6/10
A long time ago, I was playing warcarft III on my laptop Pentium 4 laptop. It had a hard time running the game because it did not have a real graphic card, but it was still a lot fun. I would play the game online via the automatic match making system on good old Battle.net. When I was bored of the vanilla game I would play custom maps. Starcraft and Warcraft III came with great map editors which allowed to completely change the rules of the games within custom maps. A map would be automatically downloaded upon joining a custom game that featured.
The community was very creative and many new genres were born. There were a lots of survival maps, evolve maps, racing, sniper maps, board games, ect And map creators were able throw-in their own ideas as well as drawing ideas from their peers. Some ideas were great and original and gave birth to their own sub-genre, like tower defence maps.
Warcraft 3 was a RTS where you controlled leveling (RPG style) heroes (as well as building your base and your army). A lot of custom maps put more focus on the heroes and less on the base and on the armies. Armies, creeps(mobs), and bases would exist only for the sake of leveling your heroes and crush your enemies.
What was innovative on the RPG front in Warcraft 3 and in these maps was that your character would go from level 1 to the maximum level in within the time of game (30-60 minutes). In comparison traditional RPGs have your character slowly level over the course of long campaingns (30+ hours). Making strategic choices for a character is what the fun is all about in RPGs, and its even more fun if you make these choices every 2 minutes instead of every 2 hours.
Also these map often brought a competitive and team work aspect which make the experience much more intense for the player.
Replay value is ensured by a very large selection of heroes but you'll want to play a the same few heroes lots of times to master their usage in battle and make a difference and win your games.
The most popular "hero battle" map became "Defence of the Ancients" or DOTA. It had a wide selection of carefully balanced and original heroes (in character, in their abilities and use in combat). I'm pretty sure that at some point DOTA became much more popular than vanilla Warcraft 3 as it was becoming harder and harder to find games via the match making system but there was always hundreds of DOTA game listed and these would often attain the maximum number of players in a matter of seconds.
The market was limited to those owning a copy of Warcraft 3 but after few years people realized that this untapped genre could become very popular. Many "MOBA" games (WTF, worst video game genre acronym ever, the only thing is it rhymes with DOTA really) games were announced. The fact that the free to play business model was becoming increasingly popular probably helped.
I won't waste anymore of my time explaining this read these wikipedia articles if you want:
The Good
The graphics are better than those of Warcraft 3.
The game is free to play.
The game is not pay to win.
Its practically a port of the Warcraft 3 mod, you'll find that the game plays exactly the same, and that 90% of the times the existing heroes of DOTA 1 and their abilities were copy pasted into the game. To this day they are still releasing Heroes of the original map (once every few months or something).
Steam integration is excellent, I got dragged into the games because my friends were playing.
The Bad
Getting a game started takes forever. There are many steps and if anyone disconnects or fails to "accept" or to load the map, its back to square one. For some unexplained reason, even if my filters are very wide (all game modes) it can take me more than 10 minutes to be matched with other players. After the match making part players have 10 seconds to click the "accept" button. If one of the 10 players fails to click in time, everything is cancelled and its back to square one. After that the game loads the map. THE ONLY ONE MAP. If a player fails to load and connect withing TWO FRIKING MINUTES (everyone else must wait that amount of time) its back to square one. Lets just say that its rare and happy occasion when I use the match making system and it works on the first time. On average it takes me 20 minutes to successfully start a game with strangers and once it was over 20 minutes. These problems should be easy to fix, they come bad designs. First, the match making is broken, they should fix it. Second, THE ONE MAP OF THE GAME should be already loaded from the hardrive, it should have loaded while we were all waiting for the matchmaking system to match us. Then if a player fails to connect or respond after 20 seconds it should be replaced with an other player searching for game INSTEAD OF SENDING BACK THE 9 OTHER PLAYERS BACK TO THE MENU.
Backward logic. You might think that attacking the enemy soldiers all the time and pushing combat zone into the enemy territory is the right thing to do.WRONG. The right thing to do is to only give the finishing blow. This will give you the gold of killing the enemy unit without pushing the combat zone into the range of the enemy tower where you would not be able to give the finishing blow and gain gold. Actually its even better if you get you get your own troop dead to prevent the enemy heroes to gain gold and experience. So that's the game in DOTA, get the finishing blow on enemy or allied soldier while also fighting the enemy heroes. People even bring monster from the forest to intercept and kill their own soldier to put the enemy heroes at a disadvantage.
The game is full of tricks and secrets. I feel that this is intentional to put newer player at a disadvantage. The game has a "Secret Shop". My experience with secret shop in Warcraft 3 custom map was when a cheater would edit a map and insert a secret shop he could exploit to give himself an advantage. DOTA and DOTA 2 have their own legit, official secret shop. Also the are many unwritten rules that experience players will take advantage to get out of a situation without a scratch where a new player would have lost all his hit point for example: While in the range of an enemy tower, if it attacks you pretending to attack one the soldiers on you side will make the tower target an other unit (and probably save your life or allow you to attack other heroes within the tower's range). Video Link. Other tricks. So basically the game is rigged to give experience an much greater advantage than what they would normally have in a fair game (where all the rules are known by each players).
The game is not welcoming to newer player. To give an example a friend I play with who loves the game, but does not give a damn about the game's complexities, has still not understood how the shop interface works and how to complete a recipe, the secret shop does not help there. He attacks the creeps when he wants to and gets killed by the towers all the time. We played about 20 games. He still has fun with because we are all friends, but in a public match he would be hated and people on his team would complain to him all the time.
Also I took screenshots in the game but cannot find them on my steam profile or on my harddrive. Sooooo no screenshot for you DOTA2.
Conclusion
I play the game with friends once in while, because its accessible (free to play) and we can all play together. However I don't like the community and what has become "acceptable" in this game. The more I learn about the tricks of the game, the less I want to play it. I decided to review the game now even if its in beta because the things I don't like are unlikely to change and I probably won't be playing the game when it releases. I think Valve should not have tried to port the game and bring the bad logic to the new game. The should have taken the good stuff and let go of the what makes the game unwelcoming for new players.
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