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Sean

Dota Today 5: With Brad Bot Shoemaker

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Sneaking out of bed to play Dota, and being on your second 90-minute game at 8:30am sounds a lot more dedicated than I am at anything.  Congratulations, Brad?

 

Does Dota play differently depending on what time of day you're playing?  I guess there are dedicated players playing at all hours in all locations, but I wonder if there's an overall ebb and flow.

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Here's the post I wrote in notepad yesterday after listening to the cast and seeing there wasn't a thread for the episode here yet.

 

First things, about Treant becoming top pick/ban material, it actually isn't the result of the last patch, which only changed leech seed.  It's been happening for a while and   finally got picked up in big tournament games.  He's been getting played a lot in IXDL for a while now (an inhouse league made by ixmike88 who is the hard support player for   Team Liquid where most of the North American pro players play) and it's actually funny to watch another league that has it's own metagame because you see how arbitrary a lot   the metagame is.  For the longest time the Eastern Dota scene refused to play wisp even after he became super popular with European teams (I think LGD.Brax said it was because they thought it was too unstable of a pick) and now he's a regular pick/ban.   

 

About playing a bunch of game and still not having played every hero, I remember back before your hero rankings in your profile weren't relative to the rest of the heroes you   play, but compared to the other players in your matchmaking bracket, people would request pro streamers to show their heroes. A lot of the times they would scroll through and   at the bottom there would be maybe 10 or so heroes that still had the message saying to play a few more games to determine ranking, meaning that the pro players who had maybe   1500 wins or so still had played less than 3 games or whatever it was with some of the heroes in the entire time Dota 2 had existed.  I guess now that I think of it it's not   that weird because people coming to Dota 2 who were already pro players already had a team and a role and didn't have a reason to play heroes that they knew they would never   be playing in a real game (or they always play in a stack and will trade with other people if they random a hero that isn't their role), but it was still really surprising.  I   guess there's also also people like ixmike88 who only plays inhouse leagues and hasn't played a single matchmaking game in probably over a year so all his games are considered   practice lobbies and don't count stats. 

 

In terms of things that are really rewarding (like landing a really good Tide ult), I find that the sound design in the game is one of the things that makes the game feel so   good to me.  For example, the other day I went into an empty practice lobby, spawned an Antimage on the other team, leveled him to 25 and pushed all my lanes and destroyed   every rax in my base.  I then proceeded to record ~5 minutes straight of me just destroying creeps with Flak Cannon as Gyro with three Divine Rapiers and have a .wav on my   desktop that is the space between waves of creeps cut out so it's just non-stop gold raining down. 

 

About a hero that melds with another hero (from the starcraft unit discussion mentioning High Templars), it reminded me of the hero Empath from HoN.  Her ult is as follows:  "As One: Empath becomes one with an allied hero, buffing the host. Empath may continue to cast spells and use items as normal. Grants a sub-skill, "Faster!" "

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On playing early morning, it largely affects who you get matched with. I do early morning a lot you tend to be matched with a lot of EU players. Late night more likely to play with my own time zone. The americans tend to be more talkative. Unless I somehow anger a russian, apparently.

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This is the third time Sean's mentioned the Queen of Pain Feminism Ban. Somebody make that man a client-side QoP mod already! Maybe a tasteful frock (or the old lazy standby: invisible torso textures) and some dubbing over the more ridiculous barks. (I would use that mod too.)

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Hello! For some reason I listen to this podcast even though I don't know what Dota 2 even IS, but I simply enjoy the listening experience. 

 

I don't know what the goal of the game is. I don't know what ''lanes'' are. 

 

I played Warcraft 3 and I'm familiar with some hero mechanics, so today (DOTATODAY), after ingesting today's podcast with my ears, I downloaded the fuck out of Dota 2. 

 

After finishing the tutorial mission in a dreamlike haze I pressed the ''find game'' button. I was full of confidence at this point. Seriously. I knew how to buy stuff. I knew how to move my Lord. Piece of piss.

 

The game started and I had to pick a guy. I picked Nightstalker because he sounded and looked cool. After spawning I bought some stuff and then ran around. Nobody talked or said anything. I didn't know what to do except that I should probably murder ''creeps''. So I murdered many creeps and leveled up my Lord. I had this vague idea that I should try to ''hold'' a ''lane'', so I moved my Nightstalker to the center lane which was unoccupied. Pretty soon we came under attack but I held fast, sending back wave after wave of creeps and gaining levels fast. Suddenly, the team chat shuddered to life;

 

''wtf''

 

What? Is it something I did? 

 

Within one minute of this message I realized that my entire team had disconnected and I was completely alone so I quit. The end. 

 

What is this game??

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Unlike Brad the fact that Valve essentially kept the models and mechanics for all the DOTA2 lords the same as DOTA is what makes me not like it.  It just feels lazy which isn't something I would normally associate with Valve. And I feel the same about the overall art aesthetic it is just a sort of boring/bland fantasyish thing. 

 

Everything after that is pretty typical Valve to me though.  They have put a lot of effort into polishing the crap out of those mechanics and building in the spectator system etc etc.  I just wish they had been more bold in making changes in the design phase.

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I, too, am a non-player of this game, though I suspect my not-playing is rather advanced.

 

I've listened to all the Dota Today podcasts.  I've read the "Welcome to Dota, You Suck" on the internets.

 

I've watched a half dozen pro matches, and about as many "casts" of non-pro matches.

 

I've even watched a bit of a League of Lords game (astonishingly, it appears to be exactly the same game, played on exactly the same pitch, except with retrogamey cartoon graphics instead of the Standard Fantasy Gloom approach inherited from Warcraft 3)

 

I feel like I've soaked up some of the basics, but there are still some apparently very simple, fundamental things that I just don't understand, e.g. "what is a bottle, and why does everyone get so excited about them?",  "what's that thing that you pick up when you kill Roshan, and why does it matter?", "What is a BKB, and why does it matter?"  "Why is a 'carry' called that?"

 

The glossaries I've looked at are useless; they have maybe one in four of the abbreviations or idioms I'm trying to look up, and there's no mention of why the particular thing is important enough that people use shorthand or slang to refer to it.

 

Also, I get it that a central part of this game is solving spreadsheet problems.  Games like that aren't generally to my taste, which is fine, that's just my taste.  But where are the online, interactive-but-single-page Lords Spreadsheet, and also Items Spreadsheet, complete with keys thoroughly explaining the column headers?

 

It ought to be possible, if not easy, to be a fan of a game without playing it yourself.  Is the LOMA industry simply not interested in this audience?

 

Someone in this week's episode referred to this obliquely, saying that when asked by his (spouse?) about the game, instead of cheerfully explaining what it was about, as he usually would, his reaction was something along the lines of "I can't get into it" or "it's not worth it."

 

That's a problem.

 

There seem to be plenty of resources available for people who want to learn how to play this game; why isn't there even one video out there titled "How To Watch LOMAs"?

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Unlike Brad the fact that Valve essentially kept the models and mechanics for all the DOTA2 lords the same as DOTA is what makes me not like it. It just feels lazy which isn't something I would normally associate with Valve. And I feel the same about the overall art aesthetic it is just a sort of boring/bland fantasyish thing.

Everything after that is pretty typical Valve to me though. They have put a lot of effort into polishing the crap out of those mechanics and building in the spectator system etc etc. I just wish they had been more bold in making changes in the design phase.

 

Part of it could be trying to hold to the original as to not piss off fans.  There was massive backlash when they released a slightly silly Ursa item set early on.  People flipped out because it wasn't serious business and that it ruined the aesthetic for them.  To an extent I see why, but I'm also always for silly things.

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Or they did it 'cause they're BALLER at it and it looks fucking fantastic.

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There is a nice 'item spreadsheet' in the dota 2 client under learn. Heroes isn't really the same. There's an attribute spreadsheet on the wiki, but you still need to know the abilities.

 

I have to chime in that I hate the bots just as much as Sean. I'll often jump into practice with bots, because it loads the map in advance, and it lets me warm up my fingers before I have to play. But seriously bots are terrible. Tell them to defend a tower, and they'll run up lane into a 5 man push. Bots with a stun will auto-attack once before stunning to a fault, even when it means the entire enemy team kills them. If you're against a necrolyte, or a strong aoe team, your bots will continually feed. It's honestly super annoying. Especially if you just want to try carrying and trying items, but by the time you can fight the enemy team is just massive.

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I, too, am a non-player of this game, though I suspect my not-playing is rather advanced.

 

I've listened to all the Dota Today podcasts.  I've read the "Welcome to Dota, You Suck" on the internets.

 

I've watched a half dozen pro matches, and about as many "casts" of non-pro matches.

 

I've even watched a bit of a League of Lords game (astonishingly, it appears to be exactly the same game, played on exactly the same pitch, except with retrogamey cartoon graphics instead of the Standard Fantasy Gloom approach inherited from Warcraft 3)

 

I feel like I've soaked up some of the basics, but there are still some apparently very simple, fundamental things that I just don't understand, e.g. "what is a bottle, and why does everyone get so excited about them?",  "what's that thing that you pick up when you kill Roshan, and why does it matter?", "What is a BKB, and why does it matter?"  "Why is a 'carry' called that?"

 

The glossaries I've looked at are useless; they have maybe one in four of the abbreviations or idioms I'm trying to look up, and there's no mention of why the particular thing is important enough that people use shorthand or slang to refer to it.

 

Also, I get it that a central part of this game is solving spreadsheet problems.  Games like that aren't generally to my taste, which is fine, that's just my taste.  But where are the online, interactive-but-single-page Lords Spreadsheet, and also Items Spreadsheet, complete with keys thoroughly explaining the column headers?

 

It ought to be possible, if not easy, to be a fan of a game without playing it yourself.  Is the LOMA industry simply not interested in this audience?

 

Someone in this week's episode referred to this obliquely, saying that when asked by his (spouse?) about the game, instead of cheerfully explaining what it was about, as he usually would, his reaction was something along the lines of "I can't get into it" or "it's not worth it."

 

That's a problem.

 

There seem to be plenty of resources available for people who want to learn how to play this game; why isn't there even one video out there titled "How To Watch LOMAs"?

 

 

Having put hundreds if not thousands of hours into LOMAs, I can tell you that they would need a separate commentary track for people who didn't play the games.  The amount of information that must be conveyed, or is being conveyed visually, is incredibly difficult to exclaim without shorthand.  What is the best way to learn all the slang and shorthand in the game, as well as all the heroes intricacies and the metagame, without playing it?  I don't think there is one.  For all the effort you would need to learn how to watch dota as excellently as a player can, you might as well learn to play the damn thing.  It's more fun that way, and you'll learn by doing.  If you have specific questions, this or the channel ingame, or the giantbomb channel, or the reddit channel, or the dota subreddit, are all great places to ask.  To your queries:

 

A bottle is an item that starts with 3 charges.  Each charge, when consumed, restores an amount of hp and mana.  when the bottle is empty, it can be refilled back to 3 charges by returning it either on your hero, or on the courier, to the fountain where you spawned at the start of the game.  You can also refill it by picking up a rune (think powerups), which will store or "bottle" the rune.  In order to use bottle charges, you must first consume the rune.  At that point your bottle will have 3 charges ready for use.

 

The thing you pick up from roshan is the aegis of the immortal and it causes your hero to respawn a few seconds after death, right where they died, which consumes the item.  This first death does not count as a real death, you simply have 2 lives while you carry an aegis.  Upon its third death each game and every death thereafter, roshan also drops a Cheese which instantly restores the HP and Mana of the hero consuming it.  The cheese can also be sold for an amount of gold.

 

A BKB is a black king bar, which is an item that gives strength, damage, and a usable ability which grants magic immunity.  This prevents most spells from stunning you or targeting you with large burst damage.  THis is often used by heroes who need to channel a spell without interruption, or a hero who wants to deal lots of damage with auto attacks without being stunned or disabled.

 

A carry is called that, because they are meant to carry the team.  Initially they are weak, and must be carried through the early game.  In a late game scenario when they have many items, a carry can often destroy an entire enemy team alone if they are not dealt with properly.

 

Feel free to ask more stuff, i'm sure people would be glad to assist you in dota education!

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Every time I watch sports I am confused by the specifics, the weird cases, but I'm able to enjoy it well enough just from understanding the basics. I don't see how Dota is any different. U:

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Well, every hero is effectively HOLY SHIT DIFFERENT. In sports, while there's different positions and strategies, they all pretty much catch and throw balls. Yup, that's how every sport is to me. Now I really want to see Nascar Polo.

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Sure definitely but you still get the nice back and forth flow to the game (unless it's a stomp) and after watching a few games you start to understand what a decent play at least sorta looks like.

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@12

 

Fair enough, but if you feel a separate or supplementary commentary would be necessary for people who don't play the game*, then still: why don't such commentaries exist?  At all?

 

And thanks for the definitions to a few seemingly ubiquitous bits of terminology, but why isn't there a place where I can just go and ctrl-f to find crap like that?  How many would-be fans are going to just throw up their hands and give up, rather than go to a forum and ask a question about this apparently basic terminology, and then patiently wait to possibly maybe get a more or less cogent explanation some time within the next few days?

 

The NFL would be nowhere today if it catered solely to an audience of men who had played comptitive tackle football at the high-school level or higher.  Is the LOMA industry interested in attracting fans who don't play the games themselves?  Or not?

 

 

 

* among which would be people who do not have the (considerable) free time to invest in learning to play the game, no?

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On the improvised ways in which different heroes mesh, I recommend lifestealer infesting into a spirit breaker before he charges somewhere, and then consuming on impact. Feels great, and I often type "CRAZY TRAIN/VROOM" into all-chat before we land, for effect.

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Also, there are some casters who actually take time to explain things that are happening in pro games. Why they're doing this or that. Which items they might buy in the near future, and why. What those items do. Not all of 'em, but enough.

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Hello! For some reason I listen to this podcast even though I don't know what Dota 2 even IS, but I simply enjoy the listening experience.

I don't know what the goal of the game is. I don't know what ''lanes'' are.

I played Warcraft 3 and I'm familiar with some hero mechanics, so today (DOTATODAY), after ingesting today's podcast with my ears, I downloaded the fuck out of Dota 2.

After finishing the tutorial mission in a dreamlike haze I pressed the ''find game'' button. I was full of confidence at this point. Seriously. I knew how to buy stuff. I knew how to move my Lord. Piece of piss.

The game started and I had to pick a guy. I picked Nightstalker because he sounded and looked cool. After spawning I bought some stuff and then ran around. Nobody talked or said anything. I didn't know what to do except that I should probably murder ''creeps''. So I murdered many creeps and leveled up my Lord. I had this vague idea that I should try to ''hold'' a ''lane'', so I moved my Nightstalker to the center lane which was unoccupied. Pretty soon we came under attack but I held fast, sending back wave after wave of creeps and gaining levels fast. Suddenly, the team chat shuddered to life;

''wtf''

What? Is it something I did?

Within one minute of this message I realized that my entire team had disconnected and I was completely alone so I quit. The end.

What is this game??

If it helps, that was basically my first experience too, and I was playing with friends.

(I haven't really loaded it up since)

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First things, about Treant becoming top pick/ban material, it actually isn't the result of the last patch, which only changed leech seed.  It's been happening for a while and   finally got picked up in big tournament games.  He's been getting played a lot in IXDL for a while now (an inhouse league made by ixmike88 who is the hard support player for   Team Liquid where most of the North American pro players play) and it's actually funny to watch another league that has it's own metagame because you see how arbitrary a lot   the metagame is.  For the longest time the Eastern Dota scene refused to play wisp even after he became super popular with European teams (I think LGD.Brax said it was because they thought it was too unstable of a pick) and now he's a regular pick/ban.  

 

Pro teams generally don't pick heroes until they've seen it run pretty exensively. For the longest time the only team that would ever pick Outworld Destroyer was Orange, Quantic started first picking OD and Treant about two months ago and now both of those heroes are pick/ban material in the first 12 for Western teams. The same has happened with heroes like Clockwerk, Visage, and Kunkka. Wisp is an interesting case in that he's the one hero whose relevance hasn't crossed from West to East. There are some teams that like the hero (almost never enough to first pick it) and their presence in the TI3 East Qualifiers is why he was picked/banned so much there. Since then the hero has fallen back to it's near nonexistent status.

 

The NFL would be nowhere today if it catered solely to an audience of men who had played comptitive tackle football at the high-school level or higher.  Is the LOMA industry interested in attracting fans who don't play the games themselves?  Or not?

 

An NFL game has ample time between each play to breakdown the preceding play and even then if you watch an NFL broadcast and have no prior knowledge, you'll be about as lost as you are with Dota. It's easy to pick up the basic positions and what they generally do but there will be lots of talk of technique, route trees, coverages, blocking scheme, etc.. Learning to play Dota, even on the simplest level, entails learning to watch it as well. It doesn't make for a particularly enjoyable cast if it needs to be explained that a bottle is used to burst regen hp and mana and can be filled by the fountain or runes. NFL broadcasts don't explain that a wide reciever lines up wide of the formation and catches balls thrown by the Quarterback.

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There seem to be a lot of beginner Dota guides that I think emphasize the wrong parts of the game in the wrong order. Even Purge's 'You Suck' guide starts out by telling you what the easiest heroes are, even before it explains what a hero is or what they do.

 

I do agree that terminology should definitely be more officially supported in the game, and the language barrier between casters and the audience is really dense. But there really isn't any way to watch a high level game without having a decent/mid level understanding of the game beforehand, since there really is no visual cue that alerts progress, like in basketball (it goes in the hoop) or football (they moved to the left a bit). 

 

This issue stems from the fact that, as many people have already noted, Dota isn't an intuitive experience, and really the fun part is how complex and weird it is all the time. Like Nick/Sean said on Idle Thumbs once, saying the kills on both teams are even means absolutely NOTHING compared to everything else, so there really is no conventional score that makes the game more digestible like any sport.

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The talk about how tons and tons of game devs play Dota makes me really want some sort of Studio Rumble type thing to go down.  I would buy a ticket for that so fast.

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An NFL game has ample time between each play...

 

I don't want to belabor the NFL comparison, because it's just not a constructive discussion, and I apologize for bringing it up.

 

But for the love of Pete, why don't LoMa-casts have highlights and replays at the end of the match?  Team fights in particular would be so, so much easier to understand and appreciate when replayed in slow motion, with good analysts doing a breakdown of the action.  There might even be time to briefly remind the audience of the specifics of an ability or two.

 

Is it just a budgetary/manpower thing?  You might need an extra A/V tech or two to rewind the tape and cue up the clips or whatever is involved there, but the volunteer army of LoMa-casters must include tons of people who are willing to play a part other than "on-air talent," no?

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The production quality has been steadily been getting better, a few big events do have instant replay type stuff going on now, though It think it's only Chinese ones so far.  With things like BTS setting up their own studio in LA and the GD Studio getting a lot more heavily involved with people like Bruno and Draskl there now I'd imagine things will keep getting better, and I imagine TI3 coverage will have a lot going on behind the scenes.  It's still in progress though, you have to keep in mind that for a while TobiWan was the only person actually doing Dota casting for a living and a person like Purge was just a kid casting from his bedroom in Michigan.  Also the way casting works is that the people casting it just join a spectator slot in the game and are just "playing" in the game with the other players and just stream the same way players stream their matchmaking games.  This means that for the most part there's just the casters (who many times aren't even in the same room when it's a host and a pro-player co-casting) and not much else going on behind the scenes both in terms of people and equipment.  So yeah, for now it's a budget and man-power limitation, but the game is growing a lot (and it is technically still in beta).

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