Dota 2 news from Gamescom, day 1

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Blasted timezones. I wasn't able to stay up too late last night to watch the start of the first ever Dota 2 tournament, premiering at Gamescom. I think I stayed up from 1AM to 2AM, but the first 40 minutes of the livestream were laggy due to a bad connection. And I woke up too late this morning, so I caught the tail end of it.

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Since I didn't get to watch day 1 of the tourny, I'm relying on the other guys to summarize the event for you.

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PC Gamer has all of the information you would need to catch up with:

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  You can see the four group tables as they stand now on the Dota 2 site. The schedule page will give you access to a comprehensive scoreboard (or “match page,” as they’re called)for every match that has been played so far, including precise stats on each players’s gold per minute earnings, XP per minute gains, last hits, denies and kills. The Results page will eventually host replays of every match, but there are two you can watch right now, TyLoo vs. OK.Nirvana.cn ... and OK.Nirvana.Int vs Virus. Replays will also be added to the Dota 2 Youtube channel.

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Day 2 of the tournament will be starting at 10:00 o 'clock (GMT +2) today, so visit the Dota 2 website to catch the livestream!

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Also, here's a few extra goodies that you should find palpable.

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• Kotaku has posted a gallery of photos from Gamescom showcasing the Dota 2 tournament
• Joystiq says that the beta is "starting soon," and Dota 2 is targeted for a 2011 launch
• Gabe Newell sets first world record for Dota 2

 

[Lobster]

They had some lag issues due to the 4 million people (at one point) flooding onto the spectator site at once, the system was under a lot of stress to keep up, which meant a lot of the games would freeze several times during play. It did improve towards the end of the day though.

Lag aside the game itself seemed really solid and looked like a lot of fun, it also looked close to being finished so the beta shouldn't be far off.

The live scoreboards and spectator functions are what interested me the most though, the entire interface feels like it was built to compliment the Steam community directly. If they were to translate these features into existing and future games like CS:GO and third party Steamworks titles, it could be a huge deal for the future.

 

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The game does look pretty damn good!

I'd like to think that the leaderboard and live stats are a new feature for Steamworks. It would be great if anyone could use this to generate a stats window for their clan's website, directly through Steam.

 

[Hectic Glenn]

I enjoyed watching the tournament yesterday, I had very little idea what was going on though and tried to brush up on the concepts of Dota / LoL / HoN etc to understand what was happening. The commentators really didn't try particularly hard to explain much and stuck with the advanced concepts and used jargon mostly (I wanted to gank their faces using my ulti, I'm clueless!).

The lag issues were also quite annoying, several times the games had to be paused by the referee for several minutes at a time...in fact one time they had to restart the game I believe. The live scoreboard continued to update when the stream was down too which was quite frustrating knowing the game was going on still. The microphones seemed to break up quite often too and the commentary was inaudible. I watched a few games and did begin to understand the main objectives but the commentary is still needed to help me follow, which is a shame because all the recorded vods on the Valve youtube are in lovely HD but no audio commentary!

The game looks good fun with a serious depth and complexity to it once you get into it. I think if we organised some games between us it would be a great laugh once we all get the hang of it. I'm not sure how much more I'll be interested in the top end competitive play until the issues I said above are fixed. I watch a lot of pro Starcraft 2 and the casters do a better job of explaining the game (now and when it was in beta) than the casters at Gamescom. I'm not asking for GSL production level qualities where a lot of money is invested but for a $1 million competition you would hope the casters have better microphones than what they are currently using!

Hoping that today runs a bit more smoothly.

 

[hool10]

Pretty much the basics in these games is as follows:

1. You pick your champion/hero/character.
2. You spawn and purchase your equipment in a waiting period.
3. You choose 1 of 3 paths or what they call "lanes" to follow. Typically if your a healer or caster, you wanna pair up with a buddy and a tank can have a lane to himself.
4. You can either wait until the round starts OR taunt enemies and possibly kill somebody.
5. When the round starts, enemies or support/minions spawn. You want to always work with these little guys and not go ahead of them. The #1 thing to remember in these games is that there is strength in numbers and your XP level.
6. Early you want to farm a lane by helping your little minions push the lane. To achieve this you kill enemy minions and gain XP and gold. You will come face to face with enemy champions though and typically you want to peck and taunt them.
7. You are a hindrance to the team if you keep getting killed as you give major XP and gold to the people who killed you. So learn to stay behind the minions, and learn when to retreat. Especially if there are enemies who can teleport instantly to your location and paralyze you for a few seconds.
8. As you progress you will hit towers and you want to let the towers hit minions instead of you. Take the tower down and keep pushing on.
9. Once you get to the enemy base you can destroy a building that spawns enemy minions in that lane and you spawn tank like minions.
10. Finally take down the main HQ of the enemy team.
11. As a bonus there are jungle areas with boss enemy camps. You get lots of gold early if you clear the camp and that area is revealed on the mini-map where the enemy is. Grass also will cloak you and is perfect for flanking the enemy from behind and popping the guy.

Pretty much that is how it is, at least in LoL.

*Download the client here: http://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4e4cf79d3b4fd073935472 I'm hool10 on it and it's free.