By Alec Meer on November 2nd, 2011 at 1:03 pm.
The open-ish beta for Valve’s action-RTS remake Dota 2 is apparently impending, with a clutch of far’n'wide folk last night mailed a link to a survey intended to assess your level of experience with the multiplayer-only title. I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t complete it myself, such is my inexperience with these things – I put a fair bit of time into Demigod, but only really in singleplayer, and my one experience with a Dota game was a shower of incompetence. Keep meaning to check out League of Legends and see what the fuss is about, though.
If, unlike me, you are not entirely ignorant in such matters and thus can easily answer questions such as “Please estimate your average total gold earned in a DOTA match”, then set Steam running then click on this link. If that doesn’t work, hit Run from your Windows Start menu, paste the link in, hit enter and you should be presented with the questionnaire.
02/11/2011 at 13:07 sockpuppetclock says:
I got the email and thought I was special :’(
02/11/2011 at 13:10 Frapple says:
Denied!
02/11/2011 at 13:56 Ondrej says:
I didn’t even get the bloody e-mail, so you should feel pretty good about yourself, actually :)
02/11/2011 at 14:20 Hoaxfish says:
You are special, now clean up your bedroom or you’re not getting any dinner.
02/11/2011 at 18:17 Juan Carlo says:
When I read the headline I ran to my e-mail in excitement, only to be denied like a bad boy on Christmas morning.
Oh well. DOTA doesn’t look like my kind of thing anyway, but it’d still be cool.
02/11/2011 at 13:09 ru_disa says:
On a completely unrelated note (but hey, Alec brought it up) how’s Demigod in single player? Does it make any sense as a game if I’m not interested in playing it multiplayer?
02/11/2011 at 13:39 carn1x says:
My experience of Demigod is that it was a very beautiful and polished game, albeit with a buggy as hell initial release, and really bad timing for the genre. It didn’t really “play by the DotA rules” at all, so I think it was quickly shunned as a Dota-like, and even now is probably the least DotA-like DotA-like. However it has become one of those games that is now being patched by mods and the community, forgotten by the devs / publisher.
The good news is that the devs are thinking sequels, I just hope they don’t try to cozy up to the hardcore crowd and make the game that Demigod really should have been.
02/11/2011 at 13:43 Xocrates says:
Well Demigod has probably the best bots I’ve seen in a dota-like, so there’s that. If you’re a more casual player it should be quite alright.
Heck, I often kept the game as a backup whenever I got tired of dealing with human players in LoL.
Just don’t play the tournament, really, just don’t.
02/11/2011 at 14:27 Danny252 says:
The issue I had with Demigod was that beyond a certain level of difficulty, your own team’s bots seemed to engage Derp Mode whilst the other team’s roflstomped my one-handed attempt to win the game.
Still, it was rather fun.
02/11/2011 at 14:38 Xocrates says:
@Danny: Did that also happen in single games?
That did happen in tournaments, which is why I don’t recommend playing them, at all, but if I recall correctly in single games you could set the AI difficulty for each bot individually. I certainly don’t recall my team going into derp mode outside tournaments.
02/11/2011 at 14:55 Chris D says:
I found you could get quite a good game if you set all the bots on both teams to hard. That way you still have to work for your victory as everyone has an advantage compared to you but you don’t have to worry about your own team feeding the enemy too much.
Once you’ve got used to that you can tweak the difficulty up or down to provide the level of challenge you want.
Of course playing just you against eight medium bots on the prison map is also good fun.
02/11/2011 at 13:11 Unaco says:
I got the email, and it seemed awfully phishy. My client flagged it as being suspicious. I found out it wasn’t in the end… but the link to the survey doesn’t work. I’ve never played any of these games either… but I thought this was ‘newb’ friendly?
02/11/2011 at 13:14 zergrush says:
Considering that they’re implementing plenty of newbie frendly features, less experienced people are probably likely to get invites too.
02/11/2011 at 13:27 The Sombrero Kid says:
you need to have applied the latest steam update for it to work
02/11/2011 at 13:58 DigitalSignalX says:
In addition to the latest update, paste the link into your browser’s address bar seems to help (at least with Firefox).
I just put zero for everything, having never played DOTA before. I’m hoping they want a pool of complete noobs as well as all the elite to see what mistakes we all make (=
02/11/2011 at 14:05 Unaco says:
@DigitalSignalX
Haven’t read the ALT text then, I take it.
02/11/2011 at 14:18 DigitalSignalX says:
@Unaco
It did work though? Some other folks did the same in the comments further down. Since there wasn’t any sort of error message, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
02/11/2011 at 14:52 djbriandamage says:
I had trouble opening the survey too, but restarting my Steam client a couple of times fixed it for me.
Completing the survey reserves a place for you in the pool of potential beta invites.
02/11/2011 at 21:53 vivlo says:
Concerning the steam link, here is a tip : you can create a shortcut to your Steam client application, then open the properties of said shortcut, and add the aforementionned link after the path of steam client app (leave a space between the two things and don’t add quotes for the link). Open it and it should work ;)
i did it ignoring there was a “run” feature in the client though, so this is quite useless. And i wrote 0 everywhere (except hero picked where i selected the 5 first of the list because otherwise i doubt it would have worked…), seen as i have played like 3 (awful) games of dotas in my life and don’t remember a thing about those, so we are not alone :(
02/11/2011 at 13:13 Beanbee says:
Could anyone write down what would be acceptable answers for us mere mortals?
02/11/2011 at 13:18 zergrush says:
K/d ratios, level and gold earned depende a lot on what kind of hero you’re using, averages are probably around level 20, 10k5d and 7-9k gold.
02/11/2011 at 13:36 Malawi Frontier Guard says:
@zergrush
Averages for what kind of mythical player? Not me!
02/11/2011 at 13:39 zergrush says:
When playing hard carrys I usually get more than that, with supports it’s usually similar or a bit lower to that, so… that’s what I think my average is around =X
02/11/2011 at 13:46 BurningPet says:
How can the average be anything more or less than 1:1 k/d?
for every time you kill, someone else dies and vice versa.
02/11/2011 at 13:48 zergrush says:
The survey asks for your average number of kills and deaths at the end of a match.
02/11/2011 at 14:02 bear912 says:
I was completely honest about how completely un-skilled I am at anything having to do with DOTA. I have literally never played a DOTA-like game, and attempted to reflect that in the answers I gave. We shall see if this counts for or against me… Most likely it’ll mean that I get an invite later than everyone else, but they could also be looking for a more diverse selection of players and skill-levels.
02/11/2011 at 13:15 Pictoru says:
the thing is Dota didn’t show at the end of the round how much money you EARNED , it showed how much you had on you at the end , or how much did you lost…so yeah…who wrote that survey DIDN’T have so much experience with the game >_>
02/11/2011 at 13:21 Ghil says:
Actually maybe it’s a trap. putting a low number means you are good with your gold management.
02/11/2011 at 13:23 InternetBatman says:
Either that or they want people at first who know the cost of their item builds and could estimate how much they got by how far along they usually got.
02/11/2011 at 13:24 zergrush says:
It’s quite easy to estimate how much money you got by your inventory (:
02/11/2011 at 13:19 Mike says:
Surely they want new players too? Isn’t ‘zero’ an acceptable answer?
02/11/2011 at 13:25 Toothball says:
It better be, I used that for most of my estimates. Total deaths I guessed might be 10, as players in the tournament matches didn’t seem to die very often. I suspect it might be lower than my early average.
02/11/2011 at 13:33 Colthor says:
It let me enter 0 in all the boxes, and leave all the character drop-downs blank.
They did say they wanted players of all levels, and I’m as absolute newbie as possible (having never played DOTA or any clone), so fingers crossed.
02/11/2011 at 13:24 The Sombrero Kid says:
I play a lot of lol but couldn’t really answer the survey properly either since i’ve never played dota, i hope i get an invite though, i reckon i’d move over to dota 2 if it was as good as lol
02/11/2011 at 14:22 man-eater chimp says:
I basically said ’0′ to all of them until the last one about action RPG’s as I’ve never played DOTA, just insane amounts of LoL.
02/11/2011 at 21:59 vivlo says:
same here
i’m playing a scII dota-like mod called Storm of the Imperial Sanctum, aka SotIS, which is compared to LoL maybe slightly less optimized in terms of gameplay (using scII engine, and beeing developped by a few persons team) but which is, for me, very visually appealing :)
02/11/2011 at 14:25 Jools says:
I was able to fill out the survey, but I find it insanely disconcerting that Valve is primarily sourcing people with DotA experience for the open beta. DotA has an insular, absolutely miserable community (if you’ve played LoL or HoN, take those communities and then realize that they’re shining beacons of civility and maturity by comparison) and DotA 2 really needs to do as much as possible to expand its playerbase and dilute the existing community.
A tiny, stupidly optimistic part of me hopes that this is all a brilliant ruse designed to weed people with existing experience out of the beta.
02/11/2011 at 14:34 zergrush says:
I doubt that’s the case :(
Atm the only way to get into the beta is proving you’re a Dota / HoN / LoL professional gamer, and from watching people play dota 2 there’s already all kinds of bad mannered people.
02/11/2011 at 22:00 vivlo says:
aw :/
02/11/2011 at 16:19 Milky1985 says:
I’ve given in the details as far as i remember them, its been a long time since i played it (i assume it means dota like games so i counted my LoL time as recently played for that question) , so i think i made it clear i’m an avarage player who knows whathes doing , but isn’t terribly good at anything other than a certain type of hero.
Its a godo idea to get all type sof players in , as they will want to make it accessible, LoL has shown a massive base for an accessible game.
02/11/2011 at 17:00 tenseiga says:
Actually it specifically asks you how much you dota you have played in the last month and week and specifically how much Action RTS genre (blizzards word for dota like, LoL uses moba) so LoL should be counted there. I put in 0 for dota and a bunch for LoL.
02/11/2011 at 17:05 Kevlmess says:
What? No mention of the absolutely beautiful comic?
Here, let me fix that for you.
I’m not a huge fan of DOTA (though I’m giving Valve the benefit of doubt – they are, after all, Valve) but I think the art direction in this thing is something special indeed, somehow looking very distinct despite lovingly embracing all the fantasy tropes. And the fact they are building an imperial fuckton of lore and story around something traditionally strictly competitive and no-nonsense is amazing. I can imagine myself following and enjoying all the future DOTA2 comics and videos without playing the game even once.
02/11/2011 at 17:16 CharlO says:
That link, is not working.
Edit: Sorry, it seems that’s not working from their page also, might be the proxy from workplace.
02/11/2011 at 18:20 bglamb says:
Never played Dota in my life, but 5 mins of research left me with the answers lvl-20, 10/5 k/d and 5k gold.
Hope I get in, but if I do, I’m gonna get pwned so hard!
02/11/2011 at 18:34 SighmanSays says:
While I too was absolutely disgusted with how the survey was designed, I do realize there’s a very good reason for it: It’s a beta, they need to figure out how to balance the game. And with a game that has set its eye on the competitive scene, you balance for the capabilities of high/top tier players, not the common average.
So naturally, they’re looking for people with plenty of existing experience with the DOTA genre. I’m still puzzled as to why they didn’t account for people who have not had experience with DOTA specifically but with it’s other derivations: HoN and LoL. Perhaps there’s a legal restriction, I dunno.
It’s a logical approach, but I’m still worried. The DOTA community is legendarily inclusive and rude. If these people are the established player base on launch, the game’s liable to have the same problem as DOTA and HoN currently have. The game will fall into the same trap: being aggressively anti-newcomer. Long-term mainstream prospects will therefore be slim.
The summoner progression system in LoL at least alleviates that by exposing newcomers to the acrid community on a gradual basis, instead of all at once. I’m relatively new to LoL and I can say I’m still willing to keep going forward. Contrast this with my first (and last) game of HoN, where I was immediately lambasted to the point that I decided it was just not worth spending the time with those troglodytes, or spending the time to dip to their level. Why is this important? Well, look at the size of the player base for LoL compared to HoN. Look at it’s overall popularity on the internet at large. I’ve already purchased RP from Riot, which reflects the business benefit for a introducing and maintaining a relatively amiable community. But I’ve seen nothing from DOTA2 that does this except for perhaps the fact that getting to an acceptable skill level may be easier thanks to spectating.
I’ve filled the survey and I do hope I get in. I’ll still reserve judgement until I see for myself how the game turns out. But my hype has been shot, no question.
02/11/2011 at 19:09 cmi says:
what makes me wonder is the pure content of the questions. i mean: sure, ask about previous dota experience. ask about favorite champs and shit – but: why isn’t there a single question about ANY of the modern dota-likes (HoN, LoL, whatever).
i *never* played dota, but i’m playing way too much LoL *and* I’m curious about dota 2. tbh when i read the questions this survey I was like “sigh” and closed the browser tab, feeling unworthy. i can’t answer a single question. i played LoL, so i’m at least familiar with the genre. but valve doesn’t even allow me to express this.
02/11/2011 at 19:41 mrwonko says:
I’m pretty sure by Action-RTS they mean “Dota-Like-Games”, so the last question reflects that.
02/11/2011 at 19:40 Daniel Is I says:
I’ve never played DOTA, so I just swapped every “DOTA” out for “League of Legends.”
On an unrelated note: is reaching level 18 and having 15000+ gold standard in DOTA?
02/11/2011 at 21:44 Daniel Klein says:
I think DOTA had a max level of 23–they had 5 (?) levels of stats upgrades you could buy, which we got rid of for reasons of simplicity (it’s always more exciting to level a skill, so we want that to be the best path). Dunno about the gold.
02/11/2011 at 20:37 piderman says:
I could not enter the fact that I did not have any experience yet. Surely they need people like me too? :o
02/11/2011 at 23:46 awickedone says:
There’s a lot of people who haven’t played it applying,, so all that’s left to do is to hope they need to test their game on your hardware.
02/11/2011 at 22:31 Andrigaar says:
I threw down my HoN stats since they’re basically the same game when it comes to characters and money. Here’s hoping I can get in since I want to again experience the DotA community, the ragiest on the internet as far as anyone can tell.
03/11/2011 at 17:06 AMonkey says:
Although I played about 20 hours of LoL I’ve never played the original Dota. So I had to lie to Valve to get into this pool of invites.