Hello hello, welcome to the patch update number 25! This week’s patch brings many interesting cool new features! First of all, the new HUD, the new Items icons and new Courier UI Although it is a quite big update, sadly no heroes are included this week.

So, this week’s main features are:

• Brand new HUD!
• Item Icons have been redesigned.
• New Courier UI added.
• Added a new DOTA 2 Replay Parsing Tool.
• New appearance for Lion.
• New Town Portal effect.
• Some heroes will now call out to allies they encounter in the field during the early phases of a game. (lol)
• Now let’s see all the Main Build Patch Notes in detail:

Full Changelog

Click

The DOTA 2 Test Build is here. With it come dreams of pain awake… Bane is in the house!

Hello everyone, here is the 17th and delayed patch update of this week. It brings the infamous DOTA 2 Test Build and Atropos, the Bane Elemental now simply known as Bane.

So, this week’s main features are:

• DOTA 2 Test Build added to Steam under Library.
• Added Atropos, the Bane Elemental (Bane) to the game.

Now let’s see all the Patch Notes in detail:

After more than a year hiatus I am gladly announcing that the World DotA Council is finally back. That said we have a lot of interesting stuff for you guys if you read on.

Of course we are planning to organize tournaments once again, but another important task in our list is providing a series of quality articles about our belowed game and making interesting interviews just like the ones for the European DotA Championship.

This means we are searching for staff members for the following tasks:

- tournament organizer

- match admin

- news writer

We will open up new opportunities in the future as our site grows.

WDC-Online has several players in the current beta cycle of DotA 2 and we are open for questions regarding the game and we will try to give as much feedback as possible.

We also plan to give away some DotA 2 beta keys for the tournament and mini-cup winners as well as for other active members on our site. Visit us daily and be one of the DotA 2 players!

Beast_Pete

WDC Owner

The Finals were played between
Psyduck1337 and Impact
You can watch the streams on WTV:

Game #1 – Stream
Game #2 – Stream

Game 1 Draft:
Psyduck1337 vs Impact

Bans: Invoker | Batrider | Rubick | Phoenix | Lanaya | Shadow Daemon | Lich | Puck
Picks: Windrunner | Ancient Apparition & Death Prophet | Obsidian Destroyer
Final heroes: Windrunner vs Ancient Apparition

Game #1 Stream

Game 2 Draft:
Impact vs Psyduck1337

Bans: Batrider | Invoker | Puck | Shadow Daemon | Windrunner | Lanaya | Pugna | Broodmother
Picks: Rubick | Phoenix & Lich | Krobelus
Final heroes: Krobelus vs Lich

Game #2 – Stream

Congratulations to Psyduck1337! You are one of the lucky ones who is playing DotA 2 now.

Special thanks to the DLG staff member Turpin, who helped me out during the whole event and made sure everything is working correctly.

Beast_Pete
WDC-Online
2011.10.22.

WDC-Online and Dotalicious-Gaming proudly present their first collaboration, the European DotA Championship 1v1 Mini-Cup Season I. This is the first time that we are organizing our event on the DLG Client which is currently one of the most popular WC3 DotA clients with an enthusiastic and experienced staff of DotA players. A DotA 2 beta key is our prize!

After a long-long time the World DotA Council comes back with a blast. All the DotA players are looking forward to the stand-alone version’s release and to finally playing the game. You don’t have to wait until that time if you are good enough in what you like!

The winner of the first EDC 1v1 Mini-Cup will be awarded a DotA 2 key, a special beta access to the game and to its all currently implemented contents. Be the first of your friends to play Valve’s upcoming game or join your friends on Steam who are already amongst the lucky ones.

You can find the rules on the forums.

This event is held this Saturday 22nd Oct.
The first round starts at 12:30 CET in the afternoon. Please join our IRC channel at least 10 minutes before the first round: #WDC-Online @ quakenet

Round 1: 12:30 – 13:00 CET – 30 minutes – 8 matches starting every 5 minutes
Round 2: 13:00 – 12:30 CET – 30 minutes
Round 3: 13:30 – 14:00 CET – 30 minutes
Round 4: 14:00 – 14:30 CET – 30 minutes
Round 5: 14:30 – 15:00 CET – 30 minutes
Round 6: 15:05 – 15:45 CET – 30 minutes
Round 7: 15:45 – 17:15 CET – 90 minutes

The Semi-Finals and Grand Finals will be broadcasted over WTV.

Match Winner: The player who collects 5 points first or the player with more points until the 20th minute or if the opponent surrenders.

Be fast as there’s a maximum of 128 spots to be filled up. We await all the applications to the cup!
Sign-up in the forums: LINK.

First register on DLG! You must have a DLG account in order to be able to sign-up to the EDC 1v1 Mini-Cup. For instructions on how to register and play on DLG, visit the following link! Don’t forget that you need to play one game on DLG before you can take part of the tournament in order to test wether everything is okay with your computer and connection.

Only European rezident players may participate in this tournament. We will hold WDC Mini-Cups in other continents as well as a compensation. The sign-ups are open until 21st October 23:59 pm or until the 128th player signed up.

Have fun!

Beast_Pete
WDC-Online
2011.10.18.

The Brackets of the EDC 2v2 Mini-Cup Series #1 is up. Please check it on the full article.

Finals: sTurtle versus F|five

The epic 3 games between the Romanian and Greek pro laners ended with a blast. You can download the finals here. The full replay package will be uploaded tomorrow.

Brackets will be updated during the course of tournament.

The mini-cup is over and it finished with an amazing finals with 3 games of interesting picks and combo usage. If you wish to watch only the finals you can download them here:
sTurtle vs F|five

The whole replay package can be downloaded here:
EDC 2v2 Mini-Cup Replays

Share your opinion on the forums!

Special thanks to Boby, MY.ShaeRaInE and n1ce0ne for their help during the tournament. Without you I wouldn’t have been able to solo organize it. Really! Thank You!

I would also like to thank all DotA portals that spread the word about the cup and got more teams to sign-up.

Beast_Pete

We are proud to announce our next event, the first in line of the EDC 2v2 Mini-Cup Series. We have had numerous requests by the fans of our tournaments that we organize some less serious events as well, so we decided to give the opportunity of having a fast paced mini-cup for just one day, but for a whole day. Details are below…

The games will be played on 16th October (Saturday) from 10:00 am till 1:00 am 17th October, which means the whole event lasts for 15 hours only. You can see the schedule below:

Round 1: 10:00 – 12:00 CET
Round 2: 12:00 – 14:00 CET
Round 3: 14:00 – 16:00 CET
Round 4: 16:00 – 18:00 CET
Round 5: 18:00 – 20:00 CET
Round 6: 20:00 – 22:00 CET
Round 7: 22:00 – 01:00 CET

Each team must have at least 2 players and may have an additional player as a substitute. You can sign up on our forums in this subforum. If you wish to know what the proper form of the sign-ups is then please take a look at this thread. The cup’s rule-set can be read by clicking on this link.

Only European rezident players may participate in this tournament. We will hold WDC Mini-Cups in other continents as well as a compensation. The sign-ups are open until 16th October 9:30 am.

We hope all of you will have a fun time playing in this much awaited DotA event!

Beast_Pete – WDC Owner

IceFrog: \”Hey guys, Game Informer dropped by the office last week to take a look at what I\’ve been working on with the rest of the team over the last year.
They are going to post an article about it tomorrow on their website. I\’ll give you guys a link to it as soon as it is published.
Looking forward to seeing what you guys think!\”

You can discuss about it on our forums.

During the past some years DotA has evolved into a game with one of the hugest community in cyber gaming. Obviously more and more companies have interest in exposing the possibilities of this genre and to get their slice from the cake. The war to protect the Ancients has begun.

Defense of the Ancients is originally a custom map in Warcraft III that was based on the Aeon of Strife map that was played in the first Starcraft. People refered to these type of maps as AoS style maps, but ever since IceFrog is developing the map it became so popular that everyone is calling it the DotA Genre. There are a total of 4 map creators to mention: Eul, Guinsoo, Neichus and IceFrog. To understand why there’s a big fight and chaos around the trademarking of DOTA we need to get in details of how DotA developed and how much each creator contributed to it.

Many people forget about Eul who is the original creator of the Warcraft III custom map the one who transferred the AoS style of maps to the fantasy realms. Many people tried to copy his work without success as he put protection to it. There have been several other type of DotA’s like DotA Darkness Falls, DotA Chaos and DotA-Allstars.

This is where Steve Guinsoo Feak comes in. He was the one to successfully overcome the map editor protection and being able to take over Eul’s DotA. He later copied heroes and ideas from other DotA map creators and that’s why he named his version as Allstars as it had all the best ideas implemented in one map. Many people refer to him as the original creator as they were misinformed by the marketing strategy of Riot Games (developers of League of Legends) which tried to draw attention by saying “The game by the original creators of DotA”. Guinsoo is not the original creator and the only other known DotA character Steve “Pendragon” Mescon was just the administrator and owner of the biggest DotA fanpage, the dota-allstars.com and had nothing to do with the development of the game. His site became the official forums only after IceFrog decided to pick it up.

The next two developers in line are Neichus and IceFrog. When Guinsoo suddenly disappeared (noone knows the real reason, some think he was sucked in by WoW, some think he was simply bored of developing the game and couldn’t handle it anymore) that was the time these two guys appeared making sure the game does not die. They had a lot of work to do as the loading of the map took several minutes (10-15 for some users) and some heroes were totally imbalanced making the game quite boring for those who wanted to dominate with all the other heroes too as it was almost impossible to do so. After two versions Neichus left, leaving IceFrog alone to finish this robust work which seemed to be a mission impossible. IceFrog realized that he had to build up a real beta testing team who not just play the game but also contribute to the development by giving advices on how to balance the game and what nifty eye-pleasing changes to add.

And that’s why the map stayed alive and managed to grow to a game; a game played by 10 millions over the World. That was the first time when balance became a real focus and the developer listened to his community. That’s why everyone calls DotA a community game because it is developed upon the feedback of the community and the developer tries to please their needs while keeping sanity in all changes.

Now that’s where the problem lies. Several companies realized the potential of releasing a standalone DotA. Demigod by Gas Powered Games was the first in line which was rather a let-down accordingly to the feedback of DotA players. The next in line was League of Legends by Riot Games which had a greater success thanks for their marketing strategy but most of the hardcore DotA fans opposed playing it because of the childish graphics and the fact that it had less strategical options (denying was completely removed for example). Eventhough it’s a free game, for being able to use all champions you need to buy some of them and that’s again a drawback considering that you can play WC3 DotA completely free. The third DotA based game is Heroes of Newerth by S2 Games that was taken by mixed feelings of the players. Most people liked it because they thought it was IceFrog’s secret project as the changelogs totally resembled to IceFrog’s DotA changelogs. Also it had all the strategical elements that LoL didn’t and it was closer to what DotA is. However it turned out that IceFrog wasn’t working on it when he announced him working on a PC game under the wings of Valve.

But that’s not the end of the line. Many people expected IceFrog to continue DotA’s legacy on Blizzard’s next diamond the Starcraft II. Blizzard probably was one of these too and must have been surprised by that statement of IceFrog joining Valve, a company that never really had any RTS type of games before. However with this move they became a potential competitor of the legendary company so they had to make a step forward to draw attention to their SC2 as much as possible. On the latest Blizzcon many special custom maps were announced to be released and worked on. Left 2 Die and the SC2 DotA are obvious teasing towards Valve who are also the developers of Left 4 Dead, a popular game with its second edition having been released a year ago.

Everyone who has ever played DotA even a bit seriously or long enough to know how much the game has moved into a good direction would agree that the copyrights serves IceFrog jolly well right. He has been developing the game for almost 6 years now for a longer time than Eul & Guinsoo together summed up. He and his beta team made the game to what it is now: a competitive and balanced game with great strategical depths, a game that you can hardly get bored of. However not everyone thinks like that. Both Riot Games and Blizzard think that the DotA trademark belongs to the community. Seeing how many offending posts and offensive articles have popped-up against IceFrog and Valve it seems clear that the war, the Defense of the Ancients has begun.

But it seems pretty strange to have something being trademarked by a community. It’s not even possible at all. Also, if Riot Games developed a fairly different game that is just a DotA based game, but not DotA’s next version then what rights do they have to DotA at all? And if Blizzard refers to the game having been developed in their map editor, then would they file a lawsuit against Hajime Kanzaka? That’s not going to happen of course and what I sense that it’s all just a marketing movement again which might distract some hundreds of players but the real DotA hardcores will keep real.

DotA is often called as a community game not because the community is developing it but because there have never been a real company behind it yet it grew so big that it rivals with games like World of Warcraft or Counter-Strike. It also has a tie-bonded community, players are aggressively defending their favourite game and it’s hard to please them. IceFrog in the end did manage to do so and seeing all the positive feedback on the big sites (GosuGamers.net DotA-League.com myMYM.com) it is clear that they look forward to the release of the standalone DotA.

To close my lines, DotA would have never grown this big without its community: all the beta testers that sacrificed their nights finding all the possible bugs, the forum moderators and forum crew that built up a site where everyone would return to read upon guides, watching replays or discuss latest DotA matters. But the body cannot live without the head, and DotA’s head is IceFrog, he has proven it during the past 6 years with his hard work and enthusiasm, a real gamer for gamers.