The Online Battle Arena Games: Episode 1__DOTA

DOTA (Defense of the Ancients) rose up in my high school era and stormed the entire cyber game world, especially for Asian people, particularly for 
In my sophomore year, my roomate Mark Zhou recommended me another game, League of Lengends (known as LOL).
In fact, before writing this blogpost, I didn't even know how to categorize these two games. I wikied it and found out the two games are categorized as Online Battle Arena Games.

The reason I want to compare these two games is because there are so many similarities between the two and yet so many differences that the developers promote this game to players. Today's post is about DOTA.

"Defense of the Ancients (DotA) is a multiplayer online battle arena mod for the video game Warcraft III. The objective of the scenario is for each team to destroy the opponents' Ancient, heavily guarded structures at opposing corners of the map. Players use powerful units known as heroes, and are assisted by allied heroes and AI-controlled fighters. As in role-playing games, players level up their heroes and use gold to buy equipment during the mission"(Wikipedia)

The game is about balancing the strategy, team work and personal ability when fighting with the opponent team. At the beggining of the game, 5 team members were assigned to 3 different lanes, in order to defend against the opponent team. There could be different strategic arrangement for the players, such as 212, 311, 2111, etc. When it comes to the later era of the game, the players begins to start ganking (teaming up to catch and kill a single player) to gather the first move advantage of the game. At the end of the game, the teams comes to a 5 on 5 group fight and terrant pushing, until one party loses its Ancient.

This game mode is pretty much the same thing to LOL.
What I am really focusing on is the way the developers promote it.

Dota is dveloped by ICEFROG, which were lately purchased by Blizzard.
The map (not the game) is free to download. And since all the potential DOTA players already installed Warcraft III, there is absolutely no cost to play this game. This explain why there are so many people still playing DOTA despite the fact Blizzard released DOTA II already.