bad game though.

Oh and you are still implying that reliable gold was brought about thanks to LOL. Jesus man. It was being tested in beta since forever ago - way before pendragon even split from icefrog. And there is nothing wrong with borrowing stuff anyway.

I was referring more to just denying though. I don't think denying is artificial difficulty. Channeling bar and mana bar rage is stupid, I agree. I do like how HoN has those channeling bars.

As for where I play DoTA... I haven't really played it since SC2 came out except some dota cash pubstomping here and there. I used to play in things like Clan DXD on US west servers back in the day though.

These days I mainly play HoN, because the interface is just so much better and convenient. However, $2 have ran out their welcome with me, and I love Icefrog, so I have no reason to stay with HoN.

Well, you wanna play a few games in RGC (http://cdn.rankedgaming.com/client/RGC.zip to download) perhaps? I can also get a few other friends in.

I usually play dota in www.dotacash.com . It's an open league so anyone can play. Unfortunately, the player base isn't as good as some of the leagues that used to exist.

I play DotaCash as well. Been playing DoTa since 2007. I'm not really into the fan wars between DoTa and LoL/HoN. Everyone should just play whatever they prefer, no point arguing and trying to convert people. As for me, I might have checked out LoL/HoN a little more but the announcement of DoTa 2 has kept me with the original for now. I have good expectations for it, and hopefully the skill ranking system is well designed as that's pretty important if you actually want to enjoy the game.

Guys, I am gonna have to ask all of you to seriously chill out here. This whole "I know better than you" argument is not going anywhere, so please drop it already before things start to get even more tense that what they are now.

Yeah, sorry for that whole fiasco. I don't even how it turned that way. I think it's just that the game genre is competitive and the players are passionate about it all so the friction just comes out of thin air like its natural. The discussion here was much much much more civil than you'd get in other places so if anything I am proud of animesuki O_O

Watch this VOD from 11:00 min onwards if you want to see among the very best DotA matches ever though : http://dota.178.com/201108/106725875358.html

It was the WCG final that happened yesterday. Really nice and close game with lots of fights from right off the bat. It isn't the best representative of the current metagame considering both team opted for a strategy about a month and half old but the game was really nice until the last second. No replay because of the load though. That's another one of the features I anticipate in DotA 2 - letting saved games have the replay and letting replays be rewinded etc.

Oh and you guys should probably try other clients than DotAcash as the games there are quite lacking in skill. Most of the good inhouses are in RGC (http://cdn.rankedgaming.com/client/RGC.zip) nowadays. Dotalicious (http://www.dotalicious-gaming.com) is a very nice client with lots of features like achievements, matchmaking, hostbots etc. It's a tad bit too strict on rules though and people are obviously big flamers with ego flying high.

The one thing I'm really hoping dota 2 changes that plagues both dota and HoN is the rotten attitude of its player base. There needs to be a way to hold all the ass holes in line who just won't let you play the damn game in peace.

We seriously could do without the whiny children calling you trash or bad from the very start of the game and blaming everything about their loss on you.

Otherwise how can we attract more casual players in general?

The F2P model ensures that a large section of the community will be idiots and trolls. Unfortunately without making it F2P it won't be able to compete with LoL and now that HoN has gone F2P as well.

It's doesn't need to be F2P to compete. LoL and dota 2 have different fan bases. Also factor in the huge crop of players that will probably pour in from steam annd it will be fine.

http://media.playdota.com/misc/loads...Kunkka_Med.jpg

I will just leave that here. Totally hyped now. Four days to go.

I am just gonna leave this here.

http://i.imgur.com/Z3QR5.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Z1pzQ.jpg

If you're gonna do that, at least leave the entire thing >.>

Also, these are apparently 4 months old.

Will take some getting used to (since I am so very used to wc3 graphics) but it isn't obstructive at least.

Shadow Fiend
http://i56.tinypic.com/30k3r5g.jpg

Doom Bringer
http://i.imgur.com/pDSSw.jpg

Vengeful Spirit
http://img804.imageshack.us/img804/4559/80894784.jpg




The GUI could use some more work. I am curious as to if these really are 4 months old. In any case, 3 days to go. Just wait like this man says

Looks really good graphically. Would have to see a video to get a sense if the aesthetics are actually good.

Since it seems to be a blatant copy/paste of DotA (which was to be expected) there's no need to worry about the mechanics.

Well, given that it will be on source, and there is the excellent hammer editor - and given that Icefrog is a supporter of community effort, I am sure we will be able to mod the game etc. Expecting a lot more from the community than the port itself actually. The port itself doesn't need to be anything other than a straight up upgrade anyway. Heck the community will chew them out so hard if they change much. I am expecting a few surprises but the straight up port of the primary map is going to be very similar to current DotA (and not all that different from LOL and HON either which isn't surprising given that they tried their best to emulate as much of DotA as they could to win players over).

As for the video, 2 days now.

Who even knows what the final product will look like, it's very possible that the stream we'll see will still be different from what is actually released.

So yeah, got to wait for the stream... Only 2 days indeed.

I always though Heroes of Newerth looked a bit TOO shiny. These graphics look just right IMO.