dota2 thoughts

eclectic thoughts from Dota2:

- I'm pretty lucky to have immunity to the collection urge. The game gives out MYSTERIOUS CHESTS that you can pay REAL MONEY to open and get random COSMETIC UPGRADES which accumulate to form COMPLETE SETS. My reaction to this is simply that I'm confused, I'm not sure why I'm being offered this because it doesn't seem appealing at all. But apparently some people enjoy opening these and trading these, and they spend money on them? I don't understand; it's not that I'm resisting this temptation, I just don't have that bit in my brain that would make me want to do this in the first place. However, as a game-maker this lack of sympathy for what appeals to many game-players probably puts me at a serious disadvantage in terms of mainstream appeal.

- Effects that just do a big chunk of damage, like Lion or Lina's ultimates or Dagon, actually have a surprising amount of subtlety to them. There's more depth than just click - numbers go down. Often you want to use these to finish off a wounded hero, maximising the information you have before using it, and surprising them with discontinuous damage before they can escape. But usually doing this means not all of the damage potential is used (unless you manage to click when their hp exactly equals the damage total), so there's an advantage to using these earlier in a fight as well. Also it helps your teammates to know that it will be used, and the most clear and accurate way to convey this information to them is to use it earlier - though this reveals it to your opponents too.

- It's kind of amazing to be able to play a ten-player real-time online game that might be an hour long, any time of day with usually no connection problems. At least to someone who grew up with dial-up internet and LANs that needed constant fiddling to make sure all the computers could see each other, getting parents to drive computers over to friends houses to be able to have more than one or two people playing together at once, configuring routers to open particular ports so games could be hosted; so much organisation and faff was required for networked multiplayer to exist at all. Now a game can comfortably demand ten players, not even supporting lower numbers - at least with a sufficiently powerful company behind it.