Single Player Game
An essay retrospective of computer games, esports, and DotA.
By yaboyhud
We were standing in front of the Key Arena in Seattle. It was the first day of the International. The sky in Seattle was like its reputation, gloomy. But it didn’t matter what the weather was like outside because I was about to comfortably spend the next hours inside, watching people sit in front of their computers. I was with two of my best friends, Reflection and LOSS35. We were at a venue that had played host to NBA teams and rock concerts in the past; now the three of us were here to watch professional gamers compete on the same game we started playing as teenagers. Back then, we could have never imagined that these pros would be playing for a prize pool of over ten million dollars. We squeezed by some nerdy looking guys as we found our seats in a packed stadium. We were nerds too. Lights beamed down onto a grand stage and we heard cheers that started getting louder as we saw the players walking into their booths to play. It was finally an exciting time to be a gamer.
Computer games have surrounded my life ever since an early age. What was once considered a distraction to the studies of Asians everywhere has now become a way to be a millionaire. The game that has shaped my life most of all is an innocent community mod called Defense of the Ancients, now known simply as Dota. Initially a custom map based on Warcraft III, DotA has grown to inspire an entire genre of games, MOBAs, and in doing so, propelled the esports market into the mainstream. The game has helped popularize internet culture, pioneered a free to play model supported by group-sourced microtransactions, and enabled an entire generation of people to find freedom and friends online. The following is an account of how computer games and eventually, DotA, came to intersect my life. In doing so, I narrate the evolution of this remarkable game, starting with its predecessors and leading in to the modern iteration that millions play today.
Jump One: Pot of Gold
Summers are hot in upstate New York. I was standing outside on the porch of my friend Lin’s house. I had been waiting for some time, waiting for him to answer the door, and the heat was starting to get to me. I sneaked around the house to his room and saw through the window that he was hunched over with his feet on the chair crunched up underneath him, staring at his computer. I thought to myself, “he looks like a monkey”. I rapped on the window and he started. He saw me and went around to go let me in. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you, my mom went to the lab” He showed me what he was so hypnotized with on the computer. “Dabu”, said his computer.
DotA is a computer game that has been played by more than a million people worldwide and is only growing in number. It possesses the largest prize pools and earnings for professional players among all esports. It is commonly known to have one of the highest learning curves of any game, digital or analog, but also for having an addictive and rewarding pace of play that appeals to cultures and players across the world.
My story of DotA cannot hope to be a complete recollection of the game, and there are many facets that I am sure that I will miss. What I write here is not an exhaustive history of the game. I intend to narrate my own experience with gaming and DotA, and through my own personal growth alongside the game, give an account of how DotA came to be what it is today.
The first game that I remember playing is Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. I was 5 when I first saw Lin playing the game at his house that summer. My family didn’t have a computer so I would often find myself going over to his house as often as possible to watch him play campaigns and strategize about units and gameplay. Lin was three years older and he taught me a lot just by letting me watch. I loved the game so much that I would draw Town Halls and Barracks and knights on notebook paper back home and then play out frames one by one. The graphics sucked.
It was the original Warcraft that started me on the lifelong journey down the path of gaming, and it was also the first in a lineage of games that eventually came to define the MOBA, the predominant genre in the world of esports. How could this slow-paced, primitive RTS game have anything to do with DotA? Beyond inspiring the game that would serve as the engine for the original mod, I see DotA, along with the entire MOBA genre in general, tracing its roots back to the wildly popular RTS genre of the 90’s and early 2000's that I grew up with.
Simply put, DotA is an abstraction of real-time strategy.
The RTS genre is canonically thought to have began with the release of Dune II. I was only 3 at the time and I never played it. I was too young to be pwned. The creators of the Warcraft franchise borrowed heavily from Dune II and its successor, Command and Conquer, and both franchises were commercially successful. The competition between these two companies spawned a number of critically acclaimed games, and helped to define the entire RTS genre for the early part of that decade. Warcraft I and II just had the unit bar on the left, while Command and Conquer and Red Alert had its bar on the right.
While the C&C series had significant differences in the types of units each faction could build, the first two Warcraft offerings essentially mirrored units for the Orcs and Humans. The only differentiating factor between the two factions was in magic spells, which also happened to be the end-game tech and therefore the coolest part of the game. When Lin and I would talk about the game when we weren’t playing it, our conversations would naturally end up with which side had the better spells.
The most exciting magic spell of the original Warcraft was called Summon Daemon. As the Orcs, you needed to build a Warlock, tech the ability, and then wait until your Warlock glacially regened enough mana to cast the spell. The reward was a beefy red Daemon who was the strongest unit in the game by far and could chop all the puny human units to pieces. (Literally “chop”; the animation was so goofy)
Of course, the Humans had something fun to do too for their final magic spell; it was called Summon Water Elemental, a ranged super-unit. The two of us wanted to know which was the strongest unit in the game and since back then there were no resources online to find the HP or damage they had, we tested the strength of the two super-units in game. We found that Daemons could just barely survive 1v1 walking up to a Water Elemental and kill it. I attribute my love of theorycrafting back to this simple discovery I made when I was 5. Just like the Charizard or Leviathan from Pokemon and Magic TCGs, the Daemon solidified itself in my young mind as the most badass thing you could do, even though it wasn’t very practical.
As a kid, my favorite way of playing RTS games was when I could build up to a big unit like the Daemon that would just beat up on whatever the AI had. Command and Conquer had the Ion Cannon and Mammoth Tanks. Age of Empires had the crazy lazer agent guy and the rocket car. It was just so much fun clicking around with your racecar, neglecting base and economy and just blowing up cavalry archers with impunity. Magic spells in Warcraft 2 were great in the same way; I had lots of fun polymorphing units ad nauseum and spamming death and decay. Once I got to using big fun spells or units, I wouldn’t even pay attention to my gold mines or lumber and I would build up huge stores of resources while my peons waited around idly. Although these games were defined by base management and economy building, it was the end-game units that drew me in. What was the most broken thing you could do in the game? That was a question I was always asking myself.
Of course, shitting on comps using cheats could only be fun for a while and it was only the rapid release of newer RTS’s that kept my attention. I was just playing myself against the AI, making up scenarios in my head, and it got old quickly. Without multiplayer support, the genre plateaued in what it could offer. It was just too manual to play multiplayer on the early generation of RTS games. Lin and I tried a few games of Warcraft and Command and Conquer against each other after my parents finally caved and bought our house a computer, but it just wasn’t very practical. We both had dial-up internet so when we were online, we couldn’t call each other and troubleshoot. There was no friending system, no matchmaking, and multiplayer often required separate clients and lots of outside knowledge in computer networking.
Thus, early generations of RTS games for me could be boiled down to building your economy for the purpose of producing a super unit that would go against AI. This was the first step early computer gaming took towards the MOBA genre we know today. Unbeknownst to me at that young age, I would eventually start calling these super units heroes, and my idle base, the Sentinel.
Jump Two: Blue Night in Seoul
“What did you learn today in school?” “Nothing”. I ate my food silently. My father called it “brown rou” or brown meat. He wasn’t the best cook. My parents had gotten a divorce two years earlier, and now my mother was in China. “Hao chi ma?” (Is it good?) I was so happy my Dad didn’t understand how to use sarcasm. Lin had moved away last year and I had a hard time in school making friends. My parents did as Asian parents do, pushing me to excel in my studies, alienating me from my peers at the same time. I pushed away my food. “I’m full.” My dad didn’t approve, but I went to our living room, fired up the computer and dialed up. In school, I was nobody. On Battle.net, I was Zero.
In the late 90’s, I was getting older and my tastes for the RTS genre were starving for innovation so the release of Starcraft to me was like a supernova going off. The scale of the game was huge, with its three distinct races and story-driven campaign, all supported by amazing graphics and cinematics. But the biggest addition in my mind was the Battle.net service, which allowed anyone to create and join game lobbies online.
For the first time, someone had nailed the online gaming experience. Before Battle.net, finding people to play with was a huge mess of coordinating separate clients and tinkering around with a variety of protocols that confused the 9-year-old me to no end. With Bnet, I couldn’t believe how easy it was to join other people’s games just by virtue of having an internet connection. Now that the RTS community was given a way to find and play games online, a new subgenre of games emerged, known as “Use Map Settings”.
For the first time, someone had nailed the online gaming experience.
I had previously messed around with Warcraft II’s map editor a bit, which consisted of me holding down the Dragon button with my mouse and dragging around until the entire map was full of them. I lost interest quickly because I couldn’t share what I had made with other people to play with. Starcraft, on the other hand, had a robust triggering system and easy-to-understand sentence-like structure to its custom map editor. When coupled with Battle.net, people much smarter than me started making completely new games to play with people online. These custom games very often deviated entirely from the main goals of the original Starcraft.
The first custom games I played were a variety of takes on the classic RTS formula of make base, make units, kill units, kill base. A popular mod for this type of gameplay was called Big Game Hunters. This map was exactly identical to the map Hunters, which came with the game by default, but all the resources were maxed out so you never had to worry that your minerals would run out, or that you had to expand your base. This let people live the dream of building 200 pop worth of whatever end-game units they wanted, but this time, instead of AI, you were playing against other players. They had access to the same resources you had, which made it much more compelling. However, the map was still very raw, in the sense that there weren’t clear paths to each player’s base, and the starting space each player had was very small. It didn’t fit the scale the increase in minerals had provided.
Following Big Game Hunters, I moved onto a map called Blue Night in Seoul, which quickly became my favorite. Like BGH, it had effectively infinite minerals in your starting base, but the creator also gave each base a ton more room to build rows and rows of buildings, all the while giving each base only one choke point so you could bunker up and focus your defenses there. In addition, the center of the map was simply open space for all the units everyone was building to duke it out instead of the narrow walkways on BGH. I played this map and its subsequent clones until the dominant map for playing cheesy Starcraft became Fastest Map Poss. The map played out exactly like it sounds. Someone had found a way to place minerals all onto one stack, and dropped it right next to the Command Center, making mining trivial. The map had finally reduced Starcraft down to a macro super-unit fest. A basic layer of RTS’s, resource gathering and management, had been peeled off, revealing the first bits of the MOBA genre underneath.
At the same time that the pace of classic RTS was accelerating via the modding community, another line of custom maps were making their rounds in the lobbies of Battle.net. Several genres of popular mods emerged, and my favorites were: Turret Defense, Bunker Wars, and RPG’s. Defense games involved defending against periodically spawning AI units that moved down a lane towards your base by building turrets. Bunker wars maps did away with resources and automatically created units for you to send at your opponents. RPG games were massive maps where you controlled a single unit and went around killing AI units to level up your character, which in Starcraft meant getting an entirely new unit model. All of these mods had themes wrapping them based on whatever was popular at the time. I liked the ones that had Pokemon, Gundam Wing and DBZ characters. I was watching those shows in the afternoon on Toonami and then going and playing those same characters in a custom map at night.
These three genres became very popular and there was frequent cross-pollination between them. A favorite mod of mine, and one that I actually put some work into developing was Golem Wars. The game was the same as Bunker Wars but when you got enough unit kills, you were able to create a golem. Your golem was the equivalent of a hero unit, much stronger than the automatically produced units. The map injected RPG elements into an attack-move game. This eventual bleeding of mechanics between popular custom maps gave rise to the canonical fore-runner of DotA, Aeon of Strife. AoS incorporated the lanes and turrets of Turrent D, combined them with periodic unit spawning from Bunker Wars, while adding the RPG elements of controlling a single powerful unit. However, AoS was still a little too far ahead of its time. I don’t remember playing the map as often and it was never a very popular map, likely because the mechanics needed to make it compelling were not part of the kit provided by Starcraft.
And so I played Starcraft voraciously during this time in my life. Unlike console systems, Battle.net made playing with other people easy when your parents wouldn’t let friends come over. Custom maps were a way for me to play a variety of games when my family couldn’t afford to pay $50 every time a new Mario Party came out. Starcraft had set the bar high for desktop gaming, and people were playing games that started to resemble the MOBA’s of today. But there was still one crucial piece missing. It was in Blizzard’s next foray into the RTS genre that finally allowed us to be heroes.
Jump 3: “Please don’t kick me, I’m good”
My mother was teaching me how to “kan jia”, meaning cut the price, otherwise known as bargaining, and I was confused. It is a crucial part of any Asian person’s arsenal, and everywhere you go in China you are expected to know how to bargain. What we were bargaining for was 10 yuan CD’s inside this dirty basement under Beijing. For just a little more than a dollar, I could get a pirated version of Warcraft III, a game that sold for fifty dollars in the US. You can see why I was confused why we were bargaining. We eventually walked away with some summer Hollywood movies that had just came out in theaters, a full Chinese TV series, and three copies of Warcraft just in case one of them didn’t work, all for basically nothing. The problem was I couldn’t play until I could install it on my computer back home in the States. I resigned myself to a summer of waiting.
By the time Warcraft III was released, Blizzard was basking in the success of back-to-back hits with Diablo 2 and Starcraft, two games that defined their respective genres. My expectations were high for this next installment in the series that brought me on path to computer gaming, and I was very satisfied. The third battle between Orcs and Humans now had two more distinct races, upping the complexity of RTS’s in a familiar fashion, but it was the addition of heroes to the battlefield that would prove most influential.
Prior to W3, I saw RTS’s as an arms race of who could produce a game with the most differentiation between playable factions, and this was the metric by which I compared games. The original Warcraft and its sequel each had two races, Starcraft upped the ante with three, and now Warcraft III had four. In comparison, The Age of Empires franchises used incomplete tech trees and unique units to separate between races, while games like Age of Mythology and C&C Generals fused unique playstyles with aspects of hero units. With the success of Diablo 2, Blizzard saw a demand for character progression, and when they encapsulated that theme within the confines of a real-time strategy game, it was a smash hit.
Blizzard leap-frogged the RTS arms race with the addition of hero units that evolved during the course of a game.
With the addition of heroes that could gain experience, neutral creeps for heroes to kill, and items for heroes to use, the game of Warcraft III became centered around these units. They started off weaker than normal units in the early game, but as the game went on, they became absolutely devastating. I recall one of the most satisfying things to do in the game was to have a high level metamorphosed Demon Hunter rip through the other guy’s mass wyverns all stacked on top of each other.
The progression of a hero from killing small creeps to leading an army against the other players was very important. When it came to killing things with impunity, typing “e=mc2 trooper” just didn’t feel the same as winning the game with the hero you trained from level one. Starcraft hero units were usually just reskinned versions of normal units, but heroes in Warcraft III had unique abilities that got stronger as the game went on, and could hold items. They had stories. They felt special.
When it came to killing things with impunity, typing “e=mc2 trooper” just didn’t feel the same as winning the game with the hero you trained from level one.
Starcraft expanded the scale of the RTS with the 8-player 200 pop carrier vs battlecruiser battles, but the design of Warcraft took a step back from the large scale RTS’s that were coming out then like Empire Earth and Rise of Nations. Warcraft III shifted the focus back onto you. The game purposely had a lower population cap, introduced things like upkeep to punish massing units, and tabbing through units to micromanage their skills. Heroes were the centerpiece for this change, and it was reflected in custom games lobbies.
Just like in Starcraft, if you give the community a powerful modding tool, custom games of all sorts naturally pop up. People will take what they believe is most fun and make those parts more accentuated. The preeminent genre of games that naturally arose on the hero-centered Warcraft III were Hero Arenas. Modders took the heroes that everyone loved to play, removed everything RTS around it, and stuck them all together on a map to fight it out. Like custom games in Starcraft, they were themed, and one of the most popular ones that circulated on Bnet was a heaven-hell themed map called Angel Arena.
Depending on the version, Angel Arena had over 50 different heroes to choose from, which you used to kill camps of neutral creeps, take objectives, and fight the other players. It was fun not having to worry about other units and only control your hero, but there were a few shortcomings. The first was the presence of tomes, items that could permanently buff the stats of your hero without taking item slots. Thus, there was a way to make your hero stronger infinitely. I, and other people as well, quickly realized that playing agility heroes was broken because you could cheaply increase your agility with these tomes to the point where you could be hitting like a machine gun in a game with swords and arrows. Hero arenas rapidly became degenerate.
Angel Arena had a lot of heroes, but the variety among them was in fact very low. The original heroes that Blizzard designed had a nice albeit simple balance of skills, but the heroes in Angel Arena just took these skills and mashed them together with no coherence. There were many heroes with duplicate skills, and because of the presence of tomes, the random skills your hero had didn’t really even matter. Finally, the manner in which you progressed through the game was very confusing; there were objectives, but it was never clear what the objectives gave you, and they were trivially easy when you had access to tomes.
If you wanted to kill God, all you had to do was buy tomes of agility + 2.
Like RTS’s, I lost interest in Hero Arenas when it was clear that they hit quickly a cap in terms of complexity. The sheer number of heroes available to play kept it interesting, but was supplanted by the fact that they had the same skills as normal ladder heroes, with less coherence in design. So I played a variety of custom maps on Warcraft III during this time, and my favorites were generally the popular maps such as Footmen Frenzy, Battleships, Wintermaul, LTW, etc. As I refreshed the list of games to find new ones to play, this one map name kept popping up over and over again. When I decided to try it out, and clicked on “join game”, I was immediately kicked from the lobby. This happened time and time again, frustrating me endlessly. Why wouldn’t the host let me play? The name of the map was Defense of the Ancients.
Jump 4: Where are the tomes?
“Fan liang le!” my mother called from the kitchen. It was dinnertime and I was glued to my computer. It was already the third time my mother called me and that meant she was going to get pissed. Like she said, the food was getting cold. But I couldn’t just get up and quit. “Bu yao da game le!” (Stop playing game!) For some reason, all Asian parents collectively called whatever we as kids were doing on the computer “game”. They didn’t understand that you couldn’t save and play later. They didn’t understand that these were my friends I was playing with, or that I would be put on a banlist if I left early. This wasn’t just a game, it was DotA.
From the very beginning, DotA felt different. Unlike other custom games on Warcraft III, players that hosted DotA maps mercilessly kicked people that didn’t have the map already downloaded, because it meant you had never played before and were therefore a newb. When I first started playing, on version 3.3b, there was already a burgeoning community facilitated by the hosts. This air of exclusivity kept games tight-knit and competitive.
After an exercise in patience, I finally downloaded the map from a gracious (afk) host and I played my first game of DotA. Having played many Hero Arenas before, I looked at the heroes available to choose, and figured the Flame Lord (the old bloodseeker model, not the Firelord, which was in TFT) would be a good pick because it was an agility hero. When I clicked on the hero’s skills, I was completely blown away. This hero had completely custom skills, custom icons and they were all themed according to the hero. The animations were new, the skills were flavorful, the ultimate was unique. As I ventured out onto the map like a newb with no items, I saw familiar models like Arthas and Mannoroth, and some strange ones too, like a giant tank and a floating lich with wings. I was completely outclassed in game, beaten down by units and spells I had never even seen before. I wanted to quit the game right then so I could test out all the different heroes on my own. I was hooked.
What drew me in was the novelty of over 30 new heroes with completely new design, but what kept me there was the complexity of this game within a game. There was no other custom map on Battle.net that required the level of teamwork and strategy that DotA, even as primitive as it was then, required. From the start of the game, you were expected to pick a hero that suited a role; I quickly learned that some heroes were pushers, some heroes were disablers, some were hero-killers, and that every game should have a healer.
There was no other custom map on Battle.net that required the level of teamwork and strategy that DotA, even as primitive as it was then, required.
Players were expected to type “ms mid” or “pd dk bot” to call out which heroes the other team had picked because there was no HUD to tell you what heroes they had. You were expected to generate incremental advantages over your opponent such as buying regeneration. To eventually win the game, you had to coordinate your skills with the four other players on your team effectively. Games lasted longer than other custom maps, and you felt the progression of the game through taking objectives like towers and barracks, which affected the game in a tangible way.
Every game I played of DotA, I was learning something new. I wasn’t getting that kind of stimulation from school or from my parents. DotA was a game where even the smallest edge or knowledge of strategies would create situations such that the your opponent was completely helpless. For example, one of the first strategies that came about this time was the primitive manipulation of cooldowns. In the early days of DotA, people pretty much just stood in their lane. If you had a nuke or disable, you could use it and then follow your opponent as he was running back, not stopping to auto-attack, staying in range in order to use your spell again when it came off cooldown. This seemingly simple strategy allowed a veteran player to gain the edge on a new player and eventually kill them at will. It was domination, and it wasn’t by virtue of knowing which shop sold the tomes.
Every game I played of DotA, I was learning something new.
Along with custom heroes, custom items were added to the game, and due to the absence of cheap tomes, the items you purchased had a non-trivial effect on your gameplay. Gold was the main resource for purchasing items, and income was almost negligible. Gold was actually precious. Because of this, players adapted by “last-hitting” creeps to earn gold, and then eventually “denying” to prevent your opponent from getting gold. Pooling gold to teammates to get critical items was common, and soon the concept of jungling for guaranteed gold became an effective strategy. In Eul’s version of DotA, each faction had a jungle, but there were also camps near the mid lane, where heroes could actually compete against each other for camps. The depth of the game was just astounding.
These intricacies made the game competitive and contrasting from the rising sheer ability to micro that was required for Warcraft III ladder, DotA had an incredibly high ceiling for strategy and theory. What was the most broken thing in the game? DotA didn’t have a clear answer to that question. The combination of custom-designed heroes, a variety of items and real teammates meant you could never accurately predict how a game would play out. People realized that even having just 1 player on your team that didn’t know what they were doing would mean 30–45 minutes wasted. If you had toxic players on your team, they could actually start attacking you or your buildings in spite. Newbs could be spotted within minutes.
The ROC DotA community thus became very tight, and because it was so small, players had reputations and were known for playing certain heroes. People in the community all had elitist-sounding names like “Smart.” with the period, instead of names like xx_darkelf88_xx. Games of DotA took long to fill, and lobbies were full of chit-chat between friends. The notion of an IH or “inhouse” game was formed during this time, and it was considered the peak of teamwork and coordination. Coordinating a good game of DotA amongst all the newbs, leavers and toxic players was like a single day of sunshine in the New England winter. When it did happen, it was so rewarding that it would settle into your mind like cement.
Games of DotA took long to fill, and lobbies were full of chit-chat between friends.
ROC DotA grew fast, and several different flavors of DotA with different developers surfaced such as Danite’s Hell and DotA Rumble. When Frozen Throne came out, modders utilized the newer custom game engine to make even more custom heroes with unique skills. These different forks of DotA quickly boiled down the scattered roster of heroes to just one dominant set, on a map known as DotA Allstars.
Jump 5: Primetime
My away message on AIM said “out”. It was senior homecoming night and all my friends were getting ready for the big dance. “house has entered the channel” said Ventrilo. I hadn’t gone to any of the homecoming dances throughout high school and I was going to miss this one too. Every night after finishing homework I would sit on Vent and talk with friends I had never even seen before, and tonight was no different. We talked about what we did that day in school. We talked about where we wanted to go to college. We showed each other pics of the girls we liked on the new website Facebook. And we played DotA. We were Clan Primetime.
DotA quickly became the most popular custom map on Warcraft III because it represented the pinnacle of strategy. The map automated the mundane processes of building a base, gathering resources, building units and then sending units at each other. A game of DotA started with your barracks and towers already erected in a base full of choke points, and your base automatically created and gave your units orders, allowing you to focus on optimizing control of your single hero unit. All you had to do was pick your favorite one and lead the Sentinel into battle.
The funny part was, at the end of the game, the Sentinel still always had the highest score.
Heroes in DotA were unique, and this separated it from the huge number of Hero Arenas and similar maps. Soon modders were releasing heroes that were doing crazy and never before seen things. In ROC DotA, hero skills were all creative applications of mechanics that already existed. For example, Chakra Magic was a Mana Burn with a negative value that you could only target allies with. Frostbite was just a reskinned Entangling Roots, and Diabolic Edict would just summon invisible Feral Spirits (which is why it can hit towers). In TFT however, players thirsted for more and more original heroes, and modders kept releasing them at a rapid pace. Some were fun, many were bugged and it was hard to keep track of them all until DotA Allstars threw the best of the best all together.
I started playing Allstars seriously around 6.27. I had played a few games of 5.84, the version previous to 6.27 that was relatively stable, but the game was still very much in a state of flux compared to the “rock” that was ROC DotA. Allstars started off massively unbalanced. The level cap was raised from 10 to 25 for heroes, there were a huge amount of new recipe/custom items, and heroes were thrown in from many different versions of DotA, each with their own balance. ROC DotA, again, was very simple in the execution of its heroes and skills were relatively tame; games were defined by pushes, pooling gold, and working together around objectives. When you killed a lane of Barracks, that was it; no more units would be automatically produced. No buildings had backdoor protection, so you could hit the ancient or super towers or any other building whenever you wanted during a push. It really felt like an RTS where you only controlled the heroes.
DotA games during Reign of Chaos felt like an RTS where you only controlled the heroes.
Allstars on the other hand, focused much more on hero killing, exemplified by extending the killing spree to beyond god-like. Backdoor protection, teleport scrolls were added, instant heal potions removed, and the game slowly evolved into what people play today. Between 5.84 and 6.27, when I started, and then until 6.37, under Icefrog’s leadership, the scene grew up fast. There was a now central forum for players to share guides, show off replays, and random chat. There was a clan called TDA that you could be invited to and after being vouched, play in high-skill games with a banlist to prevent leavers. There were LAN clients like Garena and listchecker that allowed you to host games without having to have a CD-key or mess with port forwarding. Maphacks like ShadowFrench were rampant in pubs.
At the same time, the vibrant player community surrounding Allstars kept growing larger and deepened the well of strategy for the game. ROC DotA had already abstracted RTS play, but it was still primarily focused on pushing objectives and killing the base. It was very rare to see one hero take over a game in the version that Eul built. With the new level cap and more powerful items, Allstars rewarded individual play on a per-hero basis. When I first started playing, I thought having players leave on your team in Allstars meant having a higher probability to win. Items were not muted and could be transferred between heroes, and there would be an increase in income. If you could individually outplay your opponents, winning the game was easy. This massive ceiling of player skill is best told through the eyes of a hero we all know and love, Pudge.
Pudge was the first hero that allowed a good player to clearly outskill their opponent. Other heroes in the game at the time were comparatively straight forward and did not offer the same excitement as landing a successful Pudge combo. Never has “nice frost nova” been typed into all chat during a game, but a “nice hook” was universally acknowledged. Bengal_tigger was the name of a player who created one of the first Pudge guides on the forums, and one of the first highlight reels for DotA, embedded above. He showed me that DotA was more than a game of throwing units at towers and barracks, it was a game of skill. To be able to appreciate and play Pudge, it was clear that you had to understand all aspects of the game. It was the first hero in the game that you could show off with. Almost needless to say, I played a lot of Pudge.
Thus, DotA Allstars took the formula that made ROC DotA popular and extended its replayability by adding newer and much more complex heroes. By upping the intricacy of heroes, precise execution in game now mattered on the only unit you had to control. DotA’s ability to quickly and convincingly separate good players from newbs led to a notoriously competitive atmosphere for the game. There was frequent flaming and leavers. On the other hand, this competitiveness facilitated amateur tournaments and at the end of my high school career in 2007, professional DotA was played across the world.
As I left for college, my parents pushed me to be an engineer or a doctor, something that they knew would make me happy. I played DotA on and off in high school but I saw it as just a hobby, nothing more. DotA would never amount to anything beyond just a way to have some laughs with friends. I found out I was very, very wrong.
In orbit: Dota 2
My weed dealer was Asian. I guess that’s I what I get for moving to California. It was summer 2012 and I was coding an iPhone app that was supposed to change everything in my life. It was late and I was taking a break to smoke, browse the internet when I came upon something interesting. I hadn’t thought about DotA in years and here I was on a Youtube channel for something called Dota 2. “Vacuum in! Ravage on EVERYONE! The Black Hole as well!” Two people named LD and Lumi were screaming in a language that I assumed only a few people at the time understood. The two teams in the video were playing for a chance at a million dollars? Maybe I was smoking too much.
Nobody knows just how much their life will change. I was still 17 when I started my education at Duke University in North Carolina. I brought very little with me as I started this next phase of my life, but I did have a new computer. My parents bought me a crappy Dell laptop where the defining feature was its weight (heavy). Warcraft III was one of the first programs I installed on it.
Things were so different now. I was used to chatting on AIM and now everyone was using Facebook. Everyone lived together and people were everywhere, but good friends were hard to come by. My classes and homework, once a joke, were now graded on a curve and I was no longer the top of my class. Gaming, and DotA Allstars though, remained constant.
Now that Icefrog had singularly taken over development of what was once a sharded modding community, Allstars entered a period of unprecedented stability. From 6.43 and on until 6.62, the game was cleaned up architecturally, and the community was thriving. Changelogs were organized, online guides and the forum made nearly all heroes newb-accessible as long as you were willing to learn, and the competitive scene was growing. The crux of DotA Allstars, unique heroes, was being expanded, and heroes were being added to the game at a rapid pace. Soon enough, the 100 hero marker was surpassed.
As new heroes were released, it was clear that the game was growing more and more skillful. Early on, Dota heroes generally followed the Blizzard design of heroes with primary active, secondary active, passive/aura, and then ultimate. Classic heroes like Juggernaut, Omniknight, Frost(Crystal) Maiden and Dragon Knight are good examples even today. As the community came together with strategies and insights, the rapid exchange of ideas led to a thirst for more and more innovative heroes to play. Modern heroes such as Ember Spirit, Earth Spirit, Arc Warden and Oracle all upped the intricacy of play beyond what was once established by the lowly Butcher. It soon became clear that the complexity of new heroes were limited by the fact that DotA Allstars was still a mod of a game it now really had nothing to do with. When coupled with the increasing popularity of the game/map, it was evident that the game was growing out of control and needed a new environment if it wanted to thrive.
It soon became clear that the complexity of new heroes were limited by the fact that DotA Allstars was still a mod of a game it now really had nothing to do with.
Gaming companies started to take notice of this and players during this time splintered off to play other MOBA’s that had just come out, using the formula that Dota had made popular. I played some Heroes of Newerth in early 2010 and was shocked to see the same Dota game that I had grew up on with big-boy graphics. There were new heroes too. Some of my fraternity brothers played League of Legends. But I never got into either because it always felt too different.
I wasn’t gaming nearly as often in college; I had found a good group of friends and we were doing what boys and girls were supposed to be doing in college. I stuck with what I was used to and played DotA Allstars and other games sporadically with dormmates. I gave up the Chieftain position in Clan Primetime that had been passed down to me by a fellow Dukie, and I withdrew from the scene.
When I graduated in 2011, I moved where my work took me and I didn’t touch Dota in an effort to focus on my startup I founded. Like many startups, it was going nowhere; I was in the 90%. The year felt like banging my head against a wall that just wouldn’t move and I was horribly stuck. One day, my old friend Reflection, now MisterCao, surprised me when he told me that he had an invite to the beta of Dota 2, a game made by Valve that was supposed to be the successor to Allstars. I downloaded the game and saw a hero pick screen instead of taverns, and an organized item shop instead of shopkeepers. For my first game, I played Pudge.
In the years since, Dota 2 has became a regular part of my life. Both Dota Allstars and I had grown up. Dota 2 is now patched regularly by a team of developers at Valve, one of the largest video game companies in the world. Innovation on the game still happens, which is part of the reason why the game is so thoughtful, but I don’t see the core formula changing anymore. As for me, after being blown by the wind and living in eight different cities over the course of two years, I can finally say I’ve settled down in one place.
I still to this day have not played a game that is as rewarding or as satisfying as Dota. It brings me back to my childhood days of RTS games, and it gives me a way to keep up with friends. It was a way of rebelling against my parents and a way for me to learn how the internet worked. It is a way for me to be myself.
Outro
“Yo hud, yt?” My teammates MisterCao and Ohana had just come back from ESL One in New York City and they were animatedly talking about how great it was. In addition to watching some awesome Dota, MisterCao had managed to meet the players of Cloud9 and get them to autograph a shirt for me. Ohana, as the cute Asian girl, managed to get a cameo in a news video covering the event. But tonight was team practice. We were supposed to be talking about what heroes we wanted to draft. “yeah im here, search?” Our team name was XATCH, an acronym combining the first letters of all our first names. I clicked on the button that said “Find Match”. It always feels good to find what you are searching for. It was late at night and there was nobody around me as I sat in my office alone, but I grinned stupidly. I was home.
