Games Played: Dota 2 (this will be here all year long i think!), Minecraft
Games Finished: none
Yea…I failed people. “Play Mirror’s Edge” I said, “it’ll be fun” I said… NOPE!
I must have played enough Dota 2 this past week to complete 2 full play-through of other games I own.
I have a really large history when it comes to Dota in general, not just Dota 2. I’m not sure I’ve ever told the full story…not even to Emer… I’m sure I’ve outlined my brief story but never really started in detail from the start.
Anyone that doesn’t know what DOTA stands for, you can check out this link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients
Early Days (Dota on Warcraft 3)
I started playing Dota in high school after my amateur stint as a Counter-Strike player. I actually stumbled on to the game by accident… I was playing Warcraft 3 seriously and i was starting to get bored by being The Actual Worst…so i decided that i would look at some of the custom games that were created for Warcraft 3. I found that lots of the games that were showing up were labeled “Dota -ap” (-ap stands for “ALL PICK” – back in the day) and i could never seem to get into the games fast enough (because they would fill up so fast).
Once I started playing, i fell in love with how dynamic the games could be and what i mean by that is, every game is different based on how well your TEAM performs. Your team does not need to perform well in the same way to win the game, either…
As i found good team mates within the game, i started recruiting people to play with on a regular basis. I would always instruct them to come find me in channel “ZA” and we would organize a game. Our group continued to “recruit”, to the point where my channel “ZA” would always have available people to play a game of Dota. It got to the point where our group would rarely lose a game of Dota when we had a full 5 people.
Middle Days (Dota Geeks)
I decided to create a clan named “Dota Geeks” with the acronym of “DGs”. Everyone created new accounts in Warcraft 3 to a label that started with DGs. My name was (of course) DGs.Ch00 and as sad as it is to say, i think most people could count on me to be on the game almost every day. If i wasn’t “on”, you could see my character / alias logged into the channel.
The games really started gaining popularity in 2002-2003. The developers or organizers started to introduce amateur leagues. There were sites that were introducing “0 lag, local hosting” of the games to make the scene very competitive. Our channel was very eager to compete at the highest level (so we thought). I took the lead on organizing an amateur Dota team and investing in a channel bot. The bot would allow our channel to partake in the “0 lag, local hosting” games. Everyone was very enthusiastic about the entire experience…until we played our first 2 competitive amateur games and got DESTROYED!!!! The games were not even close…it was a different level of Dota that our group of friends had rarely seen in the public custom game scene.
The Decline (Defeat)
After our brief stint in the competitive amateur scene, our group decided to stick with the public games that were hosted by the bot (with 0 lag). The community skill gap quickly started shrink, to the point where our groups of fiends could count on a good game when we decided to queue. Our games were becoming closer and a bit more competitive…everyone was having a blast.
World of Warcraft (The ending)
World of Warcraft (the Burning Crusade) was the ending to the DGs. Dota clan (warcraft 3). All of the members that participated in Dota activities had shifted their attention to the new hot game “BC”. I don’t think a single member from the clan stayed in Warcraft 3 to play Dota. We would occasionally take a break from WoW to partake in a game of Dota but it was a rare occurrence.
When our clan for friends reached the end game content for Wow (raiding), we decided to create a guild called “Complexity”. We eventually became pretty decent at doing end game content with 1 less person then what was recommended. We had a hard time coordinating a good time, where we could get 10 people on at the same time. Fortunately for us, there was another guild that was struggling to find a full 10 participants to complete the raid themselves. This guild was called “Saints”… This is where I met Emer for the first time! I believe she was a high ranking officer at the time..i can’t really remember.. Our 2 guilds decided that it was mutually beneficial to merge our 2 groups together so that we could have an easier time completing some of the end-game content.
I unintentionally turned a Dota post into a backstory of my brief stint in World of Warcraft. I think I may leave the story here and continue it for another rainy day.
I’d also like to continue telling my adventure with Dota 2! I may have left the original Dota scene but when Dota 2 was released, The Dota Geeks were reborn, stronger than ever.
TO THIS DAY, there are still members of DGs that display thier Dota Geeks tag with pride!
The Actual Worst 