Game title: Defense of the Ancients (DotA)
Game Website Link: www.playdota.com
What DotA is about:
DotA is a multi-player online game based on Warcraft 3. The objective of the game is to destroy the opponent’s Ancients which are heavily guarded by layers of defensive towers. Players of 5 will form a team and they stand for the Sentinel and the Scourge separately. Each player takes control of a powerful unit called Hero, each of them with unique abilities. Heroes can level up and accumulate gold to buy equipments.
Analysis Using Lenses
Lens #34: The Lens of Skill vs. Chance
1. Skill is much more appreciated in DotA. In general situations, a better skilled team has a much higher winning rate over a less skilled team; a better skilled player has a better performance over a less skilled player.
2. However, in some delicate scenarios, chance can play a vital role; the effect of chance may vary from some small advantages for a player to a turning point for the whole game play.
Lens #35: The Lens of Head and Hands:
Because the pace of the game is fast and intensive, so it is both a challenge for minds and hands.
Minds may mean:
1. How well you read the game and analyze your strategies as well as your opponent’s strategies.
2. How you maximize your role play in the game.
3. The timing and entry point for a battle.
4. How you allocate the team recourses and how to spend the money etc.
Hands means:
1. How to improve your gold gaining by maximizing your ‘last hitting’.
2. How to cast skills to make the highest damages possible.
3. How to dodge enemy’s skills to survive in a massive nasty battle etc.
Different players have different level of minds and hands skills.
Lens #36: The Lens of Competition
Dota is no fun if it is not competitive and winning a respectful team can be very satisfactory and delightful. It is a measurement of player’s skills as well as the level of a team’s cooperation. Many world-wide tournaments are held for this game and many teams are to compete for
victory.
The complexity of the game provides the basis for competition in the game. There’s no single hero or a combination of heroes that can dominate the game; there’s no single strategy that can take care of the victory. Even if you are losing all the way, if can win the game by finding a mistake and turning the situation around. Anything is possible in the game.
Lens #37: The Lens of Cooperation:
One exciting characteristic of DotA is team cooperation. In Dota, players can talk to each other easily by chatting function. They can also signaling (alert enemy coming or attack synchronization) to each other in mini map. To win a battle, the timing and participation is vital. An experienced team can always take down the opponent by initiating a fight with outnumbered participation.
Another aspect of cooperation is division of roles. Different heroes have different abilities and, therefore different roles. There are supporters, carries, initiators, pushers etc. To maximize a game play, the combination of hero’s pick is utterly important.
Lens #47: The Lens of Balance
Because of the complex and diverse nature of the game, the balance of the game is always a hot topic both for players and developers. From my 3 years of game experience, the game has been updated and revised for more than 30 versions. It gets balanced gradually and steadily. No heroes, abilities or items are invulnerable. Whether a hero is powerful or not is usually determined by a player’s skill and its strategy about how to play that hero. In addition, it also has great to do with the combinational effect with allied heroes or against certain types of opponent’s heroes.