The DOTA2 / MOBA community just seems horrendous, true or false that just stops me from having any type of interest in this at all.

Join the counter strike community instead, where we shoot first and explain later!!

The MOBA community makes me want to eat bleach.

I know the League of Legends heroes and competitive teams fairly well though, which is why it's easier for me to watch than Dota 2. Doubt i'll get into it unless my friends do - got into LoL because I had someone to bounce questions off of.

The Noob Stream has actually had better general commentating, especially when Purge is on, than the normal stream, which is mostly just kinda half assed hype yelling.

@justkamtoo: Are there any gaming communities that don't seem shitty - especially when they're this large? The worst people are always the loudest - it doesn't matter if it's Dota, League, fighting games, Call of Duty, PC 'master race' people, etc etc.

If I based my opinion on games on their 'internet communities' I'd probably never end up playing anything!

I watched this stream almost exclusively yesterday and it was great. Everyone involved was doing a good job of explaining things. It's still a lot to take in, but watch a few games and you'll definitely start to pick things up a lot faster than you might ordinarily with a traditional commentary stream.

Purge in particular was excellent (as you might expect from a guy who has dedicated a fair amount of time in the past few years to helping newer players), but Pyrion, Shane, Blitz, and Suns were all doing a pretty good job as well. Purge even did a good job of explaining core slang (such as "nerf" or "PotM") which is commonplace in the other streams but bizarre to newcomers, even going so far as to explain their origins.

I watched the first one(?): MVP vs VP, but it was really tough to get anything from it. There seemed to be a lot of good information during the character picking stage, but the casters music was on and drowning out their voices, and then the general game volume during fights would drown them out as well. I messed around with my audio settings and nothing changed, so the spectator mode seemed to be going through their settings. I fell asleep so I didn't see if the 2nd team did anything different.

The key thing with SUNSfan and Purge (one team that did the Newbie Stream) is that both have a bunch of "caster" experience already. Purge has extensive experience playing and creating videos around specific elements of the game: One of my favorite series he does is "Purge Comments on a Pub Game" where he select a public game and does commentary on it. These are not high level play but he pulls the game apart analyzing what went right and more importantly what went wrong. SUNSfan has been helping to run DotaCinema which also features a lot of video production and commentary like Purge where he pulls apart games for comedy but that is still the same analytic eye.

So these guys have a lot of experience looking at and commenting over games and that translates well into this style of "Lets look at midlane, this player is doing okay but he can't leave or he wil fall behind but his bottle is empty. He can wait for the runes to spawn here (top) or here (bottom) or he can call the courier and carry it back to the fountain to refill. Lets see what he does...." where other more hardcore casters would just ignore that and concentrate on whether who has the higher last hits/net worth which will lead to who will win mid.

30 minutes of logos *pling*

I would agree that the great majority of what Valve releases to the public is brilliant, at least in the long run. Talented people and a refined process of execution.

It truly makes me wonder about the kinds of insanity that get erased from the whiteboard.

Pyrion has been doing a lot better today being informative, but I still miss Purge.

Is it bad that I still don't know whats going on?

I play Dota, but pretty casually, so hopefully I'll learn something from this stream too. Purge and Sunsfan and really good commentators.

Thanks for the suggestion Patrick!

Big online gaming communities in general are pretty bad esp. in pub games. Also Twitch chat that have a lot of viewers also generally can be pretty bad as well.

The newbie chat for the most part has been pretty good and asking legit questions on there gets some honest, non-trolling answers from a lot of the people on chat and from the mods.

This.

They do a GREAT job explaining the intracacies of the game. Very informative stuff even for me who doesn't necessarily follow the pro scene or even play the game regularly anymore but I used to play it a lot and already have a grasp and knowledge about how the game is played.

Thanks Patrick, this stream is great and makes me understand this whole DOTA thing a lot more!

I feel that from this stream & watching a good month or so of Brad's Daily DOTA I have a basic understanding of the game. Still, just like every valve game, the amount of shit you get from people as a beginner playing with randoms just isn't worth my time to learn.