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.

IceFrog already scattered some hints about an article of his upcoming game that he developes with Valve. As all of us were hoping our dream came true, the game is called: DotA 2! There are a lot of interesting & unique features being added to the DotA that is running under a new engine, Valve’s Source engine. You can see the details and some nice hero pictures below…

Quote from gamrConnect:

“The rumors and speculation can cease. Valve is making Dota 2, we’ve played it, and it’s already amazing even though it’s not coming out until next year. And we haven’t yet laid eyes on Dota 2′s biggest innovation: a radical approach to integrating the game’s community back into the gameplay itself.”

What’s a Dota?

“Dota 2 takes its name from the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, a drastic change to that stock real-time strategy title, which pits two teams of five players against each other in highly competitive, 40-minute or longer matches. Unlike most RTSes, DotA has each player controlling a single hero who levels up and stockpiles gold to purchase powerful equipment and consumables. As computer-controlled armies continually spawn and rush the enemy’s base, players are responsible for using their powerful heroes to turn the tide of the battle in their favor.

DotA quickly gained massive popularity on Blizzard’s Battle.net service, with the growing community utilizing user-created channels and the rudimentary custom game browser to connect players. As mods tend to do, it branched into several variations as time passed. Eventually, one rose to the top: DotA-Allstars, originally created by Steve “Guinsoo” Feak (now employed with Riot Games designing League of Legends). Allstars is currently maintained and updated by IceFrog(who declined to give his real name), who was hired by Valve in 2009 and is now working on Dota 2.”

“DotA enjoys such unprecedented popularity for a number of interconnected reasons. The game has a skill curve as long and as wide as Counter-Strike or StarCraft; expert players dominate matches with lesser-skilled individuals solely through manual dexterity and hard-won knowledge. Extensive upgrade paths allow players to combine items into more powerful versions, gaining thousands of hit points or powerful life-stealing attacks. Team play is hugely rewarded; though the map is large enough for all ten players to spread out and fight creeps on their own without anyone engaging anyone else directly, late-game play is almost invariably centered around giant 3v3 or even 5v5 team fights.

The mod has benefited from excellent, long-running support in the form of constant updates that add new content or address balance issues. Said balance is good enough that no dominant team composition or strategy has ever taken hold for long. The heroes are varied enough that a match featuring different team rosters can take on an entirely different character from the last.

The enormous following generated by DotA’s deep gameplay is unprecedented. Today, years after its release, a third-party site hosting an update can get hammered by more than six million downloads in a day. The mod spawned a new subgenre, commonly referred to as “action-RTS,” that contains two successful commercial games in League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth (and the unfortunate flop Demigod) as well as DotA-Allstars itself. Valve Corporation, the company beloved for its Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and Left 4 Dead series as well as its outstanding Steam digital distribution and matchmaking platform, is making its entry into this still-growing genre next year with Dota 2.”

What Does Valve Bring?

“Valve’s approach to Dota 2 is unusual in that the gameplay itself is remaining almost entirely untouched. “Our first reaction is to assume that [design elements are] there for a reason,” project lead Erik Johnson explains. “IceFrog is one of the smartest designers we’ve ever met. He’s made so many good decisions over the years in building the product. He virtually never makes a decision that doesn’t have some reasoning behind it and a way to pick apart the logic behind it.” This approach means that Dota 2 basically is DotA-Allstars with new technology.

DotA-Allstars’ roster of 100+ heroes is being brought over in its entirety. The single map games take place on is functionally identical to the one that you can download for free today in the Warcraft III mod. Items, skills, and upgrade paths are unchanged. Some hero skills work slightly better due to being freed from the now-ancient Warcraft III engine, but Dota 2 will be instantly familiar to any DotA player.

A few things will make significant differences to players making the transition. Dota 2 uses Valve’s Source engine, so the game is much prettier. Source itself is getting a few upgrades, including improved global lighting and true cloth simulation. Dota 2′s integrated voice chat is a huge step up from having to set up your own Ventrilo server, and the speed of voice communication is very nearly a requirement for a game as team-focused as DotA.

AI bots will take over for disconnected players, and will be available to play against in unranked training matches as well. However, don’t get your hopes up for a full-fledged single-player game, though. Johnson says, “Our goal with the AI is just that their experience isn’t destroyed just because one person couldn’t finish the game.”

The visual style is remarkable for retaining the somewhat cartoony feel that the Warcraft III version of DotA-Allstars is built around, while going in a few different directions. “I think there are functional aspects to the art that are pretty significant to the players,” Johnson muses. The environment, particularly in the forests that fill in the map between the three lanes that the NPC armies follow, uses a desaturated color scheme to give the colorful heroes and abilities some visual pop. The sizable art team is putting a lot of work into making the shapes and animations of each hero distinct to the point that players will be able to instantly identify any hero they see and quickly gauge the threat level of any situation.

The game will also feature a ton of custom voice work. You’ll get amusing lines from heroes as they deny the enemy team last hits on creeps, and champions who have backstory connections will trade quips when nearby.

The bulk of innovation in Dota 2, however, is ancillary to the gameplay itself. Valve is upgrading Steamworks (the company’s backend technologies for matchmaking and other gameplay and community-related things) to allow them to create in-game rewards for participating in the Dota 2 community. The idea is to have everything a player does in or out of game tie back into their online identity. Like the improvements to Source, the Steamworks upgrades will be available to third-party developers who choose to use Valve’s tools when Dota 2 launches in 2011.

At a basic level, posting useful feedback or participating in constructive discussions on the forums will contribute to your standing in the community in a visible way. Valve doesn’t have the specifics on how this will work nailed down yet. Will you get points that contribute to a visible ranking, like a Gamerscore? Will your posts need to be recommended by other community members to count for anything? What counts as a constructive discussion? These questions are all being actively explored at the moment. Valve assures us that the designers have a slew of awesome ideas for how to implement rewards in a way that’s visible to the rest of the community, but there are no details to announce yet. “When we talk about this identity that exists inside and outside the game, we don’t think we’re anywhere near it with what exists on Steam right now,” Johnson admits.

If this was just about getting points for posting comments, though, we wouldn’t waste your time by telling you about it. Dota 2 goes much farther than that. Everything from unlocking new skins for your favorite hero to getting a unique title for writing a strategy guide is on the table. Valve has ambitious plans (for which, again, there are no specifics to share) to host everything themselves and provide the best framework for the community to interact with each other. The idea is to reduce the social friction inherent in having to dig around a bunch of different fansites and wikis to find what you’re looking for.

Ultimately, two things will make Dota 2 stand out: the coaching system and interactive guides. Read on to find out more.”

Riding the Skill Curve

“Getting owned sucks. It doesn’t matter if you’re the victim of a headshot in Counter-Strike, corner trapped in Street Fighter, or swarmed under by Zerglings in StarCraft. Holding the short end of the skill stick in competitive games like these is rough. This problem is compounded in DotA and its clones by two factors. First, matches last around 40 minutes – that’s a long time to spend getting your face kicked in. Second, dying not only takes you out of the game while your respawn timer counts down but also directly benefits the other team by giving a big cash bounty to your killer.

At intermediate and higher levels of play, having a poor player on your team who dies frequently is worse than fighting with a man down, as the opposite team gets gobs of gold for picking off the newbie. This has fostered a legendarily newbie-hostile attitude within large swaths of the DotA community. As fun and rewarding as the game is when you’re in a match of appropriate skill level – and it can be one of the very best experiences in gaming, without exaggeration – finding those matches has always been a nightmare. It doesn’t help that the game is so intense that Valve had to institute a “no talking about the match for an hour afterwards” rule for its internal playtests. The recent commercial titles that more or less cloned DotA have ameliorated this to some extent, but it is still often a huge problem.

Valve believes that the solution to the huge barrier to entry is threefold. The first, obvious solution is to have excellent skill-based matchmaking for both individuals and teams. Valve believes that the work going into Steamworks for Dota 2′s release meets that requirement. Second, interactive guides will allow players to do more than just read a guide for their favorite hero that has been deemed helpful by the community at large. Valve plans to allow guide-makers to tie their work back into the game by doing things like highlighting suggested item purchases or displaying useful information during a match.

Finally, a coaching system is being deeply integrated into the game. By logging in as a coach, veteran players can do their part to help out newer folks. Valve hasn’t entirely decided on the specifics of how newbies and coaches will be matched up, but once they’re together a few things happen. The coach sees the pupil’s screen, and gets private voice and chat channels to communicate with them. The coach probably won’t be able to take control of anything directly (once again, the details are currently under discussion), but information is power in Dota 2 and having a mentor whispering in your ear can make all the difference in the world.”

“Of course, the pupil will be able to rate the coach’s helpfulness. Being a well-regarded coach will have explicit in-game rewards, just like writing useful guides, posting constructive feedback, or engaging in interesting strategy discussions. If the overwhelming response to Battle.net achievements is any indication, vanity rewards like these will be extremely effective in channeling the community’s energies toward positive contributions.

Valve founder and boss Gabe Newell thinks that ongoing service and value creation over a game’s lifespan is the new reality of game development. “IceFrog was one of the smartest people we’ve ever met about doing that, and he was doing it with both hands tied behind his back, so to speak,” Newell says. The company plans on approaching Dota 2 with the same dedication that won it the fanatical devotion of the Team Fortress 2 community, pushing out dozens of updates that do everything from adding new hats to fixing balance issues to introducing entire new match types for free.

“I think the interesting thing is us adding a second layer where the community is a service to each other. That’s the real shift that we’re trying to build here. Valve is going to keep building software around Dota and around the community and around Steamworks for Dota, but we’re also going to build this system where the community can bring service to each other and be recognized for it,” Johnson proclaims. With a solid backbone of community-enabling systems and Valve’s legendary support and technology behind it, Dota 2 has a chance to turn one of the most popular mods of all time into a full game on PC and Mac that compares favorably to any eight-figure-budget console blockbuster.”

Blizzard announced the next expansion for their goose with the golden eggs. After announcing the Blizzard DotA it is not a big surprise that they implement a DotA in the World of Warcraft as well. Seems the war for us, for the DotA players never ends.

Last year we wrote about how trademarking DOTA created a great indignation between Valve’s and DotA’s competitors like Riot Games, S2 Games and Blizzard. An anonymous person tried to tree IceFrog by accusing him of lieing to the community and being a cancer of his current team which accusations proved to be false later on and many people thought this person to have been Pendragon but this never was proven on the other hand.

Now the story continues and after publishing the trailer of the Blizzard DotA, the company revealed their plans of adding a DotA mini-game into World of Warcraft. Quoting from gamersbook.com:

“Azshara Crater is going to be one of the World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria battlegrounds that will feature DotA style combat.”

Unfortunately that’s all we know so far. But making a quick search on the web it surely does interest the WoW players. Are they going to stick to their current love or switch to real dota feeling once DotA 2 is out? We have yet to see it!
What’s sure is that DotA became the number one community game in the World now that we know that more than 20 million are playing it while WoW officially has around 11.4 million subscribers as we speak.

Source: gamersbook.com