Learning DOTA 2

[diamondd]

Oddly enough the losing game that prompted me to come write this was with a friend and a friend of said friend. :3

well that's unfortunate...

[snex]

****, I ain't got time for communinmacationing. Too busy tending to my rice paddies.

[Sathias]

Anyone got a spare key for another Dota noob?

[Giblet1]

Pick your heroes without reference to what your team has already chosen, and in fact don't even look at what the enemy team has chosen, that's what they want you to do.

What about in the case of the enemy team having Slithereen Guard on their team and you go ahead and pick an invis hero like Riki or Weaver who rely on it almost?

The way you've written that makes it seem like you think Riki/Weaver rely on the enemy team having sight of them through Slardar's ulti.

, If someone went ahead and picked Riki/Weaver ect WHILE they know there is Slithereen Guard on the enemy team, that would be a stupid move.

[Jez]

:?, If someone went ahead and picked Riki/Weaver ect WHILE they know there is Slithereen Guard on the enemy team, that would be a stupid move.

What about in the case of the enemy team having Slithereen Guard on their team and you go ahead and pick an invis hero like Riki or Weaver who rely on it almost?

I thought that was what you meant, but the way you phrased it (namely the dangling participle of 'it') didn't make it completely clear.

More I have learned from DotA 2:

Never ever suggest heroes to your teammates, even if they ask you. Instead, wait until they pick a hero that you consider wrong, then criticise them for it when it is too late to do anything about it. Using the chat window on the hero selection screen is anathema to everything DotA stands for, as it prevents your teammates from achieving the perfect state of zen-like antisocial calm they will require later on.

If you're new to the game, make sure to pick heroes that require high skill levels like Anti-Mage and Drow Ranger, their natural difficulty will make sure you learn the game all the faster. Do not tell your teammates that you are new or that they may not be able to rely on you to carry, as that will only lower their confidence in you.

[XViper]

The sarcasm is strong in this one.

[Jez]

I'm not sure I get the no-leaving mentality, in Chess it's considered polite to concede a game once it's clear you've lost, rather than drag it out. Yet in a game where our team was getting destroyed by a clan of four guys and I was farming less than 200 gold a minute, I would have been penalised and deemed impolite for leaving in such a clearly hopeless situation.

[XViper]

Yeah I hate that too.
Even in games of HoN where the game is deliberately being ruined by feeders (dying onpurpose over and over again), you can't leave without getting penalised.

[XViper]

Anyone have any spare invites sitting around?

[aetherfox]

If someone went ahead and picked Riki/Weaver ect WHILE they know there is Slithereen Guard on the enemy team, that would be a stupid move.

There was a recent top tier tournament, possibly The Defense, where one of the teams guessed the other team was building a team around a Riki last pick, so they adapted their picks midway and ended with Bounter Hunter as their final hero, the other team couldn't back down and picked Riki anyway.

It didn't turn out too badly for their Riki, no worse than what an invis hero has to deal with normally (wards, dust, etc).

The lack of a concede vote is a good thing. Too many noobs in HoN want to concede the moment they lose first blood or don't like their ally picks. Then they go and farm the forest and not participate at all to blackmail their team into conceding. Better to remove the possibility of a concede vote and have people just play the best they can.

The point of the game isn't to win - everyone is going to end up with a roughly 50/50 win ratio anyway, whether you're a top 10% player or a bottom 10% player. There's just no point. The entire point of the game is to learn and get better, it's a continual process, and you learn a lot more from a difficult and losing situation than a winning one where you're barely doing anything but some star player in the other lane is going 20-0. Conceding losing games is pointless: either the situation is so hopeless you lose in the next 5 minutes, or if you can defend for another 30 minutes, there's no reason you can't turn it around.

[aetherfox]

There is a funny concede exploit in HoN, where you got a good team of 5 players together, stomped the **** out of some people online, and then you conceded before they did. You could see when their team called a concede vote - it usually takes a few seconds for everyone to pass it - your team has to immediately call a concede vote as well, and because you're all ready for it, you can always pass it before them. So the game counted as a loss for you, but a win for them, aside from the fact you just killed them over and over =P

So this meant you got to have fun killing noobs and making them miserable, then because you conceded, their rating went up and your rating went down... so you could forever farm noobs at low skill levels =P

[AndyWho]

Not even close to being an exploit, it's just playing to stomp noobs and not caring about your stats. Could do it in every matchmaking game ever, it's not like the noobs will care anyway because they get a win.

[AndyWho]

Conceding losing games is pointless: either the situation is so hopeless you lose in the next 5 minutes, or if you can defend for another 30 minutes, there's no reason you can't turn it around.

There's no incentive to try to end the game by a winning team, and prolonging it by farming 3 rapiers is 'fun', so you end up with games that go 30mins past where it's winnable for no reason but to boost the winners ego.

[aetherfox]

Not even close to being an exploit, it's just playing to stomp noobs and not caring about your stats. Could do it in every matchmaking game ever, it's not like the noobs will care anyway because they get a win.

Wrong. The majority do not allow conceding.

In the MOBA / ARPG genre with ranked matchmaking, there are only 3 major players. HoN, LoL, DoTA2.

Of the 3, only HoN allows conceding, while LoL and DoTA2 do not.

[aetherfox]

Conceding losing games is pointless: either the situation is so hopeless you lose in the next 5 minutes, or if you can defend for another 30 minutes, there's no reason you can't turn it around.

There's no incentive to try to end the game by a winning team, and prolonging it by farming 3 rapiers is 'fun', so you end up with games that go 30mins past where it's winnable for no reason but to boost the winners ego.

That's unfortunate if you have experienced it. I personally haven't seen this in nearly 500 hours of play, but perhaps I play at a much higher skill bracket (top 10% or so) where the players and team compositions are much more consistent... I do concede that I could see this happening in the low skill brackets, where the quality of players is much more random, and you get feeders and terrible team composition to boot. The possible variance in team power is much greater, and could lead to blowouts. But most games that I see are won with a relatively narrow margin, and the moment one team has the advantage, they press it for an immediate win: we've all seen games where a team hesitated and lost the initiative, and went on to lose the game in the end, so the entire team generally knows to go for an immediate kill if it presents itself.

I suspect the long dragged out games seem to happen because at lower skill levels, there is a lack of coordination and trust between team-mates, and so they feel the need to farm up their uber items before finally committing to a game ending push.

In any case, my experience is that the people asking for the concede vote (in HoN) and wishing for one (in LoL and DOTA2) are the ones that give up easily and have low mental resilience. Just last night we were playing a game where we had lost all our outer tower while the enemy hadn't lost a single one, the enemy team was up 10 kills against our 3, and had outlevelled and outfarmed us. If this was HoN there would have been people calling for a concede. Anyway, our carry got farmed up in the forest while we delayed their push on our base, we had a lucky teamfight that wiped them out and we took 2 towers in a split push which gave our supports some needed gold to finish their core items, and we turned the game around without much fuss after that.

I'm really glad DoTA2 and LoL has no concede.