Five DotA Allstars features we don’t miss in Dota 2

Inability to reconnect to the game

No matter what money you spend on a computer, the Internet and everything you need to play, no one has canceled equipment failures. At any moment, the connection can disappear for just a couple of minutes – and in Dota 2 this is no longer a problem. But the Warcraft III engine did not allow reconnecting to the game if the disconnection lasted long enough or your IP address changed during reconnection. That is, if the Internet disappears and does not return in a minute, the match will be ruined both for you and for the people with whom you played.

In professional matches on the first “Dota”, in case someone nevertheless fails the Internet, the administration of the league immediately after First Blood and approximately every ten minutes saved progress – in Warcraft III even the network game could be resumed from the save. However, departures then happened extremely rarely. Which is surprising, considering that in the newer Dota 2, reconnections and pauses during matches have become the norm even in LAN tournaments, where there should not be any problems with hardware at all.

Lack of a single store based on

The quick purchase in DotA Allstars was, in fact, a separate element of the skill, which was gained with experience. The fact is that the items were scattered across four stores, in another four (and in later versions, in five and six) recipes were sold. To collect any full-fledged “slots”, you had to click on different units on the base – for beginners, at first, purchases took several minutes.

The situation was aggravated even more by the fact that in earlier versions, when six slots were occupied, it was impossible to pick up the last component so that everything would come together. This was assisted either by a courier or by a circle at the base where all purchased items were sent. Again, for experienced players this was not a problem: they easily threw something on the ground to collect the slot, and then picked it up. But for beginners, especially those who have never played Warcraft III (and there were much more of them in Dota than many people think), it was not easy to figure it out.

Inability to change hotkeys

Not all Dota fans who got carried away with it from the second part know what is the point of setting up with Legacy binds. They are taken exactly from DotA Allstars – in Warcraft III it was impossible to reassign ability keys. Usually they were assigned so that the hotkey letter was included in the name of the corresponding spell in the English version of the game. And on an unfamiliar hero, it was easy to get confused about the buttons if the abilities needed to be applied very quickly and in a certain order. Leveling up new levels was also more difficult: you had to first press the + (hotkey O), and then the ability key. And if everything was not so bad with the active spells (IceFrog selected the buttons closer to each other), then the “passives” could be assigned to N or other keys on the unused half of the keyboard.

But it was even more difficult with the inventory. By default, it was controlled by the left and center rows on NumLock. Considering that almost all players were holding a mouse in their right hand, and the left hand was closer to WASD, the rapid use of Scythe of Vice, Dagon and other active slots also required preparation and getting used to. Alternatively, you could install a third-party program that could edit inventory hotkeys, like WarRun or WarKey ++. But if it worked at home, then in computer clubs such an opportunity was far from always present.

Lagging hosts

Platforms with ladders and their own host bots appeared towards the end of the DotA Allstars lifecycle. Prior to that, her fans found games on Battle.net or in Garena, where matches were hosted by one of the players. And very often it happened that at least one of those present in the lobby had problems with a particular server. The whole game had to read complaints in the chat, which host is a bad person. In addition, some of his actions outside of Dota, such as minimizing to the desktop, led to freezes for everyone in the game. And this is not to mention the ping, which could go off scale for individual players, even if they live several hundred kilometers from the host.

The problem was aggravated by the fact that stable and unlimited Internet was a rarity at that time. At the same time, the server’s traffic went about 5-7 times faster than the players who connected to the lobby, so no one wanted to be the host, because it was better to play ten games with ping and lags than one or two games with zero latency. the same money. “

Maphackers

Complaints about cheaters in Dota 2 have become as commonplace as stories about poor matchmaking and constant ruins on the part of teammates. Despite the fact that the software for the game from Valve has extensive functionality, the most important component – Maphack – does not work perfectly in Dota 2 and does not provide much information. The cheater can only see teleportations and death of forest creeps, and he will not see all the movements of the enemy due to the peculiarities of the engine. In Warcraft III, Maphack showed absolutely everything, even invisible units.

The thing is that WC III automatically saved a recording of the last match during the game – the file was called Last Replay.w3g. And the attackers learned to read it and broadcast the data directly to the card. The only caveat is that invisible units, wards and those who were in the fog of war could not be attacked. But this made life even easier for cheaters: it was impossible to prove directly that they were using Maphack. Ladders like iCCup and Dotalicious had anti-cheats that banned anyone who used this method. But before their appearance, maphackers were more common than cheaters in modern CS: GO.