It's time for another edition of "stating useless things that you knew already!"

Today's post will be about a rough guide to the stages of DotA, inspired by nothing, for no purpose, and well, most of which you should already know.

As useless as classification is, it does make things clearer. I realise that I've been using the word "conventional" to describe strategies in DotA without actually a clear definition of what exactly comprises a "conventional" strategy.

But that's merely a derivative, not the main focus, of today's topic.

In fact I'm pretty bad at giving topic names, so I'll just go on with the discussion without any hint or focus as to what I'm about to discuss.

So anyway, a DotA game can be divided into 3 stages. The early-game, the mid-game, and the late-game. DUH. Actually any game can be divided into any number of stages. One could always make up the one-over-pi-game, the super-duper-late-game, or the pre-pre-pre-game. For my purposes today, the division stated will be more useful though.

Another obvious point here. Early-game comes before mid-game which comes before late-game. However, it would be rather boring and even more vague to explain the "early-game" as simply "the beginning of the game". Rather, it would be better to describe the various stages of the game by what actions and situations players will find themselves in.

To begin with, the "early-game" is a situation where players find themselves mostly in lanes. The main priority of most of the team in the "early-game" will be to gain XP and a bit of gold, thus most hero movement is easily predictable. Almost always, all 3 lanes will be filled, and players can more or less see most of what their opponents are doing, or at least predict it easily within a 10 second window.

Moving on to the "mid-game", a team's main priority here will be to farm their heroes up while preventing the opponents from farming, and also pushing towards an easier late-game, getting closer to victory (i.e. downing towers). The mid-game is more gold and gank oriented, and hero movements around the map will be very rapid. Usually though, as a result of the necessity for a late-game advantage, teams will most often see at least 1 or 2 of their heroes on the map for most of the time. Protection and backstabbing, movement around the map, will be the focus of teams.

In the "late-game", a team's priority is simply to win the game. Much like the mid-game, teams will have 1 or 2 heroes visible on the map at any time. However, since the objective is to drive towards a game win rather than to simply just dumbly continue farming up, movement around is much more predictable. Ideally, even-matched teams will at this stage of the game be focusing on facing each other 5v5. If backdooring is not a factor, then most late-game actions are much more predictable than all that movement in the mid-game. Hero positions will be very predictable, namely that they're all going to be together most of the time, unless they do a split push, in which case the heroes that you can't see are most likely behind the heroes that you can see. The late-game sees many large scale 5v5 engagements. What is unpredictable about the late-game though is that any effective and unpredictable moves by a team can give them a game win, not just a tower kill or a hero kill.

Having defined the 3 stages of the game by the situations and actions of a DotA team, there are also different set of skills prevalent in the 3 different stages of the game. "Skills" here more of being "decision-making processes" given different amounts of information. To be specific, I'm going to talk about decision making by individuals, and anything that involves more than 1 person isn't part of my scope.

It's actually pretty simple, these "skills" are simply how a person makes a decision when presented with certain amounts of information and in certain situations.

The first, which makes a player much better in the early-game phase, is what I call "laning skills". The ability to make decisions when you can see most of what happens around the map. Then there's the whole last-hitting and whatsnot part which I don't have time to cover.

The next, for lack of a better term, is what I call "gameplay skills". Gameplay of course is too generic a term, but... whatever. This involves making decisions when you can't see most or even all of the enemy team. Strangely, the most simple action also is the one decision that is the most difficult to make soundly. This skill is most of the time as simple as "which lane do I go to".

The last is what I term "engagement skills". Knowing what to do when you can see more or less everyone... but this time, when they're all together. In theory it's simple, simply being at the correct place, casting the correct spell at the correct guy at the correct time. The difficulty of this decision making skill is that a player very often has a 0.1 second window to make any decision. What this skill comprises of is usually a mixture of logical planning (to know what one should do when the engagement begins), instinct (to do what one does when the situations aren't too ideal), and desperation (what to do when the shit hits the fan, or if you want something more specific, when your Earthshaker just got hexed before the battle started).

What's the point of all this? To give myself so much more to elaborate on when I next have the time. Hurhur.

For now, I book in.

In the meantime, you can go find out where your weaknesses are at. I know for a fact that my gameplay skills are shit.

Edward Cullen.

What the girls seem to love about him.
- Has superhuman strength
- Has skin as hard as stone
- Has cold skin too
- Likes to play baseball
- Has screwed up eye colours
- Kills stuff
- Is immortal
- I guess having white skin is a turn on too

And what, in my limited understanding of the female mentality, aren't his most desirable mating traits.
- Drinks blood
- The whole 200 km/h thing. I understand that imba-fastness isn't high on the list of things desired
- The fact that Robert Pattinson looks like Ryuuk. You know, the SHINIGAMI FROM DEATH NOTE

Not that I've watched twilight.

So I have thus formed a mental picture of the most perfect mate ever, taking Edward's most desirable traits and removing all his undesirable ones.

I do have a rendition in fact. With all the detailed descriptions included... in HERE!!

ASTERISK* CHRISTMAS PARTEH
let's countdown to christmas!

are you invited?
i've sent out a bunch of sms-es to immediate asterisk* friends and fans. so if you haven't got one, yups you guessed it... YOU'RE OUT. XP

for those who are friends but didn't get an sms (cos you changed number, or maybe I changed phone)... do let us know. =D

how can i get an invite?
hmm this is tough. if you can befriend any of the asterisk* babes between now and the 23rd and if you succeed, WE MAY JUST invite you along. haha.

the theme?
come as your nick. NO CHEATING.

THOSE WHO CHEAT RISK BEING TURNED AWAY AT THE DOOR.

venue
penthouse@upp bt timah
(actual address will be given to invited guests)

warning! gatecrashers will be tossed into the pool from the top floor

date/time
24 december, 6pm - midnight

rsvp pinksheep or furryfish before 22 dec!

Have you been desperately trying to buy ggshells and goldmember?
WAIT NO LONGER.

GST 5v5 Finals will be held at Networms this coming saturday! Prepaid cards, Shirts and other exciting items will be sold at networms! Refer to http://www.garenasg.com/index.php?showtopic=2147 for more info!

zzz

i am finally posting an article xD. MUAHAHAHAHA!!!!
*looks proudly around*

no more EMO EMO EMO EMO EMO
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
wait but i'm not emo
maybe lately
nah. it's just that i've cleared away all my whatever feelings in the past long long time
:-(
i think i shall stop writing in a "stream of consciousness" way
should i use more emoticons?
this is like a warped poem!
*dances happily*

So let's stuff all the stuff about history and thoughts and whatever before I degenerate this blog into... an actual blog.

My recent situation has led me to seek out methods of trying to train that someone in a situation such as mine can only resort to. Up till now, I've been pretty content with sticking with a small group and finding draft matches with a small mix of people in my team. With recent developments, I have, well, no team to train with, and hey, everyone else is training with THEIR team.

Occasionally there is the urge to join up as a last in a draft match. Experience has shown that me going out to solo look for 4 teammates usually has a very disastrous outcome.

The unfortunate case is that I actually have normal sleeping hours (as your parents would most likely put it) unlike the rest of the draft matching community, and am not home on most nights or days, an unfortunate result of my current job. So for one, finding a match during my playing hours is much more time consuming.

And of course since it takes so long for a match to pop up, I don't check IRC or other channels that often for people who are finding players, which multiplies the entire effect of me being unable to find a match since I miss most opportunities from checking too late.

Doing stuff like writing this article of course, means that for 99% or more of the time that I'm on my computer, I'm not actually checking any other forms of communication with the rest of the world (99% of course being a high figure since checking any forms of communication requires so damn little time).

Next, joining 4 friends as a last generally lends you with very little power to do anything. It is not uncommon to be in a situation where I find myself completely powerless to change the game - not by my own demerit but by the whole power ditch bestowed upon someone in my position. That being said, there are a fair enough share of games where I join a bunch of decent players that make the game worthwhile.

That being said, you, my ever discerning reader, will no doubt have concluded that I have been indulging myself in the *DREADED PUBLIC GAME*.

On Garena, I find myself actually in a surprising amount of pretty good pubs with a lot of players worth their salt. That being said, I've held a pretty low impression of the "public game", so what I term a "surprising amount" is somewhere close to around 5% of games. There are a lot of games where a team of competent players will decide to gank up against a team of, well, not so competent players (a judgment passed simply because of statistics). Those sometimes end up as challenges, but often end up as a situation like one described above. A very frustrating sequence of events that you have almost absolutely no control over.

Almost all the cases stated though, are minorities. Not to the extent of being exceptions (though I would consider some games to be exceptional considering the statistical probabilities), but not games that I would include in a sweeping description of the general "public game".

There are some things that can be learnt about public games, though there is nothing I can think of that can be learnt FROM public games that cannot be learnt in a proper good match. It is an amazing thing that where the general "public game" is the most common mode of play for DotA, it defies most of what the game is about. Indeed, DotA is one game where, and increasingly so nowadays, coordination and teamwork is absolutely essential. Yet majority of what happens in "public games" has at least one team lacking in any basic team work or coordination, and some things are impossible to learn without practicing.

Having read thus far into my exposition, you might be disappointed to know that there is no magnificent revelation about the DotA pub in this post. With all the above being flashed out, the next bit is about a specific way to make your DotA pub much more enjoyable.

Tada. The key is to play with ONE friend. Suddenly everything is much easier. If by any chance both of you join a random pub, chances are that by bringing in one friend who is a competent player, you are statistically more likely to win. The challenge is what happens when you fight a bigger group of friends on the other side (mostly on the hosting side... perhaps it might be an unjustified generalisation, but friends on the scourge side usually end up just leaving together), or in the surprisingly likely event where your teammates are utterly atrocious. Perhaps it only is a surprisingly likely event because most of the games where mine teammates aren't utterly atrocious end up being short and not very memorable games, but this is where the fun begins.

Because suddenly, when you have just one good friend amongst all the blazing noobness, the game becomes CHALLENGING as opposed to FRUSTRATING.

The impact dealt to the game by one single good player is nothing compared to that brought about by a pair. This statement I have yet to put into proper explanation, but is one of those statements that simply feel right, and at least seem empirically correct for my case.

I would love to discuss more about this, but this post is already dragging too long for me to write down all the things I love to write down about. Perhaps I'll explore this further, with more specific case studies, but like I said, I never actually follow up any of my points do I?

Anyway, I was playing a game today, and all of a sudden I experienced a fresh feeling I have yet to encounter in the past few months. Forgive the vague analogy, but it was as if I was myopic and suddenly got glasses. Basically, I started consciously thinking about almost everything that was currently happening in the game. It was almost a heightened sense of map awareness, coupled with a clear idea of what to do against a visible enemy.

Makes one wonder if it's possible to recreate such a sense all the time. It feels a bit lousy sometimes to simply play by instinct and occasionally just have everything fall in your way.