Valve announces DOTA 2

Yes. He started up ARS in ~97 then got out of adult for the most part selling it to his sister. In the late 90s online porn was literally a gold mine. You could create the shittiest website and pull in $10k+ a day. I know it sounds crazy but 100% true. The industry is no where near that profitable now.

http://www.pradult.com/2006/08/30/ars-sold-new-owner-new-vision/


So he basically cashed out and started up S2Games along with his hockey thing. He owns some other stuff as well.

Smart guy, and he got out at the right time.
 
I rather have dota 2 with all the familiar heros and items. It just needs updated graphics, better matchmaking systems. HON changed up the names and everything with different hero abilities. It felt like I had to relearn the game from dota to HON. I really like HONs system and how you can rejoin a game after someone drops.
 
its amazing how big icefrog blew up.. I remember being a shaman in TDA and recruiting him with Gippis..

I always found icefrog to be a tool. Same goes for Pendragon (though I admit that was based on how he was years ago before icefrog ever existed. Props to him for creating the dota community though.

Personally, I liked it more when Guinsoo was was in charge. He was a much better modder than icefrog ever was. I remember when he got owned by someone playing Lychan, and the next day, the map was updated with the Lychan becoming the worst hero in the game. He eventually put it back.

icefrog made the game more unstable and never really balanced it out in a timely manner. The game was fun, but only because of my clanmates and friends. Pub stomping alone was always boring.
 
Valve: Selling mods since...whenever CS went to be a pay game?

Not knowing HoN, LoL or DOTA, this seems like a mess. And if true, my opinion of Valve drops further (though TF2/L4D2 dropped my opinion to near rock bottom already...)
 
Valve: Selling mods since...whenever CS went to be a pay game?

Not knowing HoN, LoL or DOTA, this seems like a mess. And if true, my opinion of Valve drops further (though TF2/L4D2 dropped my opinion to near rock bottom already...)

As the years go on I become less impressed with Valve =(
 
because they add absolutely none of their own work to the mods they publish? css, dod, tf2, l4d, alien swarm, etc. the list goes on, were not sold and distributed as-is. I think there's a pretty big difference between simple publishing rights and full-on development. if you go by that logic we could say they're all ripping off blizzard.
 
Sorry it was late, I meant they trademarked the name DOTA and are scooping up all of the IP for it.
http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=85102245

At any rate I kind of feel dirty about it. I know iceforg was a HUGE contributor but I feel like Valve is just scooping up a game for free.

Oh ok yea, this makes sense.

Valve does this, it makes sense from a business standpoint. They don't necessarily "rape" the game like EA does, but they do keep it stable. I haven't played dota in a while mainly because of pubs and its hard to get in on clan games.
 
Vapourware?

I hope this isn't another one of Gabe's promised surprises as it's about as exciting as treading in dogshit and treading it around the house.

This will be the first Valve game in some time that I'm not going to buy.

same here
 
Yes. He started up ARS in ~97 then got out of adult for the most part selling it to his sister. In the late 90s online porn was literally a gold mine. You could create the shittiest website and pull in $10k+ a day. I know it sounds crazy but 100% true. The industry is no where near that profitable now.

http://www.pradult.com/2006/08/30/ars-sold-new-owner-new-vision/


So he basically cashed out and started up S2Games along with his hockey thing. He owns some other stuff as well.

no wonder he would not tell the forum how he became a millionaire


I believe he sold the hockey thing
http://s2-arena.ezleagues.ezfacility.com/default.aspx

rumor has it, HoN isn't doing as well as made out to be
 
because they add absolutely none of their own work to the mods they publish? css, dod, tf2, l4d, alien swarm, etc. the list goes on, were not sold and distributed as-is. I think there's a pretty big difference between simple publishing rights and full-on development. if you go by that logic we could say they're all ripping off blizzard.

Lets see, they added the shield into CS, then removed it. What else did they do? Gave us shitty netcode?

TF2: they ruined it with the unlocks. It was fun before that shit came along; I played until the unlocks became random and hats were introduced, then I quit. I got tired of them rebalancing it every week. I've played Empires Mod, that every release nerfs another gun and makes some existing gun into the BFG essentially. It sucks to play like that - and valve did that to TF2. Also, every update broke SOMETHING. How many times did I get stuck in the spawnpoint? How many? Valve needs some real Q&A.

L4D - Where's my L4D1 content valve? Where? You packaged it into L4D2 and sold it and game me no updates like you promised? Bitches.

Alien swarm - not even Valve's doing...it's oh, right - a UT2k4 mod.

DODS? Mod.

What original ideas has valve had that are good? Half life. OK, that also includes portal I suppose. What else? (And what happened to episodic content being fast to push out the door? Why did EP2 take so long? Where is EP3? I mean, yeah, take time to get it right. But what about holding true to promises? Also, wasn't there another episodic style game valve did, that had ONE episode, then died?
 
Lets see, they added the shield into CS, then removed it. What else did they do? Gave us shitty netcode?

TF2: they ruined it with the unlocks. It was fun before that shit came along; I played until the unlocks became random and hats were introduced, then I quit. I got tired of them rebalancing it every week. I've played Empires Mod, that every release nerfs another gun and makes some existing gun into the BFG essentially. It sucks to play like that - and valve did that to TF2. Also, every update broke SOMETHING. How many times did I get stuck in the spawnpoint? How many? Valve needs some real Q&A.

L4D - Where's my L4D1 content valve? Where? You packaged it into L4D2 and sold it and game me no updates like you promised? Bitches.

Alien swarm - not even Valve's doing...it's oh, right - a UT2k4 mod.

DODS? Mod.

What original ideas has valve had that are good? Half life. OK, that also includes portal I suppose. What else? (And what happened to episodic content being fast to push out the door? Why did EP2 take so long? Where is EP3? I mean, yeah, take time to get it right. But what about holding true to promises? Also, wasn't there another episodic style game valve did, that had ONE episode, then died?

why are you quoting me in your rant... are they not working on valve's payroll? how is alien swarm not valve's doing, when they hired the guys who made the original mod.

this word you keep using it, I don't think it means what you think it means.
 
Lets see, they added the shield into CS, then removed it. What else did they do? Gave us shitty netcode?

TF2: they ruined it with the unlocks. It was fun before that shit came along; I played until the unlocks became random and hats were introduced, then I quit. I got tired of them rebalancing it every week. I've played Empires Mod, that every release nerfs another gun and makes some existing gun into the BFG essentially. It sucks to play like that - and valve did that to TF2. Also, every update broke SOMETHING. How many times did I get stuck in the spawnpoint? How many? Valve needs some real Q&A.

L4D - Where's my L4D1 content valve? Where? You packaged it into L4D2 and sold it and game me no updates like you promised? Bitches.

Alien swarm - not even Valve's doing...it's oh, right - a UT2k4 mod.

DODS? Mod.

What original ideas has valve had that are good? Half life. OK, that also includes portal I suppose. What else? (And what happened to episodic content being fast to push out the door? Why did EP2 take so long? Where is EP3? I mean, yeah, take time to get it right. But what about holding true to promises? Also, wasn't there another episodic style game valve did, that had ONE episode, then died?

You trollins.
 
Whats with all the hate? Dota is an amazing game and you guys discrediting it because you've never played and for some reason valve is evil for publishing it. Are you serious? The developer of the original mod is ecstatic I'm sure, as well as the entire fan base of DotA. Whats the problem here?

edit: dont give me a history lesson on the developers
 
They've made over 15 million dollars on it and the owner of S2 said they sold enough for it to break into the top 100 pc games sold. Pretty good for a niche (and growing rapidly) genre.

Source on the 15 million dollars made? Also is that revenue or net income?

You're wrong about the top 100 thing.

Here's the article where the top 100 thing is mentioned.
http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2010/06/kalamazoo-made_heroes_of_newer.html

First off, the owner did not claim HoN sold in the top 100. It was Shawn Tooley, who is the chief technology officer. I believe he goes by the handle [S2]Toolz. He handles all the server stuff, like if they go down, or if S2 needs to buy new ones. He also helped Marc DeForest with his porn hosting at ARS back in 2002.

Secondly, if you look at the top selling PC games, HoN should have sold around one million accounts, if you trust this wikipedia page.

There are approximately 311,000 HoN accounts..

So you can come to a few conclusions about HoN being in the top 100 of PC games sold.

Shawn Tooley is a liar.
Shawn Tooley is misled/has bad data
They count Garena
 
Well the last four on that list say 1 million shipped not sold, but I find it hard to believe that the next best selling game is approx. 340k :confused:

Also I may have been off on the 15 million, but if you do 340,000*30=10.2 million. Also they charge money for stat resets and they claim to have a steady stream of new accounts every day, so I would still say that the sales are not disappointing to them (i got the 15 million from a forum post...:rolleyes:)
 
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I'm fine with HoN right now. I've now got 6 local friends playing it. Xenomanic would be 7, but he fell off the bus.
 
Blizz just announced dota for Starcraft 2. Whaaaat? So I never have to use wc3 again?
 
no reconnect feature, no stats, p2p hosting, 250ms delay

no reason to buy SC2 for its DotA port, whatever that entails.
 
no reconnect feature, no stats, p2p hosting, 250ms delay

no reason to buy SC2 for its DotA port, whatever that entails.



Kind of makes you wonder. Going back to warcraft III, I absolutely HATED the multiplayer in that game. But the custom maps were top notch, you already had heroes built into the engine with special abilities, and it made for great customs. In multiplayer is was herocraft to victory.

But the thing that kept me playing multiplayer for so long was NOT the regular melee battles, but maps like Dota and tides of blood and the endless rpg style maps out there.


At the moment, that does not exist in the starcraft 2 custom maps to the same degree. Hard to find custom maps that are not at the top of the list. The added draw is just not there. And I wonder if blizzard/activision wants a piece of mega popular custom maps like a dota.

Well now the dotas of the world have unshackled themselves from blizzards multiplayer. That coupled with the bastardized system of custom maps in the new bnet, starcraft 2 stands or falls on the primary melee multiplayer. Like the Age of Mythology series. And while it's good, it was NEVER as good or fun as the top custom maps to me.


I have been playing League of Legends far more than starcraft, a dota style game, and infinitely more fun in my view. And so varied, the matchups are so different as there are so many heroes. And new dynamics are released almost every 2 weeks with a new champ thrown into the mix.

different genre, but it is a genre that used to be contained within battlenet.
 
I'm happy for the announcement.

I played HoN beta and a major annoyance for me was the fact that most of the heroes and items were the same, but re-skinned and renamed.

I started playing around the release of 5.84b. I know what the heroes and items are. I don't want to waste all this time re-learning the strategies I already know - I want to learn the new stuff.

I played the entire beta with a webpage open on the other monitor, the big DotA to HoN conversion table. Ok, I have hero xxxxx - what dota hero is he? Ok, I've looked up that. I want to get this dota item - what is its name in HoN? Better check the table again.

WC3 engine is definitely aged. Disconnects and stuff suck. The matchmaking is nonexistent, which results in most pub matches being complete stomps one way or the other.
 
But the thing that kept me playing multiplayer for so long was NOT the regular melee battles, but maps like Dota and tides of blood and the endless rpg style maps out there.


At the moment, that does not exist in the starcraft 2 custom maps to the same degree. Hard to find custom maps that are not at the top of the list. The added draw is just not there. And I wonder if blizzard/activision wants a piece of mega popular custom maps like a dota.
This is exactly why I didn't buy SC2. Not a real fan of the RTS genre, micro doesn't do it for me. And with the backwards step they took with bnet, there's no way i'd buy it for the custom games like I did with War3. I gave away my first War3 CD set since I got bored of the melee games. I later bought War3 again solely for DotA when it boomed with the 5.84 map.

I went with HoN instead of LoL, as it gave me my DotA fix without the limitations of bnet/war3 engine. I got my LoL invite months after my HoN invite, so I never got into LoL. S2's infrastructure is leaps and bounds ahead of bnet2.0. It has reconnect, stats (keeps track of leaves among other things), ability to join multiple channels, excellent net code, dedicated servers, great game browser, not locked by region unless you're in South East Asia, etc... And other basics like, player ladder, and a gimped solo match making. However they have not released two key features, which they have been advertising for the past ~7 months. They don't have team match making, nor do they have a map editor.

Once S2 adds those two features (and polishes/bug tests them for months), the game will be amazing. But this basically means everyone paid $30 to beta test the game. The $30 went to weed out the griefers/feeders/leavers to make this beta testing experience more tolerable.

S2 offers a limitless feature set that is extremely unpolished. Where as Blizzard offers a limited feature set that's very polished. Both those options suck, but I like the former slightly better.

I started playing around the release of 5.84b. I know what the heroes and items are. I don't want to waste all this time re-learning the strategies I already know - I want to learn the new stuff.

I played the entire beta with a webpage open on the other monitor, the big DotA to HoN conversion table. Ok, I have hero xxxxx - what dota hero is he? Ok, I've looked up that. I want to get this dota item - what is its name in HoN? Better check the table again.
It takes 10-30 games to get over that hump. So you have to force yourself to get stomped as you learn the changes. However the game has changed a lot since beta. S2 had to stop copying DotA changes since summer 2009. So it has a year of new changes. Some items completely change the game, like striders and blood challice (buffed version of urn).
 
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