RPS Feature Dota? I hardly knew 'er
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart*.
Hello!
It’s time for some Dote Night real talk:
RPS Feature Getting to know you
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart.
I spent the last few Dote Nights talking about tutorials in three MOBAs – what they did well and what they did poorly. I realise I didn’t make any suggestions of my own for where to start in terms of characters, though. This post is about which heroes I learned to play Dota 2 [official site] on:
Tutorials and practice in MOBAs is something I think about a lot. It came up again over the last couple of weeks because Riot ventured the opinion that a sandbox mode in League of Legends would introduce problems and take away from fun of the game.
I already talked about the sandbox situation in greater detail here but I figured I’d put forward a few of my own ideas for useful practice scenarios. Before doing so, though, I wanted to check on the current state of tutorials in MOBAs. A quick peek turned into a longer look because Dota 2’s Reborn beta has introduced a whole bunch of new tutorial stuff in the form of these guided bot games you can play in their entirety as well as a demo hero mode. What I’ll do, then, is go into Reborn’s guided bot matches in more detail to say what’s good and bad about them – how they work and what’s still not covered. Next week’s Dote Night will be for broader thoughts about MOBA tutorials in general. Feel free to pitch in with your own in the comment section!
RPS Feature Incy wincy spider
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart. Today she’s going to talk about the aftermath of TI5 for pro players and spectators.
With the confetti [mostly] picked out of my handbag and Aegis of Champions in the hands of five new gentlemen, it’s time for the fallout from The International 2015.
For the players that all began a little while ago. The International is a great place to try and win stacks of money with your current team but it’s also a networking event and a recruitment opportunity. The best teams in the world (and their managers and associated folk) are all in attendance and an attractive prospect dissatisfied with their current roster is a veritable Cinderella in a shoe shop. I don’t think that analogy worked but you get the point.
RPS Feature Ready to role
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart.
Today Twitter had a meltdown over the existence of a magazine about YouTubers called Oh My Vlog. You can pretty much guess at the reactions. The reason that I bring it up is that it prompted me to take my first internet quiz in about ten years.
Suddenly I was seized by curiosity. Were there Dota 2 quizzes? There must be! This is the internet, there’s a quiz for everything.
RPS Feature The case for a reset
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart.
Above is a picture of two bears. I have been watching a bearcam while I try and write about matchmaking rating (MMR) in Dota 2 [official site]. Eventually I started imagining the bear you can just about see in the background shouting at the one on top of the little waterfall “WHAT’S UR MMR, SCRUB?” as they both fail to catch any fish.
I guess that’s as good a jumping off point as any: I don’t associate MMR with anything good. I associate it with miserable gaming experiences and being used to undermine people in discussions.
RPS Feature It's dead butterflies all the way down
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart. THIS WEEK, however, she will be complaining about her Dota 2 petting zoo!
I am staring at a hang screen in Dota 2. I think I just tried to compile a map but I can’t be completely sure because programming words have always been a bit of a mystery to me.
Being sick and jetlagged I took the obvious decision that this would be a good time to build a petting zoo as a custom game mode using Dota 2 Reborn’s toolkit. So far I seem to have made a horrible map in the Hammer editor where the trees look goofy and the textures are unsubtle and there’s an army of butterflies completely by accident that I can’t get rid of. The totally separate INTENTIONAL army of butterflies is in a totally different location but I got cross with rotating them individually so they’re currently in grid formation and now they look weird and menacing and, crucially, unable to fly. I think they might all be dead.
RPS Feature Rune for your life
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart. THIS WEEK, however, she will be glaring at the runes and masteries of League of Legends!
In a few minutes of downtime at the recent MSI event League of Legends expert and caster Rivington “RivingtonThe3rd” Bisland III sat with me for a beginner-friendly Q&A focusing on Runes and Masteries. Both are ways to give a little boost to your Champions which you set up before a game starts. Runes provide little bonuses which you can stack in order to increase their effect. You put the runes into pages in order to set up slightly different builds, then pick one of these pages to use when you go into a match depending on how you want to play. Masteries are similar but rather than you just selecting the bonuses you fancy and plugging them into vacant spots you’ll need to follow a progression tree, adding points strategically in order to access particular bonuses further down the line.
“Overall they have a slight impact on the game but they can definitely make or break a situation where you both come down to about 10 HP and you’re trying to win that battle,” is how Riv sees runes.
RPS Feature Creature feature
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart. THIS WEEK, however, she will be spying on the wildlife of the Dota 2 map!
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RPS Feature The skinny on ESL's big Dota 2 event
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart. THIS WEEK, however, she will be chatting to Dota 2 caster Capitalist about the upcoming ESL One competition!
I went to the inaugural ESL One Frankfurt event last year. It featured one of the best games of pro Dota 2 I’ve ever watched (Alliance v Cloud9) and, as it took place shortly before Valve’s mega-tournament The International, it was an interesting opportunity to size up some of the competitors before Seattle. This year’s event will offer similar fare – big-name teams and a chance to see how they perform on LAN in front of a massive audience – but a lot has changed over the past year. Teams have undergone massive shakeups and enchanted mangoes, octarine cores and glimmer capes abound on the battlefield. In case you’ve lost track of competitive Dota 2, here’s caster Austin ‘Capitalist’ Walsh on the current meta, the teams to watch, and the relationship between casters and players.
RPS Feature Learning to LoL
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart. THIS WEEK, however, she will be finding out how League of Legends picked out their starter champion lineup!
League of Legends [official site] treats newcomers ever so slightly differently to veterans when it come to which champions they are allowed to play for their first few games. Instead of just plunging these baby Leaguers into whatever’s on the free rotation you get to pick from a pre-selected roster of more straightforward characters like Ashe and Aatrox. If you’re more familiar with Dota 2, it’s similar to that game’s Limited Hero pool. The idea is to give players a bit of guidance and prime them for a more positive introductory experience to League than if they pick a character like Orianna and proceed to get utterly destroyed. I got in touch with Riot to find out how their picked their champs:
RPS Feature Mangoing crazy
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart. THIS WEEK, however, she will be picking through the mango-infested lands of patch 6.84
Tis patch time in Dota 2 land – the patch notes for 6.84 hit yesterday and we’re at that point where the subreddit is now a forest of theorycrafting and the test client is merely a vessel for flinging out “lol icefrog pls fix” video material.
“But Pip,” you might say. “Surely it is to you we will turn to make sense of this world where Alchemist must provide Aghamin’s Scepters like some kind of mystical Pez dispenser, you who will guide us through the ramifications of the multiward stackathon and the difference between a walrus punch and a walrus kick.”
Well, sort of. But I think SRS ANALYSIS BSNS will only really bear fruit (mangoes obv) after the patch has settled in and had the broken bits tweaked or removed. Heck, some of the new items might not even make it through the process.
Instead I’m currently more interested in a smidge of “oooh, would you take a look at that” from my own point of view on the new items combined with “lol icefrog pls fix” video material.
RPS Feature Defence of the artworks
One of my habits is searching art and design forums for what their denizens are doing with Dota 2. There’s some excellent stuff out there – cute cartoons, painstaking pixel art, whimsical watercolours and [other alliterative thing here]. To that end I’ve been poking about on Behance. It’s a platform for artists seeking to showcase their work. It used to be that a site search for “Dota 2” would yield little – maybe some pixel sketches or loading screen-style character art – but going back to it today I found far more.
*deep-breaths-and-don’t-think-about-how-disastrously-this-could-go-Pip*
Hello Dote Nighters. This post marks the beginning of Pip’s Cosplay Challenge. By that I mean I am going to do my best to create a cosplay – one which I could feasibly wear to an event and people would a) be able to recognise who I was supposed to be and b) not join this tragic lineup.
The whole thing was inspired by the various amazing cosplays I’ve seen around the world at eSports events and the skill and dedication which people put into creating those costumes. I’m not even going to try to pretend I’ll match up to their work but I wanted to give it a go – find out what’s involved, talk to people about how the various aspects work and get an idea for how difficult it is.
RPS Feature MOBA legacy
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart. THIS WEEK, however, she will be digging into how one MOBA can influence another:
Three lanes, patches of jungle, a bunch of player characters, items and minions, oh – and a base to defend. When you put it in those terms League of Legends and Smite [official site] don’t seem too far apart. But the devil’s in the detail and it’s what you do with that detail that counts. But from watching the first pro season of Smite it felt like a lot had been borrowed, or at least learned from other MOBAs in terms of playstyle– particularly League of Legends. With the second season of Smite well underway I got in touch with Graham ‘Hinduman’ Hadfield – a Smite expert caster with a League of Legends background – to find out how close the two really are and whether Smite is branching out.
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart. THIS WEEK, however, she will be telling you why she’s preferring pro League to pro Dota and what any of that has to do with medical soap operas:
I’ve been away from my own PC for big chunks of the last couple of weeks. It’s mainly been for work reasons so in addition to not being able to play any Dota or League I’ve also been able to watch very little. The semi-absence has been irritating, in that I’ve missed gaming but it’s allowed some nebulous inklings and ideas to form into actual thoughts and opinions.
The most interesting was that while I prefer playing Dota to League, I prefer watching League to Dota.
RPS Feature Suffering For Your Dotes
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart. Today, however, is not that day. Today is the story of the worst Dota setup known to man. Worse than Fear’s desk in the Free To Play movie.
Whenever I go traveling for work I have my trusty laptop in tow. It’s an old Macbook – old enough that persuading it to do anything useful feels like the digital equivalent of dragging a recalcitrant cat through a river of molasses to a vet appointment.
It wheezes and whirs and can’t hold battery charge for the length of time it takes to write a Dote Night column. At one point, though, it was my main gaming machine and I forced it to run Dota 2.
RPS Feature Re-goosing like crazy
The Rekreational was a games industry Dota tournament which played out over the course of about a billion years seven or eight months. It was organised by Indie Megabooth’s Christopher Floyd and IGN’s Mitch Dyer. Here’s what I learned from being a part of it:
I took part of The Rektreational as one fifth of team Venomancer? I Hardly Know Her! along with Ted ‘PyrionFlax’ Forsyth, Shane ‘shaneomad’ Clarke, (both Dota streamers and casters) and Chris Thursten of chipper RPS fanzine PC Gamer and Phill ‘I work over at Gamasutra now’ Cameron.
We made it through to the finals (the FINALS!!!!) against Pit Lord Meta but after an exhausting best-of-five had to settle for second place. You can watch the final before we continue but I’ve made a list of some of the things being part of a tournament crystallised for me. They’ve definitely made me a better player already which will come in handy, particularly if the tournament returns and we get another shot at glory!
RPS Feature First Dote
Alec has been asking me to come to Brighton to teach him Dota 2 for a while now. Thus far scheduling had made the trip impossible (plus I’m still not entirely convinced it isn’t an elaborate childcare trap), But then an opportunity presented itself. A chat with their deputy editor let me know that cheery RPS fanzine, PC Gamer had decided to learn to play Dota 2. The one problem was that they needed a team to face off against – a team of similar skill, or at least sufficiently inexperienced that four Dota babbies with between four and ten hours of play under their belts wouldn’t just get ground into a fine paste over the course of eight minutes…
I volunteered RPS.
Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart. THIS WEEK, however, she will be telling you all about her exploits with the All-Hero Challenge:
Currently I am staring at the cliff face which is the All Hero Challenge in Dota 2.
