How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Modern MOBA

So here's some back story about me, all through middle school I casually played Warcraft III, I was terrible at it and preferred Broodwar for the most part, but sometimes I needed a fantasy fix that sci-fi games just couldn't give me. When I was in high school I discovered I a custom game called DotA All-Stars. For those of you that don't know, DotA All-Stars was the predecessor to Valve's DOTA 2. Anyways I started playing DotA pretty seriously my sophomore year of high school and continued to play for about three years, migrating to Starcraft II upon its release. This weekend I put some time into DOTA 2, and despite my skepticism I have to say that its absolutely awesome! I'm going to explain below why if you're a DotA player that hasn't given DOTA 2 a shot you absolutely should!

No Ban List

Younger gamers will probably struggle to understand what I'm talking about here, but back in the heyday of DotA All-Stars there was no match making, and games were openly selected in the WCIII custom games lobby. This led to leavers being a serious problem, and the only way to deal with them was a semi-functional monstrosity known as the ban list.

The Ban-List was a program that host's would run that, would auto-kick users that had previously left games. There were two big problems with the Ban-List, the first was that it used some awful WinCap driver to perform TCP/IP functions, and the way way it interacted with WC3.exe meant that on Windows 7 PCs, it was unstable at best. The second issue was that a single cd-key could be tied to unlimited Battle.Net acounts, and it took about 30 seconds to create a new account. This meant that the ban list was only a useful deterrent to people that valued their handle, which was approximately no one.

In DOTA 2 the game itself punishes leavers, meaning that the host doesn't have to worry about any of that nonsense.

Match Making

Finding a game of DotA All-Stars could be a huge pain, you'd have to find a lobby with one of the various game types that appealed to you SDEM/APEM/RDEM/SD/AP/RD, join that lobby, and hope that it filled up eventually.

In DOTA 2 you just choose what kinds of games you're okay with playing, click the find match button, and wait. I didn't have to wait more than a minute at a time to find a game, and that was never my experience playing DotA All-Stars.

Newbie Friendly

When I first started playing DotA All-Stars I felt lost. I didn't really get comfortable building my characters till I got a 2nd monitor I could view while playing the game. Valve has solved this by allowing suggested builds to be part of the interface. Even when playing a game where I was unfamiliar with my hero I could easily browse builds suggested by community members, and this allowed me to focus on the games mechanics and enjoy the match instead of trying to think about whether I should buy Sange or Yasha first when building a DPS Dragon Knight.

Ultimately if you enjoyed DotA All-Stars, but are reluctant to try out DOTA 2 I recommend playing it ASAP. DOTA 2 takes the solid gameplay behind DotA All-Stars and perfects it! Anyone have a similar story to mine? I'd love to hear it in the comments!