Stability vs. Chaos
In the beginning there was nothing. Then, out of a roiling primordial soup of terribly unbalanced custom games arose Defense of the Ancients. In those early days, players roamed randomly around the map fighting whatever crossed their path. Individual strength and aggression lifted some to victory while others played a more strategic positional brand of warfare.
Out of this mess, team play began to take shape until it coalesced into tangible victories over less coordinated opponents. New heroes bombarded the game every few months, shaking Dota to its core and blowing apart the metagame with their shockwaves. Absurd new mechanics were pulled into Dota from a variety of inspirations, pushing players to master micro and macro aspects of the game. As the dust finally began to settle a shining beacon burst from the horizon, pulling players towards it with the promise of incredible things to come. Dota 2 was coming and it was being created by Valve.
When Dota 2 was announced via the first ever International a lot of professional players believed it was a scam because of the massive prize pool. Over the next half decade a wild variety of tournaments, teams and strategies swept over the game and the playerbase swelled. Tournament organizers and broadcast talent pulled themselves out of the maelstrom through absurd work schedules and wild west negotiating tactics. Dota squads formed and crumbled as egos and ideas clashed over the ever increasing bounty available for winners. Esports organizations entered the fray, picking and dropping teams every few months based on their results or buying a ticket to TI on the eve of the tournament. Artists, content creators and personalities emerged, sharing in the glorious wealth generated by fanatical fans of all things Dota. Careers and companies were built upon the hysterical demand for competition and content.
Strategically, the game became more refined as players adopted more defined roles and capitalized on their individual strengths in the context of a greater whole. Mechanics evolved and were regularly broken through crazed experimentation resulting in discussions about exploitation or ingenuity. Aggression clashed against control as each team found their own identity. Every loosely defined role cycled through periods of great power over the outcome of a match or meek insignificance, even those lost in the jungle.
Under demands for more structure, competitive Dota began to solidify. Regular tournament series were formed by those who had built a foundation on the unstable ground of the early days. As the tectonics of scheduling began to settle, organizations and companies put down roots and raised their products and teams to new heights. The game itself seemed to have settled into a state of accepted strategy with five defined roles and general macro game theory solved.
Heroes still joined the roster at a more measured pace and the nuances of the game became more and more explored. Large and regular balance patches uprooted the meta, swirled it around and poured out a new mixture of controlled chaos every few months. The regular but relatively predictable change paved the way for epic eras of both heroes and the teams that discovered their power early.
In a somewhat reverse entropy, the structure of Dota has continued to solidify over the past couple of years. The Dota Pro Circuit has suffocated almost all major third party tournaments from the ecosystem. Ranked role queue has become the preferred method of play, strictly boxing players into a playstyle. Meta changing patches have become more infrequent and a smaller but more versatile pool of heroes remains relevant. Gone are tri-lanes. Gone are junglers. Gone are the days of aggressive roaming and wild mid-lane tri-lane carry metas. Dota appears to be trending more and more towards being an execution over experimentation game.
Is it time for a return to time for a return to the chaos or are we happy as players to focus instead on a more straightforward and disciplined game?
FIRSTTTTTT
Good write-up. I think it's better for the health of pub matches for it to be less freaky. And experimentation (playing a hero in a different role for example) is still present, so it hasn't regressed too far (yet).
want chaos
Chaos is good. but not TI4 meta
Honestly don't care at all about third party tournaments though. We just aren't large enough to have the ability to be split like that for now. Even having two divisions is a bit of a strain on resources. We keep seeing ourselves as having buckets of money but that's only because we see the huge prizepool for that ONE tournament and completely forget that Baseball players regularly get multimillion dollar contracts and a single NFL game costs more money to run than the entire season for Dota. Stability creates clarity creates interest creates investors creates growth. It's so much bigger than it used to be, but we're SO much smaller than we think. I for one would rather take the survival of the game than the wild west, and strongly believe in the rose colored glasses being worn here.
I do miss trilanes, but I might pin their death on the growth of understanding the game itself more than on the edges being shaved off. Players know so much more about exploiting things, and trilanes may have simply preyed on ineptitude.
Trust me people are still being experimental at Crusader. 😄
You guys are just having chaos nostalgia. If you guys want to know what the shadow realm would look like, just watch Jenkins Herald review
Personally, chaos is WELL overdue. The current meta and patch has become so unbelievably stale its untrue with the same heroes being picked/banned. Its time to mix things up IceFrog.
With the amount of money that Valve make from the various sources (caches, BPs, Dota+, item transactions), I don't think its too much to ask for them to employ some software devs to change the meta at least once a year... let alone do things like fixing known bugs (i hear reddit are pretty good at making a list of those), proper remodels (i hate morph but 100% needs a remodel with an ACCEPTABLE amount of polygons) and further development of cracking down on smurfs/boosters/scripters.
I personally miss the chaos. I played primarily in the 6.78-6.88 era, and while the TI4/6.81 meta of "Pick a prophet and solo rat your way to victory" was fucking awful, as were the perpetual 80 minute games of 6.83, I enjoyed that every patch brought a completely new way of playing the game, rather than just refinements on a theme. From TI4 to TI5 alone it flipped wildly between favouring rat heroes, to Sniper, to pure/magical damage carries like Leshrac and OD, and from reliably 25 minute games, to reliably 80 minute games, to a random selection of both. The current stability is almost certainly far better for the pro scene and for new players, and as people have said above, there's probably some rose-coloured glasses, but for me personally, I just find it harder to stay invested in the game.
I'm a chaotic player with ADHD - I don't have the patience to minmax my timings or practice a single hero to perfection. I knew every stat in the game and memorised the patch notes, but my favourite games were when me and my friends deliberately defied the meta to do stupid shit and still win. Crystal Maiden jungle carry was hilarious, baiting people into Techies mines via All Chat was beautiful, trilanes, dual junglers, 5 man mid strats, countering 5 man mid strats, 15 minute fountain dives with Bristleback, Pudge/Magnus fountain teleports, winning a game as solo Ursa after my entire team abandoned, position 1 Enchantress - all of these things would be awful if they were allowed to become meta, but aside from a select few strats, most of them were too unreliable to work 100% of the time, and otherwise they got patched out.
The way I summarise the change from early Dota 2 to now is that it used to be an extremely high-risk, high-reward game with 5 individuals on each side and the meta changing every 5 minutes. Now it's a team game with a clear and varied, but stable, meta. For me it was more fun and there was more variety in gameplay, but it was also far more punishing and also countering was a far more rigid affair. It was easier to carry a bad team, but it was also easier far easier to grief a good one. When it was good, it was great, but when it was bad it was soul-crushingly unfair.
Basically, it followed the old MW2 philosophy of game design, which is "If everything is OP as shit, then nothing is." - which is fine, but it's a difficult thing to keep balanced long-term. I really miss those Wild West days, and I personally would go back to that style in a heartbeat, but I do agree with most of the other people here that it probably wouldn't be the best thing for the game as a whole, and it was a fucking trial by fire. If it hadn't been the only online PC game my old potato could run when I was 16 and if I hadn't had a group of equally masochistic friends who were more mechanically skilled than me, then I likely wouldn't have been able to stick with it.