Dota - An Introduction

For those of you who have come looking for a place to start your dota knowledge quest, this post is for you. I will break down a significant portion of dota's early years and the development into what it is now. If this is not you, or you are just not interested in this, then you should skip ahead to the strategy section that fits your skill level best (beginner, moderate, advanced).

Dota is the acronym attributed to the custom game in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and Frozen Throne known as Defense Of The Ancients. It places two teams (sentinel or scourge) of up to five players on each against each other, with the goal of destroying the other team's main base (Tree of Life for sentinel base or Frozen Throne for scourge base). Eul, a mapmaker and the original creator of Dota in Reign of Chaos, did not continue to update the map and eventually left it for others to modify when Frozen Throne was released. Guinsoo picked it up and created what we know as Dota All Stars, which split from Eul's version of Dota. It had more heroes and items, which made it much more appealing to players. The end of this story, which takes us to the present versions of dota, can be attributed to a programmer named IceFrog. He picked up where Guinsoo left off, creating more items, heroes, gameplay tweaks, terrain changes, balances, etc.

Under IceFrog, Dota has risen to the extreme level of popularity which it is at now, and is continuing to rise. With a strong fan base, Dota has recently featured new heroes and items created and inspired completely by the fans and players. It is not only a game, but a community. In the future, I see Dota branching off into its own independently created and distributed computer game, no longer a custom game, completely separate from the Warcraft III engine (somewhat similar to how Counterstrike progressed).