- Destroy My Sweater
- Jul 24, 2009
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i don't know what dota is and hell, i don't care
quote:
What is DotA/2?
DOTA2, simply, is the new engine sequel/remake to/of DotA. It makes sense to start with that then:
DotA, or Defense of the Ancients, is a Warcraft III mod that involves two teams of five players competing against each other to take down their opponents' bases. While the base engine of DotA may have been an RTS, the game plays more like a hourlong RPG; each team's army units (known as "creeps") simply attack move to the enemy base in three lanes (bottom, middle, and top) and each player in DotA controls one of 100+ heroes, and gains gold and experience to buy items that can drastically boost their powers. As a single game takes around 40-60 minutes and every individual member is integral in the team's success, the game is highly competitive!
DOTA2 has a full team at Valve working on it. Most importantly, Icefrog, the current developer of WC3-DotA is working on DOTA2. There are a few goons on the valve team floating around the thread as well!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akUNmFAzS98
I wrote a history-thing about Dota 1's creation for TMC here.
Who plays DotA?
Today, almost a decade after its inception, DotA has an estimated 10 million players on battle.net, Garena, and other international servers. A patch can get up to six million downloads in a day.
The competitive scene is ridiculously large and alive as well; from the Chinese dynasties CCM and LGD frought with succession drama to the old-school European dominators like MYM, OK, and Na'Vi, competitors are drawn from all over the world. This large playerbase contributes to a diversity of playstyles and strategies, and the large hero pool and monthly patches ensure that the game never gets stale. Recently as well, Starcraft I/II heavy hitters TeamLiquid have officially began supporting DOTA2 as one of their games. You can now find competitive info and a TL team, just check their site!
Gosugamers, JoinDotA, and now TeamLiquid have all the competitive news and streams you could want.
 NEW PLAYERS
Most of you fucks wonderful people won't read the whole OP before jumping in, then ask 'hey wat do i do ive never played' in the thread. Here are some things you can do to avoid this unhappy fate
- Watch the 'How to play Dota2 in 4 minutes' video above
- Read this
- Check out the official guide here
- If you have time, watch this.
Well should I just do bot games until I'm pro?
Some people find that bot games are less anxiety producing than jumping straight into a normal match. This may be true, but you'll see from even a bot game that there are plenty of people just as bad as you are. Still, I think I'd recommend your first game be a bot game just so you can get a feel of how the game controls, and how you buy things from the shop.
What hero should I play?
General recommendations for new players include
AGI: Viper (Carry, Ranged) or Ursa (Carry/Ganker, Melee)
STR: Sven (Carry/Ganker, Melee) or Tidehunter (Support, Melee)
INT: Lich (Support, Ranged) or Shadow Shaman (Ganker/Support, Ranged)
AVOID: Chen, Enchantress, Meepo, Visage, Invoker
All this being said, if you've done at least one of the above bullet points, and played a single game, feel free to ask any questions you have in the thread. It's just that 'I'm am entirely new and don't know what I don't know' isnt a very helpful point of reference for us!
IF YOU'RE COMING FROM LEAGUE OR HON: Welcome! Read the Transitioning to DOTA guide in the second post!
The International
The International 2014 has started!
It runs this year July 18-21 (Though qualifiers started on the 12th of May)
Here are the invitees this year. The bottom four teams will be competing for the wildcard. More details on the exact format of the tournament can be found here.
So, what is The International?
Every year, Valve sponsors an over one million dollar tournament, with free broadcasts in multiple languages.
Yes, you read that correctly. OVER $1,000,000. $4,000,000 jesus $10,000,000 loving dollars
All of the VODs for the Internationals past are available here. Be aware that TI2011 is a lot of farming however. Here's some quick info on what's what from each year, be aware that if you want to watch them all there may be spoilers if you click on the matches listed.
TI2011:
Champions:Na'Vi (Ukraine)
Set to Watch: The Semifinals and Finals
TI2012:
Champions: iG (China)
Set to Watch: LGD vs Navi
TI2013:
Champions: The Alliance (Sweden)
Set to Watch: Liquid vs TongFu and Na'Vi vs Alliance
This sounds awfully similar to...
Yes, all those games that seem familiar (LoL, HoN, Demigod, Bloodline Champions, Realm of the Titans) are all DotA-likes (or Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas aka MOBA or Action Real-Time Strategy aka ARTS). Make no mistake though, DotA2 may be prettier and have some new tricks, but in terms of mechanics and gameplay, it is the direct reincarnation of DotA. Direct. As in dont complain about last hitting in this thread, of course it's in. Discussions about mechanics are welcome, just consider that almost every mechanic in dota2 is a direct design decision, and isn't just a legacy feature.
Sounds good, how do I play?
Dota2 has officially launched! Just go to the page in the store and you can play! There's some sort of 'queue' when you go to install it but from what I've heard it goes by very quickly.
Other Info
- DotA2 uses Valve's Source engine: global lighting, cloth simulation, and integrated voice chat are part of the game.
- AI bots will eventually take over for disconnected players (maybe), and are available to play against in unranked training matches as well.
- Some hero skills work slightly better with the replacement of the Warcraft III engine with the Source engine. Examples include Rubik's Spellsteal.
- Valve has integrated Steamworks. You can create and submit new items which get voted on and potentially added on a weekly basis.
- There are several available matchmaking modes, currently including All Pick (Any Hero), Single Draft (Select between 1 of 3 heroes, 1 per attribute), Captain's Mode (Draft of most heroes, captain makes picks), Random Draft (Pool of 20 heroes, players make picks), All Random (Everyone gets a random hero + bonus gold), Captain's Draft (Like Random Draft with a banning/picking captain), and Least Played (All Pick, but your top 40 most played heroes are unavailable)
- A coaching system where veteran players can help out new players. "The coach sees the pupil's screen, and gets private voice and chat channels to communicate with them. The coach probably won't be able to take control of anything directly (once again, the details are currently under discussion)." This system is nearing release
- The game is F2P with a cosmetic shop. All heroes are unlocked, you buy cosmetic items:
What does this game even look like?
You can watch some streams! See the next post for some recommendations. There are also some pictures/fanart at the end of the post. Some reviews have said it looks dated but they're honestly really mind-numbingly dumb.
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cSFPIwMEq4
What's the deal with the store? This poo poo is expensive? What is a chest? I still can't read the op so this section also has  TRADING INFO in it?
The store in DOTA2 works very similarly to TF2's store. You can buy individual items for prices varying from about 50 cents to 7+ dollars, or bundles of items for a group priced discount. Anything (not bundles) in the store can also drop in game, with the notable exception of Unusual Couriers, which only drop from chests.
Chests are the other random things you'll see dropping at the end of games. They don't do gently caress all, but you can buy a key for 2.50$ from the store to open it. You now just buy chests, and keys for new chests don't exist at all. All chests can just be opened now, but they don't drop anymore. Opening a chest will yield one random item or set from the list of items in the chest description, but like all good gambles also has a small (1%) chance of containing something super cool! You can't get duplicates of a given normal item/set until you've opened enough chests to get one of each. The super cool things are unusual couriers, which is a courier with a coolio superneat effect attached to it. They can look something like this.
Generally the advice is 'dont open chests', since unusuals aside anything you want from them is probably worth less than the chest costs, and you can just trade for it.
Don't post trades in this thread, we have a thread for that HERE
If you want to spend real money on Dota items but want them cheaper, goon Captain Invictus sells steam things, including dota items, for a discount.
Also for trading, the Steam Marketplace which was recently added currently supports the selling of Chests, Keys, and Vintage (Green Quality) Items all items.
What's this about a Test Beta Client?
Test patches come out occasionally, if no big bugs are left, they push it to live the next day.
When you get in the beta you'll notice a second client: Dota 2 Test. It's purpose is supposedly to find major bugs before they go on to live beta client, in actuality it's a bunch of people sitting in bot games playing the new hero if there is one. There's only 2000 slots available on the test servers, so nobody really uses it. You don't need to bother installing it.
Links
Current Events
Check out our PRO DOTA2 THREAD: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3601662
If you want to find the VOD for a match, check out DotaCinema's VOD site, it's real good!
Latest Patch - June Timeframe
http://blog.dota2.com/2014/06/new-team-matchmaking/
In-Game Stuff
To join an inhouse:
- Go to the Play tab
- Find a Lobby
- Private Games
- Type in the password given into that box and hit search. The password is usually lljk, or lljk2, etc
Console and Autoexec commands:
To input any of these commands, add "-console" to the launch options for DotA2 on steam. You can also make a file called autoexec.cfg in X:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\dota 2 beta\dota\cfg, and put in commands that you would put in console to have the automatically executed when the game starts.
There is also an (new) generator for this here.
- chat_join lljk - Automatically joins a chat channel when you start dota, in this case, lljk.
- con_enable 1 - Adds the console to your game, same as adding -console to the launch options. Press ` (by default) in game to toggle console.
- dota_health_per_vertical_marker 200 - Changes how much health each of those bars is; by default it's 200, you might want to change it to 100 if you play League or want more accurate health bars.
- dota_minimap_misclick_time 0 - You can up the time on this to set how long your mouse has to be on the minimap to click on it, if you constantly click on the minimap by accident.
- dota_force_right_click_attack 0 - Right click deny Change the 0 to a 1 to enable it.
- dota_disable_range_finder 1 - Range indicators If you set this to 0, you'll see a small red/green bar from your character to your mouse pointer that makes spell ranges much more visible than looking at the mouse cursor changing alone.
- dota_sf_old_heropedia "1" Old hero learn tab thing? I dont know why you'd want it but there.
Credit to Minrad
Stuff to Change in Options:
- To remove camera pan acceleration, put the 'camera acceleration' bar all the way to the right. I'd also put the camera speed bar to the right.
- Your hotkeys start out silly, move the item hotkeys somewhere off of the numpad (like alt qweasd) and change your level-up skill and stats hotkey to something you can get without moving your hand super far (I use Z and X) Forgot to mention: B for buy! I'd like to set C to center on my hero but it wont let me.
- Enable double activate item and enable shop hotkeys in Game (if you want, I plan on learning to buy from the shop)
- Turn the render slider all the way to the right!
Credit to Gokuesque
Changing recommended items:
- Go to your steam/steamapps/common/dota 2 beta/dota/itembuilds folder.
- Paste "item" "item_tpscroll" in every hero's core item list.
- Don't like having Mask of Madness as a core item on Night Stalker? Want an urn instead? Change that stuff all in the file.
- There's a dota2alttab item list here.
- http://dota2-itemchanger.googlecode.com/files/dota2itemchanger.zip - A program made to do the same thing, but easier. Requires .NET
How to use the program:
- Unzip anywhere
- Run dota2itemchanger.exe, select a hero, and then drag&drop items from the left to the starting/early/... box in the right (the box appears after you select the item type at the top)
- Click save (you will get warnings if you don't add any items for a category)
- A new .txt file (for example, default_antimage.txt) will be created in the current directory. You can open it in notepad and check it, maybe make modifications about the item order
- Create a backup of the default hero itembuild (for example, c:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\dota 2 beta\dota\itembuilds\default_antimage.txt)
- Copy the file from 4. to the location mentioned at 5.
- Start the game, create a practice game and check if everything is ok
Other Useful Scripts:
- http://pastebin.com/FxPCueM8 - Adds aliases to search for hon and dota1 item names. Goes into "...\dota 2 beta\dota\scripts\npc", make sure to make a backup. Credit lprsti99
- http://pastebin.com/pew7W7A2 - Courier Autofetch script. Goes into autoexec.
- AND ON THE THIRD DAY IT WAS REBORN: NBA JAM ACCOUNCER
- http://www.dota2layout.com/ - An online layout editor so you can make pretty pictures of dicks jizzing out agi carries and share it with the rest of the world more easily.
- http://pastebin.com/EVQKkxgn - If the dota:// links dont work for you, running this (saved as a .reg) will fix it. Make sure you change the M:/ path to the correct drive/path for your dota2 installation
Ancient words of wisdom...
Long ago in a distant land, I, Terrorblade, the shape shifting master of darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil. But a foolish samurai juggernaut wielding a magic sword stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final blow was struck, I tore open a portal in time, and flung him into the future where my evil is law. Now the fool seeks to return to the past and undo the future that is Terrorblade.
Don't play with tcjimbo.
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Jul 21, 2014 03:10
