Dota 2 Discussion (~Boston Majors & Road to TI7~)

[Inspectah]

What is this scan faggotry?

 

[Jasede]

Great final.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Happy to see Alchemist fags shut down, but great quality series overall. Jerax is a stellar player.

 

[dumdum]

international battlepass is out: http://www.dota2.com/international/battlepass
looks like there's no srping battlepass

 

[Great Deceiver]

I can't help but think Dota 2 development now comprises 5 people at the most, clocking in a couple of hours a week and thinking of Scaleform bullshit to put in the game every 3 months. It's depressing, really. All this item/quest bullshit makes the game so much worse.

 

[Saark]

I gotta ask: How exactly is the game itself getting any better/worse when they release a compendium/battlepass? There's been a huge patch 3 weeks ago, what else do you expect at this point in time? I'm not saying the game is perfect or anything, I'm just curious what you believe is worse now compared to, say, a week ago.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Because compendiums mean quests, and those introduce a secondary objective to the game that many times is counterproductive to the main objective: winning. You'd be surprised at the amount of spergs and clueless idiots who only play because they have some prompt on the screen telling them what to do.

Last time this quest bullshit hit, I had Antimages on my team building Radiances.

Not to mention the godawful quality of items and how heroes are barely recognizable anymore. Enchantress shooting rainbows from her spear? A new Chronosphere effect that makes it nearly impossible to see heroes inside it? Dota is a game about identifiable things - that's why they took out the aura graphical effects originally, because it polluted the screen too much. Fast forward 5 years, that was nothing compared to the bullshit that goes on now.

Yeah, I think it makes the game objectively, 100% worse. From a business perspective, obviously not, but I'm not a Valve shareholder. Fuck items up the ass.

 

[Saark]

So basically you're complaining about retards being retards (they'd be retards without quests too you know), a bugged animation and what heroes exactly are "barely recognizable" due to items? I've heard all sorts of bullshit about "skywrath looking like legion", "crystal maiden with black hair looks like mirana" or "is that omni or dragon knight?" and let's not forget the 'pets looking like couriers' crybabies. Guess what, none of those really matter unless you're wearing +15 diopter prescription glasses or are really just blind alltogether. The ench impetus is stupid though, I'll give you that.
I also quite enjoy all those people complaining about the new spring terrain being "pay to win". While there is a double standard at work here with 'banning' mods that basically did a similar thing the new terrain does, there is literally no advantage to using or not using it - unless you're trash at the game and play against people who are equally as bad, everyone knows how/where they can juke anyway. Valve consistently doesn't really give a fuck about people who either don't want to put in the effort to get better at the game or are unable to do so due to time-restrictions or simply being retarded - and I'm quite thankful for that because it means I can enjoy the game without it being ruined by people who really have no clue what they're talking about. Is it an elitist way to look at things? Most certainly, but things aren't gonna change so you either embrace it and find teammates that won't ruin your games, or embrace the fact that retards are always gonna be retarded irregardless of whether they have some dumb quest to finish or just feel like skadi would be a great first item after brown boots on this carry omniknight. Ideally you have a couple of friends that you can queue with so shit like that doesn't happen, I play solo queue very often and tuning out shitty games like that is really the only way to not lose your sanity when playing by yourself. None of that has anything to do with items or quests though. It's just the way DotA or any other aRTS has been since their inception.

 

[Great Deceiver]

It's not about retards being retards - it's about giving incentives to retards for being retards. I never expect anything from your regular pub player, but having a carrot dangling on a stick as a side goal is a detriment to the simple objective of winning the game, plain and simple. I'm sorry if you can't understand this simple concept. I'm saying that the game is objectively worse when people have other things in mind than winning; that's not to say that everyone has winning in mind all the time, but having sidegoals incentivized and sanctioned is a bad thing.

Second, I'm not blaming items for the bad quality of play - that's a strawman argument and entirely your construction. I do think it's amusing that you're saying everyone knows 100% of the juke paths on the map, and that being able to see them clearly through an item does not constitute a definitive advantage. I certainly don't know all the juke paths and in the heat of the moment it's especially hard to have clarity, and I have played over 6000 hours of Dota 2.

I do think most Dota players are shit and even my real life friends who I play with are shit, that's not a problem. It's incentivizing shitty play that's the issue.

 

[SerratedBiz]

What the fuck went wrong with Dota 2 streams in general? I barely see them reaching 30k concurrent viewers these days, they used to be pretty good about staying in the 70k even without any tournament streams going on. Have the latest updates really fucked up things that badly?

 

[you know what time it is]

Not too many pros are streaming nowadays (and some of them went to other platforms afaik), besides shit just got old. There's no new content, every now and then there's a patch that shuffles things up balance wise, but that's about it. Vast majority of modes (outside of AP) are either bugged or underdeveloped. And they can't even complete the original dota 1 hero roster for like what, 3 years now? Deceiver was right in a sense that it feels like only a couple of people are working on it.

 

[Jasede]

You say "new content" as if new content were a good thing for this kind of game...

 

[Mr. Pink]

over the years, my impression of valve has changed. I'm starting to suspect that they are seriously incompetent, or have terrible management. Everything valve has done in the last 10 years has been half baked and unfinished. Just right click steam to see all the failures:

>Store
the only thing that works
>Library
strangely barebones for a page that you'll spend 95% of your time on
>Community
abandoned, nothing new since the steam revamp 8 years ago. Group chats still awful, netsplits and dropped messages are routine, especially on mobile
>friend activity
half assed facebook feed that nobody uses
>music player
unfinished, horrible, requires you to have two windows open to use it, no way to search by name or artist, only plays mp3s
>screenshots
slower and more cumbersome than gyazo/puush/every other screencap software. no auto upload
>servers
lol
>big picture
lol
>steamVR
dont even show this to me before i get a VR set



got pretty off topic, but yeah. valve is like this for everything they do, dota included

 

[Ninjerk]

What the fuck went wrong with Dota 2 streams in general? I barely see them reaching 30k concurrent viewers these days, they used to be pretty good about staying in the 70k even without any tournament streams going on. Have the latest updates really fucked up things that badly?

Doesn't help when your biggest streamers don't consistently stream. Sing sing bailed for what seemed like forever.

 

[Mr. Pink]

 

[you know what time it is]

You say "new content" as if new content were a good thing for this kind of game...

It is? Content is a broad term, it doesn't mean new heroes or anything that can upset the 'balance' (lets pretend for a moment that there is one). New modes and fixing/finishing old ones would be nice. A proper support (PROPER) for mod making so custom games could thrive and so on.

 

[Jasede]

I dunno, they already have all these custom game mods that are relatively popular. And do people really care that much about 'new modes'? It'll always be about the classical map for the vast majority. Seems like a waste of effort.

Hell, I saw a Mario Kart custom game! Seems like there's already a lot.

 

[Saark]

It's not about retards being retards - it's about giving incentives to retards for being retards. I never expect anything from your regular pub player, but having a carrot dangling on a stick as a side goal is a detriment to the simple objective of winning the game, plain and simple. I'm sorry if you can't understand this simple concept. I'm saying that the game is objectively worse when people have other things in mind than winning; that's not to say that everyone has winning in mind all the time, but having sidegoals incentivized and sanctioned is a bad thing.

That is something that almost exclusively happens in lower brackets though, at least I haven't seen a single stupid itemchoice on a hero that doesn't fit the bill (yet, it will inevitably happen obviously) thanks to quests. I do however see a lot of retarded item decision every single day on almost every core. The amount of games I lost because people didn't get a bkb instead of whatever shitty luxury item they got instead probably amounts to 30-40% of the losses. Same goes for the opponent obviously, so in the end it evens out when it comes to the winratio. Same goes for people losing games because they did a stupid challenge, and since you don't do it you have a 4/9 chance that the retard is on your side, 5/9 that he's on the opponents side so your MMR should increase even more!
I do agree that having these quests around may influence people to do stuff they otherwise wouldn't, but as I mentioned earlier Valve doesn't really care for the solo-player experience. It's basically a tradeoff between not having this stuff in game at all, disabling quests to be doable in ranked games or doing it the way it is now. I personally prefer number 3.

Second, I'm not blaming items for the bad quality of play - that's a strawman argument and entirely your construction. I do think it's amusing that you're saying everyone knows 100% of the juke paths on the map, and that being able to see them clearly through an item does not constitute a definitive advantage. I certainly don't know all the juke paths and in the heat of the moment it's especially hard to have clarity, and I have played over 6000 hours of Dota 2.

You misunderstood me, I'm not saying everyone knows them but everyone who actually cares about winning does (or rather: should) because it's just one of the easier things to learn. So what exactly is the problem with the new terrain then? Either you already know all this stuff and it doesn't impact you, or you can use the terrain and improve your knowledge of the game. These juke-paths exist on the normal map though so people complaining about not being able to utilize the new terrain to "improve" is just them being lazy. When they introduce new juke-spots I start up a lobby and test them out, takes 5 minutes of my time every major patch (so basically every 4 months). I would imagine a lot of people that complain about the new terrain being "pay to win" would be too lazy to do the same, and yet they argue that their opponents have an advantage thanks to the terrain?

I do think most Dota players are shit and even my real life friends who I play with are shit, that's not a problem. It's incentivizing shitty play that's the issue.

I partly agree. There will always be incentives for people to do stuff they otherwise wouldn't. A new immortal for techies had them in basically every other game for the first week or so, which was a time I decided not to even start up dota since I couldn't stomach it. A new amazing item for some random hero saw them have a rise in pickrate even when the hero itself was shit all around or simply didn't fit the draft and yet people lastpicked them. While they're certainly less "in your face" like the quest system, I do think that drawing a line somewhere in between would upset a lot of people either way and is thus hard to accomplish.

I do feel like Valve could've drastically improved the quest system by disabling it in the new seasonal ranked mode, which would open up a whole new group of complainants that feel that they need to pay to not have quests in their game but would enable a very win-oriented type of queue, and removing item-based quests entirely. Quests like "stun for x amounts of seconds", "get roshan before minute x", "gank x people in their own jungle" etc. are pretty great because unless you want to spam the quest 10 times before eventually finishing it you have to think about which heroes/drafts can accomplish these goals efficiently, thus improving your overall game knowledge. Just yesterday I had three different friends of mine ask what hero I'd suggest for a couple of these challenges because they could only think of the most obvious ones.

 

[Khorne]

Melee range extended..

Team vlads "need wards" but never buy any, blight stone > courier, echo sabre > bkb etc etc..

 

[Saark]

Played a bunch of games in the new seasonal ranked queue, I have yet to have a game where people were flaming each other or were retarded when it came to picks/itemchoices etc.. Haven't lost a game yet so maybe thats why noone has been a toxic shithead already but a couple of friends of mine also noticed a significant difference between the seasonal ranked and the "old" ranked. Been a while since I actually had fun playing solo-queue, having a new calibration actually seems to bring out the "best" in people. Hopefully this attitude will survive the calibration, I expect people who are dissatisfied with their seasonal MMR to be the same old retards they were before the compendium.

 

[you know what time it is]

Yeah well, exactly the opposite for me. Played mostly with a friend tho, only one solo but even that sucked, our carry was retarded (pa that went deso AND basher before BKB against invoker / 2 stuns), whilst I was shitting all over jungling sven (killed him 3 times, stole some last hits and such, he had nothing but PT at 16 minutes) and ganking all over the place as riki. I will never understand why people that insist on picking carries (easiest role in the game) SUCK SO FUCKING MUCH AT DOING IT. Can't last hit, can't move properly, 0 map awareness, 0 game awareness in a sense that they can't build accordingly to the game/pick and most of all they can't fucking take a hint and/or criticism.

The games with a friend were AWFUL, we lost every single one of them (seriously) either due to shitty picks or as mentioned above, incredibly shitty item builds... Though in a few of them teammates just sucked, i.e. dude picks pudge (last pick) says 'i don't give a fuck, my mmr is 5k but i'm being paired with you 3ks' (i'm 5k), misses most hooks, whines about lost lanes, can't even answer the question as to why he plays IT ranked if his 'main' mmr is 5k and that's just a tip of the iceberg.

I didn't play dota for a while now and I feel like i'm going to drop it altogether, incredibly frustrating experience, for real.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I would say that most of my games are a complete waste of time at this point. There's always room for personal growth (diminishing returns the more time you put into the game and I'm well over the line) but the negatives are too overwhelming the majority of the time, and frankly it's not worth the trouble.

I play once a week with 2 other real life friends and we have a laugh together, but that's it. My current opinion of Dota is that it's the best game I've ever played when it works, but it's one of the worst when it doesn't - and it's too often that it doesn't work.

 

[Khorne]

There's ups and downs, sometimes it works out fine, for example your alchemist stacked 8 camps, your mid camped all the runes and everyone packed dust.
Though most of the time in unranked you get a pudge with high ping, 3x junglers and someone whining about mmr and throwing for stupid reasons like "our carry 200h played gg" or similar.
For the most part it sucks because you often get parties who decide to feed and throw game, match quality was far better when there was option to ban parties.
TBH there's plenty of other questionable design decisions, see I used to play a lot when they made new Leoric with mortal strike, removed it, and then just renamed and re-skinned the old Leoric with no mortal strike.
Or how they made the new interface less functional than the old interface, by injecting ads into it instead of improving the functions.
And the mods that used to work and got popular but then override was banned, while at the same time some of these mods were made into paid features, like terrain and river of blood.
Aside from all that, I think the main problem with the game is sellers, but it's specific to ranked mmr and I don't play ranked, thing about ladders is the higher you climb the harder you fall..

 

[Saark]

Ranked sucks because the MMR system DotA has decided to adopt sucks for the way the game is played. It's surprisingly similar to the one WoW had back in TBC, where it worked simply because people played with the same people every game and good teams had close to 100% winrate until they hit the MMR they were "supposed" to be in. HoN had a great system because even when it matched people with a huge difference in MMR together it calculated the gain/loss of MMR on an individual basis depending on the players MMR and the opposing teams average MMR. In DotA you have 8k MMR players getting matched with 4k ones and yet they both gain the same amount of MMR when they win or lose the same amount when they lose.
I always preferred the model HoN and Bloodline Champions used because it catapulted you into whatever bracket "you belonged" to rather quickly and once you were there you usually stayed there and had little chance of climbing up or falling down unless you deserved to do so. It felt good not to lose a huge chunk of my rating when I played back then because even when both teams had an average of 1800 I didnt lose/gain much by playing in it with 1900+. It made it really hard to climb up further, but also hard to fall unless I consistently sucked harder than usual. In DotA I win/lose games even though I am doing great and am 1k MMR above the average of the game, and yet I win/lose the same amount of rating by beating people who are 'objectively' worse at the game? That just doesn't make sense to me. And the people who are outclassed by their opponents/teammates because they are "only" 4k lose the same amount of MMR when they clearly have a slim chance to win based on the difference between their individial MMR and the average MMR of the game, which makes even less sense.

 

[you know what time it is]

Yeah HoN rating system and stats were very good.