Anyway, here's the first instalment:
Signups for the Dota 2 Beta began all the way back in August 2011, at a time where Valve were targeting a release later that year for the follow up to Defence of the Ancients, a multiplayer online battle arena game which started life as a Warcraft 3 custom game. The wave of MOBAmania hadn’t quite swept me up at that point, so I thought I’d sign up and see what all the fuss was about. You had to complete a short questionnaire describing your experiences with the previous game. Alright, I thought, standard stuff... but there was no option in any of the questions for “I haven’t played the previous game”, so I just kinda...lied. “How many hours a week did you play Defence of the Ancients?” 1-2 hours, sure, that’ll do. There were only a few beta spots open at the time, so I wasn’t expecting to be receiving anything.
Now it’s April 2012, the game still isn’t out, and I had all but forgotten that I had signed up. Yesterday however, I received an email: “Congratulations! You have been selected to play Dota 2”. Great, a spam email telling me I had won a beta invite, similar to the ones I receive inviting me to play the beta for a WoW expansion that was released two years ago. But sure enough, I went to my games folder in Steam and there it was, Dota 2 just waiting to be installed.
If anyone has no idea what I’m even talking about, MOBAs are RPG based real time strategy games, where players on teams of five each pick a hero and do battle on a large map where the goal is to destroy the other team’s main structure. You level up your hero and earn gold by killing creeps, small weak enemies, which are constantly spawned and will run to the enemy base, meeting up in the middle with enemy creeps and fighting there. When you level up, you can upgrade your stats or unlock new abilities. The gold you accumulate can be used to buy special items which will improve your numbers or give you special powers.
I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive of joining a game straight away. I had heard multiple horror stories from people saying that the MOBA community is notoriously unwelcoming to newbies like myself. There was a tab on the start screen saying ‘Learn’, so I thought I’d click that and there might be some tutorials or something which would help me on my way. All that was on this page were pictures of the dozens of possible heroes you could choose, outlining what abilities they had. This was no help at all! All I was learning was that I was even more overwhelmed now than I was before. Oh well, there was no use putting it off any longer, it was time to jump into a game.
Luckily there was an option to play a game with people against computer controlled characters, as well as an option to team up with people who were also new to the game. Now to pick a character to play as. Each character has a ‘role’, such as ‘Ganker’ and ‘Support’, which I kind of understood, but there were also unhelpfully named roles such as ‘Carry’ and ‘Initiator’. I have since found out that a ‘Carry’ hero is one that usually sits on the sidelines for much of the first part of the game, accumulating experience and gold and will then be able to tons of damage later on.
I chose Enigma, because he looked cool and had an interesting name, and it turned out he was an ‘Initiator’, which means that he is good at teaming up with other heroes to take on groups of enemies in what are called ‘Team Fights’. Initiators have skills which affect large areas, and are good at getting the first blow in to disable enemies while your teammates do the rest of the work. I had no idea of any of that going into the game, maybe I should’ve spent more time on the Dota 2 Wiki beforehand.
So the game loaded up, and straight away someone said in the chat: “Sorry for any noob moves, this is my first game, lol xD”. Phew, at least someone else won’t know what they’re doing. I knew the basics. I had been told at the start of the game that you should buy regeneration items, which will help you survive and will allow you to gain mana quicker, which is used for your abilities. There are three ‘lanes’ which the creeps will run down, top, middle and bottom. Usually two heroes take each of the top and bottom lanes and one hero will go up the middle for the early part of the game, where the focus is on levelling your character. It looked like everyone had already chosen which lanes they were going in, so I took the remaining space at the bottom. The match began, and it was time to kill some creeps!
Thing seemed to be going well, everyone on my team was levelling up, unlocking new abilities and earning gold and buying new items. I decided to record some footage so I wouldn’t forget anything for writing it up later, so I quickly loaded up the capture software and hit F9 to begin recording. The game froze. Wait, people are spamming the chat with question marks. Oh, F9 is the key to pause the game. Great. Sorry guys.
Everyone on my team was around level five or six by that point. Level six is where you can unlock the first rank of your ultimate ability. I had just unlocked mine when suddenly, BANG, someone on my team got killed by Zeus, an enemy hero. How embarrassing, to be killed by a computer controlled he- BANG. Oh, I’m dead.
Zeus’ ultimate ability allows him to send a thunderbolt straight onto the head of all of the enemy heroes, no matter where they are on the map. I mean sure, my ultimate ability with Enigma creates a black hole, but I have to channel it, and unlimited range thunderbolts just seem unfair. He was getting kills left, right and centre without even having to see anyone, and every time he did get a kill, he would gain a whole bunch of experience, quickly making him the most powerful hero in the game.
My team got a few kills here and there, and managed to destroy a few enemy structures, but in the end the computer controlled team scored a fairly easy victory. A little disappointing for my first game. I had fun though, I can certainly see why people spend many hours in this game. It seems simple to get into, but has a real depth to it making it ideal for competitive play, and indeed, there are tournaments with hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars on the line. I’m not quite there yet, I probably need a bit more practice, so I jumped into another game.
The tale from my second game will be coming soon. It contains a lot more people complaining that I wasn't good at the game, so at least that will be entertaining.
Thanks for reading, have a good one.
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