Nine out of ten games of DOTA 2 (Hereafter: DOTA) are kind of insubstantial. This is because five of these nine are 'curb stomps' - i.e. your team or the other team simply wins by skill on one part or lack of skill on the other - and it's all over relatively quickly. The other four are less simple - it usually turns into back-and-forth until one big fuckup, then, over.
One in ten games of DOTA - again, approximately - is a beast.
I'm writing this because I just finished a 72-minute (where the average is 40-to-60) game, which was kind of odd, and kind of good, all in one.
Usually, there's kind of a feel to the flow of the game - which I may or may not have written about in the last column - where there will be a tipping point, a sudden shift where one team gains an advantage or gets a bit lucky and presses a bit. This means they will get more gold and experience, etc, and will generally have an easier time of it.
I just spent the first forty or so minutes of the last game getting stepped on.
Seriously.
Bounced around the map, getting the shit kicked out of me, trying to hold our ground against a team with slightly more co-ordination and slightly more early-game advantages than us.
It was getting really disheartening, by this point. There comes a time in a losing team where there's usually a cavalcade of blame - i.e. it has to be someone's fault, so start piling on them. We had someone on our team - someone who's a 'friend' of mine, on Steam - who wasn't having the bestest day every, playing with a character picked for them that they weren't fond of, getting kicked in the face a lot, that sort of thing. So they became kind of the whipping boy for a while, which wasn't fun.
And then, suddenly - or, more accurately, slowly then suddenly - I found myself doing a little bit better. Getting the gold I needed, getting decent items, and, bizarrely, ending up being the highest level on my team through no conscious effort.
Maybe because of this - I don't know, but hopefully - my team started to pick things up, and work at it, and everything slowly, slowly, slowly started to turn around.
We won after 72 minutes, forty of which was having our ass kicked all the way back to the base line, and it was one of those one in ten games that feels glorious.
Plus, playing as the Spectre meant you could irritate the shit out of anyone you wanted every minute and a half, so, hey, that's fun too.
Sunday 8 June 2014
Tuesday 22 April 2014
There's a distant light (#distant light#) / A forest fire burning everything in sight
Let's talk about DOTA 2 (hereafter, pedantry fans, DOTA) a bit more.
Let's talk about a couple of the Heroes - the characters you can choose as your avatar in the fightin' world - a bit more. But mostly, let's talk about the benefits of knowing the people you play with.
Timbersaw is a - and I may be wrong here, but anyway - purple goblin in a mechanised suit with a pathological hatred of plant life brought on by, apparently, trees invading his home and killing everyone there. I'm not making this up; check the link if you think I'm the insane one.
Timbersaw is very good at hitting things and, with a bit of play and a bit of skill, good at flinging himself around the map, either fucking up what's between him and a tree or getting out of trouble quicksmart.
My friend played Timbersaw for the first time this afternoon, and with the use of some guides and a couple of games' worth of experience, had mastered him by this evening. (He's like that.)
Because of this, we ended up in a Ranked Match - i.e. one where winning or losing affects a rating of how good you apparently are - with three other players, who chose characters which, with the right amount of skill (and maybe a little luck) are stone killers in their own right.
Io is a wispy-blue ball of light. (He is also, apparently, "A fundamental of the universe". Again, read the bio if you think I've gone mad.)
Io is a support hero. He has abilities tailored to healing allies and moving around the map with a quickness, along with an offensive spell handy for creep (soldier) control or, with skill, hitting enemy heroes.
I chose Io because I thought, hey, support, why not. Our team was all kinds of tanky - i.e. heroes with high health and damage - so a support might work out well.
I also chose Io because it's kind of, to be honest, fun. You can fling yourself around the map and help people out if you feel like it, and maybe cause some damage here and there - and if you survive long enough, you become a force to be reckoned with.
Eventually.
I ended up trying to support, getting my ass handed to me, and wandering off to basically do my own thing for a while to try to build up strength. I walked the earth, like Caine in Kung Fu, wandering around the jungles, killing neutral creeps (little camps of creatures) and making gold and buying items, raising my strength, dreaming of one day being useful to my team.
My team which, fact fans, basically won the game without me. While I was farming to try and get useful, they went and killed the enemies, and worked their way into the base, and basically just won.
Every now and then, I can sense what my friend is thinking.
This time, I could sense he was thinking "Will you just fucking help". By this point the game was knocking on an hour in play time, which is kind of silly. They were holding our team back, and I was just floating around the map, doing my thing, because whenever I tried to help - seriously, whenever - I got badly, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked up.
So this is dedicated to the patience of my Timbersaw-playing friend, for putting up with my inability to play support properly.
Let's talk about a couple of the Heroes - the characters you can choose as your avatar in the fightin' world - a bit more. But mostly, let's talk about the benefits of knowing the people you play with.
Timbersaw is a - and I may be wrong here, but anyway - purple goblin in a mechanised suit with a pathological hatred of plant life brought on by, apparently, trees invading his home and killing everyone there. I'm not making this up; check the link if you think I'm the insane one.
Timbersaw is very good at hitting things and, with a bit of play and a bit of skill, good at flinging himself around the map, either fucking up what's between him and a tree or getting out of trouble quicksmart.
My friend played Timbersaw for the first time this afternoon, and with the use of some guides and a couple of games' worth of experience, had mastered him by this evening. (He's like that.)
Because of this, we ended up in a Ranked Match - i.e. one where winning or losing affects a rating of how good you apparently are - with three other players, who chose characters which, with the right amount of skill (and maybe a little luck) are stone killers in their own right.
Io is a wispy-blue ball of light. (He is also, apparently, "A fundamental of the universe". Again, read the bio if you think I've gone mad.)
Io is a support hero. He has abilities tailored to healing allies and moving around the map with a quickness, along with an offensive spell handy for creep (soldier) control or, with skill, hitting enemy heroes.
I chose Io because I thought, hey, support, why not. Our team was all kinds of tanky - i.e. heroes with high health and damage - so a support might work out well.
I also chose Io because it's kind of, to be honest, fun. You can fling yourself around the map and help people out if you feel like it, and maybe cause some damage here and there - and if you survive long enough, you become a force to be reckoned with.
Eventually.
I ended up trying to support, getting my ass handed to me, and wandering off to basically do my own thing for a while to try to build up strength. I walked the earth, like Caine in Kung Fu, wandering around the jungles, killing neutral creeps (little camps of creatures) and making gold and buying items, raising my strength, dreaming of one day being useful to my team.
My team which, fact fans, basically won the game without me. While I was farming to try and get useful, they went and killed the enemies, and worked their way into the base, and basically just won.
Every now and then, I can sense what my friend is thinking.
This time, I could sense he was thinking "Will you just fucking help". By this point the game was knocking on an hour in play time, which is kind of silly. They were holding our team back, and I was just floating around the map, doing my thing, because whenever I tried to help - seriously, whenever - I got badly, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked up.
So this is dedicated to the patience of my Timbersaw-playing friend, for putting up with my inability to play support properly.
RIKI NOOB HERO LOL
I've been playing way too much DOTA 2 recently.
Way, way too much.
There comes a point in games for me where I've learnt the rules back-to-front, and can kind of almost see the workings going on behind the game engine, and can kind of predict things. This manifests itself as a very rigid structural thinking, i.e. "To win, I have to go from this step to this step to this step and if anything gets in the way I'll lose".
I first noticed this with the Civilization series. In III and IV there was this massively specific combination of world wonders to build, along with needing various resources and city-building spots and if they weren't perfect - perfect - then I had may as well give up playing there and then. In V this manifested similarly, but there was also the problem of - after a certain number of hours of aggregate gameplay - reaching a certain point and just quitting because, well, why continue?
DOTA is slightly different. And it intrigues me, not just because someone in one game described it as "the most toxic game on the internet".
Don't get me wrong. It fucking is. It's crazy on there. I can only imagine what League of Legends is like, and I'll go on imagining, because DOTA is all the toxicity I can take at the moment, thank you very much, kind sir.
It's what I have tagged in my head as Left 4 Dead symptom, although it's probably been noticeable in other games other time, and it comes from putting a group of people together and expecting them to work in harmony or unison.
Or, in the case of DOTA, in Russian.
But anyway.
So you have five people on your team, who you will never meet, or even likely speak to, again. And you have a simple goal; level up, get money, break the enemy Towers and then raze their Ancient across three lanes. In each lane, waves of disposable 'creeps' - little soldiers, mostly melee fighters but also some ranged - spawn at regular intervals and fight to the death, thereby highlighting the inherent futility of war, or somesuch. Enemy creeps dying near you means experience, experience means levels and new skills, etcetera, because if you've played any kind of RPG you know the dance steps for that one. Getting the last hit on creeps gets you cash, which buys you items, which help you in various ways.
Then there's the opposing team who, naturally, you have to try to kill at every opportunity.
And this is where I've started to see the scratching below the surface, because there are times when, no matter what you do, it will all start to go horribly wrong. It can be as simple as someone getting killed once or twice too early in the game, which leads to someone else having a bit of extra cash to upgrade their items, which makes them a little better, and then it all snowballs from there somewhat.
And then people start complaining like you wouldn't believe.
Die too early or accidentally? NOOB FEEDER.
Don't get the kill in when you should? NUB HERO.
Run off instead of suicidally attacking every hero in their team while your team slumbers in the grave, ready to respawn?
NOOB NOOB NOOB.
Maybe one in ten matches is an actual contest of skill between equally-balanced teams, that will go more than forty minutes and won't end in tears, recriminations and sweet, sweet name-calling.
And yet it's addictive. Because that flow of the game - the way you can sense how things are going - is powerful, in a way, because you want to try to change it, to make the Great Energy Magnet flow your way, and your team's way.
And then one of your team throws themselves suicidally towards the enemy repeatedly, giving them more experience and points, because they're obviously a FILTHY NOOB CASUAL, and...
Fun, though. Addictive, too. But still...
Way, way too much.
There comes a point in games for me where I've learnt the rules back-to-front, and can kind of almost see the workings going on behind the game engine, and can kind of predict things. This manifests itself as a very rigid structural thinking, i.e. "To win, I have to go from this step to this step to this step and if anything gets in the way I'll lose".
I first noticed this with the Civilization series. In III and IV there was this massively specific combination of world wonders to build, along with needing various resources and city-building spots and if they weren't perfect - perfect - then I had may as well give up playing there and then. In V this manifested similarly, but there was also the problem of - after a certain number of hours of aggregate gameplay - reaching a certain point and just quitting because, well, why continue?
DOTA is slightly different. And it intrigues me, not just because someone in one game described it as "the most toxic game on the internet".
Don't get me wrong. It fucking is. It's crazy on there. I can only imagine what League of Legends is like, and I'll go on imagining, because DOTA is all the toxicity I can take at the moment, thank you very much, kind sir.
It's what I have tagged in my head as Left 4 Dead symptom, although it's probably been noticeable in other games other time, and it comes from putting a group of people together and expecting them to work in harmony or unison.
Or, in the case of DOTA, in Russian.
But anyway.
So you have five people on your team, who you will never meet, or even likely speak to, again. And you have a simple goal; level up, get money, break the enemy Towers and then raze their Ancient across three lanes. In each lane, waves of disposable 'creeps' - little soldiers, mostly melee fighters but also some ranged - spawn at regular intervals and fight to the death, thereby highlighting the inherent futility of war, or somesuch. Enemy creeps dying near you means experience, experience means levels and new skills, etcetera, because if you've played any kind of RPG you know the dance steps for that one. Getting the last hit on creeps gets you cash, which buys you items, which help you in various ways.
Then there's the opposing team who, naturally, you have to try to kill at every opportunity.
And this is where I've started to see the scratching below the surface, because there are times when, no matter what you do, it will all start to go horribly wrong. It can be as simple as someone getting killed once or twice too early in the game, which leads to someone else having a bit of extra cash to upgrade their items, which makes them a little better, and then it all snowballs from there somewhat.
And then people start complaining like you wouldn't believe.
Die too early or accidentally? NOOB FEEDER.
Don't get the kill in when you should? NUB HERO.
Run off instead of suicidally attacking every hero in their team while your team slumbers in the grave, ready to respawn?
NOOB NOOB NOOB.
Maybe one in ten matches is an actual contest of skill between equally-balanced teams, that will go more than forty minutes and won't end in tears, recriminations and sweet, sweet name-calling.
And yet it's addictive. Because that flow of the game - the way you can sense how things are going - is powerful, in a way, because you want to try to change it, to make the Great Energy Magnet flow your way, and your team's way.
And then one of your team throws themselves suicidally towards the enemy repeatedly, giving them more experience and points, because they're obviously a FILTHY NOOB CASUAL, and...
Fun, though. Addictive, too. But still...
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