njoos

Home teams are more boring than others, that is a fact of all sports. To be fair to VG they did play some spectacular dota for most of their games. The noob stream concept is interesting if they can make something like that good. Keep it interesting for people who don't understand all the details, but can appreciate the push and pull of a tower defence game with 10 human players. I'm not a noob, and as such I didn't really watch that stream so I don't know how successful it was. Most of my non-dota playing friends watched the 'real' stream, and thought that was fine, but they all have familiarity with Warcraft and briefly league of legends. Are there any "noobs" in this thread who can share?

From last year Alliance are good at rat dota. I don't know why LGD let them have the 4 rattiest heroes, but it is a pretty good example. This too. Alliance didn't really pick to rat here, but they didn't manage to finish in the mid game (WK is pretty bad as a late game carry).

Star Ladder season 10 should start soon. 18 top teams, league first, then LAN finals in Kiev in October. Should start late august. http://dota2.starladder.tv/news/5029 Will be a silent time for a bit because teams usually shuffle their rosters after TI.

Rat dota is fun to watch too. The people comparing it to your soccer metaphor were wrong, very wrong. And no, VG did not play rat dota versus EG. Rat dota is out because of changes to blink dagger and the meta that followed. Hard to say if that was intended. Who knows. It is also hard to rat when there are 5 heroes death balling down your middle lane at 11 minutes. Rat dota is when you push lanes without showing your face, multiple lanes at the same time. Natures prophet with shadow blade being a prime example. I don't think icefrog cares about outside pressure. But who knows. I find it amazing that the lead designer/producer/guy behind one of the biggest PC games is just a nickname and a matching avatar. No one but valve knows who icefrog really is. The only known thing is that he was 25 years old in 2009. Nuts.

no

In the olden days (WC3 dota, right after TI1 dota2) IRC used to be the place to find dota pubs. No idea how to do it anymore. Valve have many solutions to the problem (dota2 chat rooms, dota2 guilds, steam groups) none of them are particularly good.

The giantbomb channel is probably your best bet. Just state that you are a noob and someone will take you in and not expect all that much. The idlethumbs channel/guild doesnt have enough people in it. Hard to get stuff going when there are only 9 people online, 3 are already in a game, and the rest is some guy with 2000 games played, 1400 games played and two with <100.

You get a battle point bonus for having the compendium. The compendium doesn't level up from playing unless you get player cards or compendium points at the end of the game.

Uh. No. If you are losing to natures prophet you are being out played or out picked. He has already been nerfed quite a bit in the last few patches. Kill him early on, ward his jungle, delay his Midas, delay level 6. A few deaths on him pre midas and he isn't really coming back in a strong way. He has no escape mechanism so until he gets one you can quite easily murder him if he tries to push.

Beginner stream is a really good idea. Many were annoyed in previous years because the streams were kind of either or. Probably because it is very difficult to cast dota I think. Anything you say is most likely going to be wrong unless you are in that 0.1% of players. Using pro players as co-casters is so great for me, wish they had a bigger pool to take from. Merlini and synderen are going to TI4 I guess. Hope 7ingmad is as well, but I don't think so? He was great at the ESL desk.

Pick warlock and tide. They blink in, you fuck em. They can't get bkb and blink on their heroes. Not until quite later at least. e: Disruptor as well is relatively good counter-initiation. Silencer, naga siren. medusa are also alternatives for counter initiation. e2: Yes, shadowblade sucks. Only natures prophet should consider getting it these days I think.

Yeah, the 5000+ options still doesnt work for that. It's not possible to earn that much gold as a team. 0-5000 was the lowest option right? It has to be total gold difference, anything else just doesn't math out as far as I can see.

BKB doesnt remove BH ult does it? Just prevents it from being cast on you while active.

Learning how to control creep and tower aggro will win you games most of the time. Since most people don't have a clue.

It's good on Tusk, Slark, Lone Druid, naix and Abbaddon most of the time. Sometimes good on brewmaster. Brewmaster can be very annoying in a meele vs meele lane if he has an orb of venom.

Orb of venom is 275 now, used to be 350 a few patches ago. I did abbadon with orb + batrider lane yesterday. Funny stuff.

The matchmaking does try to prevent situations like that. Trying to make teams play against teams. Guess it also prefers speed over that though. Damn shame. Don't give up. This could be you next week:

I think the main point is that surrender would remove a lot of good experiences too. Comebacks when the team have struggled hard for 40 minutes are great. The shitty games where we get slaughtered are extremely rare in my experience. I can't remember if that even happened to me in dota2. I can see how you think there is some gain to be made. But I experience tough comebacks a lot more often than I experience the slaughter games you want to get out of. I don't want to lose those great comebacks just because me and my team are feeling down after a lost team fight. I also think you are disregarding HoN a bit too much. HoN was a subset of dota, both in terms of heroes and community, for a very long time. I think it took 1 year of beta before they started adding heroes that weren't direct copies. The community was comparable during that time I think. So many things can be learned from mistakes made there. Surrender, or Concede in HoN, was a huge source of griefing and shittyness there. As well as good even games tossed away because of one bad team fight at Rosh pit. And those games were rare in HoN because their matchmaking was garbage.

Oh yeah. The HoN staff was trash and the HoN casting community was lead by a confirmed pedophile but that is besides the point.

Propose a fix that doesn't ruin the game then. If you still have two barracks up every pub game is winnable. If you don't just let the creeps finish. I really don't see how this is a problem that warrants a feature that has the potential to introduce additional griefing, reduce the fun in actually winning, and distance the pub meta further from the pro meta. The HoN meta game in pub games was really dumb because of the surrender. Go for early game cheese, win with surrender. If it doesn't work just surrender. That's not dota.

Use gg ff to catch them in a smoke gank!

If you dont like losing maybe stop playing a game with a matchmaking that tries to keep you around 50% win ratio. Must be an awful time for you guys.

Winning a hard game is more interesting than playing two easy boring 20minute games.

Pro players don't normally grief their own team, or try to surrender after first blood and then feed for the rest of the game when it is denied. They should add it to 5man ranked matchmaking, or 5v5 unranked. That is fine.