I’ve never been into MOBAs, which are “multiplayer online battle arenas” or, to put it in less confusing terms, PVP games where NPCs also attack you. I love the idea, as it creates a much more dynamic experience and allows for a more team based focus, but the implementation has always been off. Most notably, League of Legends used a free to play model in which the best characters cost money to unlock, and your account status (which could also be boosted with money) gave you bonuses, leading to the birth of the term “pay to win” to describe this style of free to play. Understandably, DOTA2 was a hard sell for me. It’s free to play, provides no single player experience, and is a MOBA … three things I really don’t care for together as one, like Neapolitan ice-cream without the chocolate.
The tutorials were painful, and as I learned the basic concepts of the game I became less and less interested. Monsters spawn on your side of the map and move towards the other guy’s side of the map with the goal of destroying towers. You kill them, gain XP, gain treasure, and use the treasure to get loot, while engaging the other players in PVP at any point. There is a big monster in the center and the team that kills him gets something cool. The tutorials have done nothing to get me hooked, and very little to even keep me online. Still, the game is too big (with 6 million unique users in its first month) for someone like me to ignore, so I power on. More tutorials, games with bots, and now my first game online with people …
And it sucked. It didn’t really appeal to me more than any other style of PVP. I didn’t understand what was going on, and I didn’t feel I was any closer to that understanding after playing a game. People were yelling about things like wards and denying, which seemed extremely important but were not covered in the tutorials. I quit for a few days, only coming back because I’m a video game guy and damn it I’m going to play this big, popular video game for no other reason than being able to talk intelligently about it. First I took some time to read up on the characters and strategies, and this is when things got interesting.
Where most MOBAs (or PVP in general) focus on rock / paper / scissors style game play, DOTA has 10 unique roles permuted among 102 characters and it’s done well. An initializer / jungler / nuker feels familiar to a nuker / jungler / line support but they play very differently. More importantly, the way your team of 5 is set up drastically changes the flow of the game, while the key concept remains in place. At its core, DOTA is a game about getting your “carry” (one of the ten roles) as powerful as possible as quickly as possible and then having them “carry” the team to victory. Depending on your team set up, you might do this by actively pressing into the team’s territory with the carry close by, supporting your carry with escape abilities and ganking other players, or perhaps even turtling your own side of your map so the carry can kill NPCs without having to worry about the other team. For each play style, there is a counter style you need to adapt to in order to play, leading to an extremely rich and ever changing experience. Even better, many of the characters play exceptionally well to one strategy but not to others. A good DOTA player is not someone who has mastered one character, but someone who knows the right character to play based on his allies and enemies, and can play all of them well.
So that’s the good, but what about all that bad? It’s still free to play after all, which means rude people with no investment who don’t care if they are banned and play to win. Turns out that thanks to Steam, this isn’t the case. First, match-making uses your Steam account to put you with people who have Steam accounts about as old as yours, so the brand new “throw away” accounts play together, and you don’t see them in the wild very often. A rating system adds another level, where people who are rated as “friendly” or “forgiving” are not only matched with each other but given priority in the queue. If you are a jerk, you’ll wait 10 minutes between matches while the system finds other jerks to pair you with, but if you are friendly, you only wait a minute or two before being placed with other friendly people. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. Most importantly, the game uses socialist free to play and profit by distribution, big words that just mean there is not a single item you can buy (or earn for that matter) that effects your game play in any way. Everyone is on an equal playing field.
So it’s free, it’s friendly, it’s fun, and I’m playing it. What more could you want? Friend me on Steam right here and start enjoying this fantastic game.
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