WC3: DotA Community?

I play DotA, though not all the time, and I am Xcited as heck to see this game come out

I play maybe once a month. Love it and hate many of the casual players

Played it, don't like it very much. This sounds like it's made for this kind of gameplay.. which is much better, plus, it's hard to start anew in DotA since no one likes a newb.

I used to play DoTA a very, very long time ago.

I've played quite a bit of DOTA. The playerbase is VERY unforgiving towards new players.

I used to play dota quite since beginning in 2003 on Northrend (Europe Bnet). It was a nice comunity 'till the Allstars Players and Leavers ruined the game. Finally a nice guy (Knarf) wrote the awsome thing called wc3banlist and saved the pub-games (I never played inhouse) somehow. The community is seperated into the ROC (Reign of Chaos) - Classic Dota Version (still my fav.)players and the FT (Frozen Throne) dota-type players. And my most hated version of the Game is the Allstars version, some kind of uber-roxxor-pawn Version from the classic Version. Basically its a "pimped" stolen Version of the Classic Dota, stolen In times where Dota wasn't free editable for all. But enogh for history.
Due I know Dota since version 1.12 I think Demigod has as a quite challanging process to do.
Dota was balanced over a time about 3-4 years to get it really "fair" and well-balanced. Demigod want to do this in half a year betatesting? Usually I'm optimistic but in this case I say no way.
Just remind how long it took to get the final hero-types the finals spells for them, the final base- and "growth-stats" aso. I'm really curious how the handling of the "God" is done, how is the spellcasting done? How long do they level? Which Items can be bought? Will there be something like the Flux Staff? Hell there are to much questions ^^

Cheers
Omni

@Omniknight, They might not achieve a truly balanced state of the game in the beta but I am sure that it is possible to get a balance which is good enough to have it fun for everyone in Version 1.0. No good game will ever get a near to perfect balance soon after release, the reason for this lies in the very nature of good games: They offer so many possibilites and combinations that the gameplay evolves over time and things thought to be balanced (and things to be thought unbalanced as well!) suddenly change because someone invented a new strategy.

But with the Experience GPG got with Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance, they should be able to be faster than 3-4 years .

I hope they also learned that having as few game mechanic bugs in beta as possible is very important to ensure good beta test results concerning balance ( I am not speaking about random crashes or bugs happening from time to time but consistent bugs like those unhittable transports we had in FA closed beta and open beta which made testing the balance of ghetto gunships impossible which later turned out to be one of the major points of complaint from many players).


Dota Balance also suffered from including more and more items/heroes before balancing the old ones properly.

youre right SCL-TheBigOne, I must agree.
All the Time during Dota 1.12 till now with something arround 3.80(?) I never felt that it was unbearable unbalanced. Maybe due I took my chances and used the balance bugs to my advantage .
I loved blocking creeps on one lane and then flooding the enemy base.
Hell, balance glitches are part of every game, hope demigod has a robust game "construct" to start from. Hope there is something like a banlist included in the game. This must be a major component or this game will suffer too from ingame-leavers. They ruined Dota and just to compare with modern Games think of this scenario: Think of beeing in some Heroic WOW instance for about hours and now half an hour to go to the boss and suddently your main Healer says goodbye because he gets bored or so. Well in WOW are mechanics that you can get a backup healer into the group, in Dota there where never such option. So it was pretty frustrating to loose a game because 4 played against 5. Hope they consider this....

Cheers omni

Well, one big Advantage GPG has over Dota is that Demigod games won't be custom mod games like dota, but have ranked games on the one side where there is a big incentive not to leave the game and they can restrict some awards to people who don't leave (or don't leave often at least) or maybe even implement some punishment system for leavers (like the deserteur enchantment in Guild Wars where you can't join a PvP match for some time, although I believe that rewarding the good mannered players is even better than punishing the bad guys sometimes a mix of both is best).

Alone displaying the leaves to games ratio would make it possible for the host to decide if he takes the risk or not (to avoid that people who have occasional disconnects get kicked maybe it should be only displayed if it is above a certain treshold).

I hope they also implement an option to enable AI takeover with the ability for the remaining players to give it some general orders (still won't be good enough to replace a human player - well on the other hand leavers aren't often that high skilled :D)

sounds fantastic hope that happens

this is so funny, if you read the offical GPG forums you would realize that:

DEMIGOD is not DOTA!

its more of a cross between that and Footmen Frenzy (or what not) plus other games, again this game is NOT DOTA

who said that Demigod is Dota? :o
and if GPG doesn't screw it up, Demigod will still appeal to Dota players from what I have read so far

who said that Demigod is Dota? :o
and if GPG doesn't screw it up, Demigod will still appeal to Dota players from what I have read so far

Gamespy made the connection.

Demigod is not DotA. Demigod is not DotA. Demigod is not DotA.

IMO, it was a mistake to make this connection.

Demigod is not DotA. Demigod is not DotA. Demigod is not DotA.

Double post. This forum is fugly .

Yeah the forums get slow at times and cause double post. Been playing DotA for the last couple of months against AI and friends. I like it. Demigod FTW. Oh and if you guys are worried about it turning out just get in the beta. I know the stardock/ironclad guys listen very closely to feedback from the testers. Hopefully GPG learns to work with Stardock the same way Ironclad did.

I play a lot of Warcraft III Frozen Throne mods, including Dota (a lot more than I should), which I usually enjoy but sometimes hate, and footman frenzy, which I am not a fan of. I'd have to say Demigod sounds more like Dota than footman frenzy, but I can see the argument for it being more like footman frenzy.

On the side of balancing issues, Dota is still not very balanced, but thats partly due to the fact it is a mod and there is new content being added constantly. I think Demigod will be balanced a lot faster than Dota has seen because it is a retail game with a crew dedicated to balancing. With Dota you just have the creator and maybe one or two other people working on the game, for little or no profit.

Just going to throw this out there. I was at a talk with none other than Chris Taylor as the speaker. He made the comparison to DotA himself. From what I can tell the games are going to be quite a bit different but share a lot too. If Demigod's going to be the "counter-strike" of strategy games its going to share many similarities with DotA. From what I can tell the game is similiar to DotA but the designers aren't using DotA as a template(as some seem to think). Its more out of coincidence that they share things.

Demi-god looks to draw from many of the WarIII custom maps not just exclusively DOTA.

Similiarities to DOTA include:
1. Picking and controlling a single character (assassin route)\
2. Character levels up through gameplay.
3. Items can be purchased to increase characters abilities.
4. Gameplay consists of 2 teams with 1 to 5 players each attacking opposite bases.
5. Object is to destroy the other teams main base (stronghold).
6. Stationary defenses deter enemy combatants and are destructible.
7. Controlled AI creep (minions) make up the bulk of the armies.

Differences to DOTA:
1. General characters create and control entire armies.
2. General characters can build structures (unconfirmed).
3. Different maps and layouts.
4. Different strategies will be employed depending on the map and layout.
5. Ton of other unreleased elements to differentiate the 2 games.

Similarities to Tower Defense based maps:
1. Large geometric maps (battlegrounds) where AI controlled creep spawns and moves through continuously.
2. General characters can build defensive structures.

Honestly, we can only push around the puzzle pieces based on the information that has been released. We'll have to wait till beta and final release before knowing for sure what the gameplay will feel like.

What it comes down to is that it is its own game that draw inspiration from a number of games and genres. I'm incredibly excited regardless of what game it may seem like.

I love the idea of thisgame based on DoTA.