For those of you that haven't been keeping up with the DotA 2 hype lately (or might not even know what DotA is), then you're missing out on one of the craziest tournaments of the year. Firstly, I'd like to give a brief history/introduction of this "DotA" thing that's seemed to have sprouted from nowhere.
DotA, or Defense of the Ancients, was originally a custom community created map from Warcraft III. It was originally inspired by Aeon of Strife, which was originally designed as a StarCraft custom map. DotA is played in a 5v5 format with two teams (Sentinel and Scourge), and the purpose of the game is to kill the enemy team's "ancients", which is basically their "base". Each team has a base which branches out into three lanes, "mid", "top", and "bot".
These lanes all have three defensive towers spread out which are pretty difficult to kill, as well as waves of "creeps" that spawn every 30 seconds. Creeps are basically computerized minions that come and fight for each team, and offer experience and gold upon death.
Each player (10 players in total) have control of a "hero" who they pick at the start of the game. Heroes all start at level 1, and gain experience and gold by killing enemy creeps or heroes. Once they get enough experience, they can level up and learn new skills (each hero has on average 4 skills, 3 regular skills and an "ultimate"). The gold from the creeps is used to buy new items which help them get stronger.
DotA was originally quite small scale, and often referred to as an AoS map. However, it started to gain fame as more and more developers worked on it, originally culminating in IceFrog's reign, which has propelled DotA into stardom. Since then, numerous games have sprouted from it, such as League of Legends (LoL) and Heroes of Newerth (HoN). These two games have taken the basic DotA foundation and revised/improved it, thus creating a new genre entirely, the MOBAgenre (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena). IceFrog then chose to work with Valve, which has the reputation of creating wonderful games, such as Half-Life, Portal, etc., and create DotA 2, which had its grand unveiling tournament today, with a first-place prize of 1 MILLION DOLLARS. I personally am ecstatic about DotA2; having played DotA 1 and HoN competitively, I am eagerly looking forward to Valve's rendition of it.
Check out a live stream/brackets of the tournament, or if you want to learn more about DotA and games like it, go here! Anyways, hope this blog was informative, and if you have any questions, once again don't hesitate to contact me! Might be covering the event live, or at least recapping it. The teams are listed below (Virus Gaming from France replacing LGD from China).
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