Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Few Steps Backwards!

Just a brief statement to start this: I’m not sure if there’s an NDA on the build of DotA2 that I played. I don’t recall signing one, and I can’t really imagine a reason for one to be in place given what they’re making, but if this is in violation of any kind of NDA it’ll be coming down immediately. I’ve no desire to violate Valve’s intellectual property by posting something damaging about one of their upcoming projects.

I’d like to tell you that, after playing DotA2, I’m super excited about it. I’d like to tell you that it’s the latest and greatest DotA clone to emerge since the first DotA, the best of all worlds rolled into one. I’d like to say that it learns from all of the previous missteps and improvements that versions since the first DotA have made. I would really, really like to say all of these things.

But I can’t. DotA2 is, for all the hype surrounding it and the resources being funneled towards its completion, kind of a tremendous disappointment. It looks fantastic, don’t get me wrong – heroes, particle effects, landscape and creeps are all visually stunning – but it’s missing quite a bit of the polish that League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth brought to the table. And at the steep asking price attached to it, it’s going to be a pretty tough sell to most players without those basic features they’ve come to expect from their games about controlling a single hero up and down the map.

See, DotA2 is actually little more than a reskin of the original DotA. A lot of the third party tools that were generated for the original DotA, tools like Banlist, for example, have had elements incorporated into the overall design of the new game. But the tools that were selected are old – over half a decade old at this point – and many more appropriate measures of addressing the issues they were created to deal with have since emerged. For example, tracking and rating the number of premature drops that a player makes during a game might’ve been a great way to deal with the issue of leavers back in the days of the original DotA, and it’s still a vital component of managing the issue now. But without other means of addressing the problem, tools like concede and remake votes that allow players to collectively opt to restart or resolve a game, they’re not really a solution. They’re just a punitive measure, and replacing a resolution with a punitive measure is just a way to make your game more tedious for the people who want to play it as it was offered. People who want to engage in antisocial behavior will always find a way to do so; they’ll go to great lengths to do so, in fact.

And without a concede or remake vote to be found in DotA2, they’re actually in a better position than ever to pursue this anti-social behavior. People can trash games with captive audiences, they can grief to their heart’s content and then use whatever quaint loophole they find to continue doing so in another game after souring everyone else’s evening in a quick and dirty forty-five minute asshole session. In my mind there’s no real justification for not including concession in DotA2. It’s not a tool intended to break the game, it’s a tool intended to let players play the game more easily and pleasantly.

And it’s symbolic of the mentality behind the game. Once the game is actually a finished product I’ll sit down and comment on other elements of it, but some pretty basic aspects of DotA2 have, in my mind, almost completely failed at taking in the lessons of games like LoL and HoN (the good lessons, not the micro-transaction lessons). And this is at the forefront of those elements. LoL and HoN both changed the mentality of DotA by putting the player first. They generated systems that were intended to help acclimate new players and provide players in general with a way to self-police themselves within games. They experimented with game types and map types, they’ve experimented with heroes and game balance and mechanics as well. But the most important improvements they’ve made in my mind are improvements on how people approach the game on a social level.

They’ve made it easy to mark assholes as people you don’t want to interact with a second time. They’ve made it easy to make comrades out of your fellow players quickly and easily, and play with them again if you want to. They’ve made it easy to escape unpleasant situations if you want to, and they’ve provided a reasonably easy to use framework for reporting such situations as they emerge. The game of DotA itself has remained relatively inelastic since its inception: it is the tools that allow us to manage the social environment surrounding that game which have changed. DotA2 appears to have ignored these messages, seems to think that DotA is fine as it was. But we aren’t playing in 2006 anymore. There are tools that allow us to avoid unpleasant people and escape from unpleasant environments and we’ve gotten used to using them. And removing them isn’t going to make the problems that made those tools necessities suddenly go away. I worry for DotA2’s future.