WC3 Banlist: Adding third party approved banlists

Ensuring a good public game of Dota is tough, but I have found that employing third party hosts approved bans has significantly increased the quality of my games. Then the question comes of which ones to use......

I have found that on top of using the buddy banlist system via http://www.banlist.nl/ other xml types (file extension in which the bans are stored, very easy to import into your personal banlist program) that have fairly decent bans are the following:

• TDA Shitlist
• ASG XML (Azeroth Sharing Group)
• ABC XML (Azeroth Banning Corp)
• Approved Bans [your realm] (For me it is Azeroth)

The approved bans of your realm can be obtained by clicking your appropriate realm:

Azeroth,Lordaeron, Kalimdor or Northrend. (These were down for a while, may be working now)

The tda shitlist can be obtained by the following link:

tdashitlist.xml

The fixed approved bans azeroth and the ASG list can be obtained at the following link:

http://banlist.us/download.php

The ABC list can be obtained at the following link:

ABC Ban XML

To import the lists found at http://banlist.us/download.php follow this link to the site and click the lists you wish to download (ASG and Approved Bans Azeroth). Then it will ask you what action you want to perform...Open...Save...or Cancel. Click Save and save it somewhere that you can find once you open banlist (recommend the desktop). Then go into your banlist program and add them by clicking on the green chain looking icon under one of the tabs in the program. It will then ask you the location of the file and you go locate it (for me it was on the desktop) and add it.

To import each of the others into your banlist right click on the link and and select "save target as". When it asks you where you want to save the file at choose somewhere that is easily accessible (I prefer somewhere on my desktop). Then once you do that for each of the links, go into your banlist program and add them by clicking on the green chain looking icon under one of the tabs in the program. It will then ask you the location of the file and you go and retrieve it to wherever you chose to put it (for me it was on the desktop) then you repeat it for each of the other links. (I realize this is a somewhat weak description, if you are completely unfamiliar with this process leave a comment and I will post an additional detailed piece on the process of adding bans within banlist).

Dota Hosting: Listchecker and WC3 Banlist

By this stage of Dota, many ways of hosting are available (dota client, listchecker, WC3 Banlist, Banlist Beta, GG client). In this post I plan to break down how to use listchecker and run WC3 banlist at the same time. For those of you who are not familiar with listchecker, it is a 3rd party program that you can download by searching google that allows you to host Dota (or any custom game) with little to no lag, assuming the host connection is halfway decent, would recommend at least 5mb dsl/cable or equivalent connection. Anything less than this will lead to monstrous lag and extreme spiking as listchecker is very unforgiving. However, given the right connection capabilities, listchecker is a wonderful program to host with. It hosts with little to no lag because it basically sets up a lan game, as the program bypasses the bnet server system and hosts directly from you to the other players in the game. Downloading and setting it up is somewhat complex and is far too long to implement into this post, so the site I recommend getting it from which does a very good job of explaining how to set it up is here.

Once you have downloaded it and got it working the way it should to host, here are some useful commands (All assuming you have read the manual in the given link). Once you have made the game public by typing /bnethostpublic [game name] ... then some useful in game commands are:

/refreshbnet . . . . allows you to refresh at will in game which is good to use every once in a while if your game is taking a while to fill because the auto refresh on listchecker is quite slow in my opinion

/pingclients . . . . will allow you to see everyones pings in your game..... anything over 90 to 100 i do not keep as usually they will spike or lag and most likely drop

If you are running WC3 banlist along with listchecker, to use its commands while hosting w/ listchecker simply type /bnetcmd then whatever you want to do in WC3 banlist. For example, if i want to check everyones locations in my game while running listchecker I would type . . .
/bnetcmd /fromall
This tells listchecker that you wish to use a bnet function. You use /bnetcmd to also whisper people or do anything else you would normally do if you were logged directly onto the bnet servers.

FYI : For those of you who use custom kick programs do not run with listchecker because since it is a lan game basically when you custom kick someone the whole group of players in game will get booted as the program thinks all players are on a lan. Kicking one leads to the entire 10 players being kicked, including the host (I know this because in my listchecker noob days I did this).

If you are having problems setting up listchecker on your computer or getting it to function properly with other things like WC3 banlist after reading the site I recommended you can leave a comment and I will attempt to help you solve your problem.

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).