@ravelle said:

That's actually, as an experienced player, one of the reasons that I hate playing against the bots: they don't really behave realistically at all. I think it's much easier to play against real people.

Agreed - bot matches are good if you can have somebody with you on comms to run through the basics of the game and understand things like warding, creep pulling, roshan and last hits etc. However once you've got that down imho the only real way to enjoy it and learn at the same time is single draft and pub matches with one or two friends/people willing to go with you.

You'll have a few spankings and maybe a pug duder will shout at you, but let that shit slide off and spend some time encountering various different heroes and combinations - youll find yourself discovering characters you never normally would have picked (as someone like me for example who after 200 hours still doesnt really like playing melee if i have the chance, i was pleasantly surprised to have so much fun with spirit breaker) and your overall game will improve much faster than just playing 30 bot matches in a row and assuming you got shit down!

Had a few matches over the weekend with a couple of new guys and some more experienced than i players (both in house and random pugs with a gb party set up) and had a great time in all of them! especially the game with @rawknro11a and co. right at the end, we lost but it was a close match, and considering the team we were up against the new guys adapted very well to early mistakes!!

Keep at it ladies and gents, the community has been a helluva lot more active and enjoyable of late, and most of the gb guys dont mind jumping in and botting/inhousing or pugging with you to show you just how deep this rabbit hole will go.

I'm on most nights after about 11pm GMT (after my WoW raids finish - yeah i know.....) for an hour or two - and am currently teaching 2 guild mates how to play from scratch.
If you see Omegacydonia in the chat group feel free to hit up and well have some more midnight dota madness.

And morn Lion getting singled out by clockwerk every damn teamfight :D

I was Sven in that game. Even though we lost the match, we won some team fights when we were stuck in our base. It was a lot of fun.

My first match against people and I was doing pretty well and this this happened.

Oh shit man, thats some major bad luck right there

Yeah, I had multiple matches were people including me get disconnected through out the match, resulting in idle characters. Would be cool if bots automatically took over between connects.

@ravelle: It's worth mentioning that once someone is D/C'd for five minutes, you can leave without penalty. Sometimes if the people are still cool with it it's worth playing it out.

I usually have 1 or 2 disconnects during bot matches. I hope they get that thing sorted out.

@surferz: Yea, was a fun AND educational match. Still feeling out the different heroes to find the one that suits my playstyle.

I feel like it's worth mentioning that my friends and I that play pretty much nightly have been having really sporadic but nasty issues with the servers. Frequently that's 200+ pings and 30-50% packet loss, along with the occasional disconnect. Probably due to the increasing popularity of the game, Valve needs to get on it with scaling their infrastructure up.

Also worth mentioning for new players, type "-ping" in the game chat (minus the quotes) for a latency check. It'll be in the upper right hand corner.

is everyone here so advanced that they would yell at me ceaselessly for boneheaded mistakes yet? :(

This is probably an exceptionally dumb question but can anyone tell me how to find replays of games? Not my own games, but actual people who know what they're doing so I can follow along with a couple heroes and get a sense of a how a good team goes about it's business and how good players play their roles. I can't see how to do that. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious.

@ripelivejam:

Hell no. I've played about 10 bot matches solo and only one with another player and I'm still learning basic controls and such. I didn't even know how to pull up the chat for more than half the game I played. But I'm not much of a pc gamer so keyboard hotkeys are a foreign concept to me...

@pyromagnestir: If you go into the 'watch' tab you can usually see some higher bracket match made games (people with like 600+ wins) playing live. Alternatively, the 'notable streams' thread should have some stuff that'll help out, especially if you're looking for someone to commentate.

Once you've got a basic grasp on the different items and rolls, I recommend you check out the "Dota 2 Fails of the Week" and the Top 10 of the Week on Youtube. Fails of the Week usually show some really entertaining mistakes that beginners often make but don't even realize. A lot of it is hero specific, so you should at least have a basic idea of all the roles different heroes have, but if you have a tab on the dota wiki open you shouldn't have any problems keeping up after that. Top 10 is just the opposite of the fails of the week and just shows some really entertaining strategies/lucky bastards.

@ripelivejam: Absolutely not. I'm terrible right now. I been just playing against bots but I'm thinking of trying a co op match against bots because the bots are unreliable to play against. I was playing a bot match with nightstalker and I was horrible but the bots do things that most players wouldn't do (like not harassing in lane, pushing the lane to hard, not doing roshan after they killed entire team) so I don't think I'm learning the basics right. If you ever wanna play, just add me on steam and send me a message there or here. Steam id is gogosox82.

@pyromagnestir: @gogosox82: good deal. DOTA2 scrub league in effect??

I would. Best not ruin our games against these bots. This is for tournament money, yo!

But seriously, send me a Steam friend request and we'll play sometime.

I started playing on Monday and have mostly been using Warlock and the hero guides have been really helpful. So If anyone want's to be supported (terribly) and figure out when to attack for last hit and not second to last or after last. Feel free to add me on steam: aromarood

No bot match is going to prepare you for the real thing. Bot matches are good for getting to know your character's spells, timing the combinations of them, testing out item builds and things of that nature. When you play in a real match there's gonna be a lot of unpredictable shit going on. Sure it makes sense that a team would do roshan if they made sure the other team was dead, but you wouldn't believe how many times the other team will try roshan for no reason at all.

Since all your bot matches don't count for anything, you will start at the lowest pools anyway when you start playing. As long as you get familiarized enough to have a rough list of items to get and a plan of what order to get your skills at (as well as knowing what your skills are), you should be fine enough to just jump in and learn on the fly.

@ripelivejam: Sure. Anyone who wants to add me on steam can and we'll set up a time to play : )

@staticfalconar: I think your right. I think I'm just gonna start playing matches against people and see how it goes.

Not a newbie (level 29, so not really a vet either), but I hopped into a game with a few of you earlier today. My name in game was Dmitri Ivanovakoffovichakowski. Was fun. I do have a regular group of friends I play with and am not really afraid to solo queue, but it was an enjoyable game.

If any other not so new players want to group up, I'll be watching. I don't really want to go up against really new players. Makes me feel like a dick (but if it has to be that way, I'll just play a hard support).

I'd be glad to group up and give some tips too. I do use my mic in-game.

Well, I'm another League of Legends convert to the Dota world courtesy of Brad. So, let's play?

Steam ID: cheishxc.

@pyromagnestir: it's not just higher bracket matches in the watch tab, as far as I know you can find any match making game ever played under Watch => Recent games, just filter by whatever hero or player you like.

Yeah, but the ones that show up by default when you first click the watch tab are, which is what he meant

After a few human matches it became obvious that the match making isn't matching players of similar skills. We had one game where two guys on our team went on to get a combination of 60 kills before the end of the match and the latest game had the opposing team set up player traps and coordinated efforts.

Isn't match making suppose to look at games played and your win/loss ratio?

@golguin said:

Yes, and it will as you actually get some games under your belt. If I'm remembering correctly, yesterday when I saw you in the GB channel and looked at your Dota profile, you had 2 wins. This means the game is going to match you up with other people who are around less than 10-20 wins. It has no way of knowing whether those people have played 10 bot games (like you) or have played a thousand hours of DotA and are now just making the switch to Dota 2 until both of you have played more games. By the time you're around 25-50 wins, the system should have a good idea of your skill level, as well as the skill level of those people that just stomped you.

And, just as another side note, sometimes games can get out of hand like that. Here's a game I played yesterday, in my first game ever as Skywrath Mage, for example. It's a combination of the playstyle and heroes of each team that can allow kills to rack up like that. Of note is that I've played well over 500 games of Dota 2, so the matchmaking system knows well enough who I should be matched up with.

The matchmaking system works completely fine and exactly how it should. Just like any other matchmaking system, it has to start everyone somewhere.

@golguin Keep in mind that there are cases where the hero combo has a profound effect on performance. There are synergies I can't even begin to figure out and when they popup in a steamroller match it surprises me every time.

@golguin:

As the others have said when you are at low number of games played the match making doesn't really have much to go on. And low unfortunately does not mean like 1-5, but more like sub 20 or sub 50. It really is that slow to converge. Thankfully once you get there the games start to become a lot closer and more fun.

That said, every once in a while either due to your team composition, or team work by the opponent or something else, you just get stomped. It eventually just happens. And I will say getting rolled in Dota does not get any more fun the more you play. That is probably the one thing in Dota that is the hardest. Learning what to do when you are getting owned that will actually help your team get less behind instead of more. I still don't know how to engineer a comeback very well and I've played over 600 hrs of Dota 2 according to Steam.

So keep at it and do everything you can to play with other people you know or fellow duders from here. NOTHING is more frustrating than solo queuing in Dota, IMO. Even 1 teammate that you can reliably communicate with increases your fun by so much.

Even that match last night where the team rage quit doesn't compare to taking on bots with random people. I can't even get my thing going because there is no coordination and once they are a certain level they just kill everything. I still did pretty good last night though.

Last night I did my third match against people and was able to get my second win. I might havea new favorite class. Played as OmniKnight and loved doing the pure support role. Ended up with I think a 2-3-10 KDA, but the guy I laned up with went 26-1-11. Felt good playing the support role. Also seems like the best way to make friends because the guy was reslly nice and grateful.

I am just going to start adding all the steam id I am seeing in the forums to hopefully team up with some giantbombers.

Mostly a console gamer but decided to give dota a go after hearing brad talking about it. My steam id is monkshaw

Now that Co-op Bot Matches are codified (and rewards small exp and items) I think it is the best way to "practice". When I do Co-Op Bot, I usually go random just to get experience with with a heroes I wouldn't normally select. If we win that is great if not "oh well". The thing the computer does extraordinarily well is being hyper efficient on last hits and denies which keeps you on the ball watching the enemy while trying to keep on top of your lane last hits and denies.

What the AI is really good at is running Gank Trains once they hit a certain point. Last two games against bot have been pretty crazy with one match being 3v5 towards the end and another being a come from behind victory when 2 team members decided it was all over and a 3rd got a dc. Both were wins and proved very good for playing against humans that are capable of panicking and being disorganized.

Had some more great 3am finishes playing with the gb group again and feeling shit at work 4 hours later because of it! cheers duders!

Also wanna drop this screenshot for possibly the one thing you really do not want to see when the game gets paused. despite the best advice during the pause waiting from the GB duders as to how i could potentially avoid this hook - it still grabbed me.

Power word healing and golem stun got me out alive though.

@omegapirate: It obviously doesn't mean much now, but although first instinct would be to run up and to the right to dodge the hook, your best bet was probably to try to run left behind the ranged creeps in the hopes that the hook would grab them instead of you.

As far as general strategy is concerned, I think that, with your team comp, Windrunner should've been the one to pick up a Mek, freeing you up to get up your Ag's into Refresher that much quicker. Also, as you're building your Ag's, you generally would want to carry the Ogre Club over the Staff of Wizardry for the extra health; the extra mana and damage aren't really that useful to you on most support heroes, especially at 35 minutes. If you could, obviously, you'd want the Point Booster over both.

Also, don't necessarily neglect Upheaval for stats: Bonds -> Golem -> Upheaval is a devastating teamfight combo.

Yeah i went for first instinct and paid for it - haha.

as for the club choice, despite 240+ hours played im still finding my way around understanding the finer mechanics of stat boosting items and when to stack certain things, started off by manipulating power treads when viable but its still a lot to take in, it'll come with time :)

I've never seen upheavel be all that incredibly effective early game which is why i tend not to use it - however i guess once the 'core' abilities are maxed, maybe a point or two in there would serve a good use after the chains/golem combo

I feel that I finally had my first game as a "real" Queen of Pain. After getting stomped for days in GB matches where the level of some dudes pushed the group beyond our abilities I decided to jump into a random mm game just to try something new. Long story short I steam rolled the other team. Me and a Sniper were essentially carrying the whole team despite having an early dc. We almost lost too because the other two dudes were off chasing butterflies or something and did NOTHING when the creep was at our base wrecking our shit.

I now know the true fun of running around with more money than I knew what to do with because I hit max level 25 for the first time and had bought all the stuff I usually was able to buy. I just started going with the recommended item builds on the side of the store because I needed to burn cash.

The other team started sending out hit squads on me and I'd just Ult them away with my Scream of Pain and they'd run away...until I blinked to them and finished them off.

I'm super psyched because after feeling like I just wasn't doing well with Queen of Pain I shot up and became my own Gank Train.

Nice!

I still need to master my Drow skills, I usually go with the recommended items and a crystalis for crits mid to late game. Also last hitting is hard and people accusing me of auto attacking.

do you really need to be familiar with every hero in the game, and how familiar do you have to be? one of the things that seems way too daunting; it seems you have to know EXACTLY who to pick when going in a match, and you have to have experience with playing practically every character. you can't just focus on trying to understand and become good with one. basically i can't just pick, say, drow ranger and stick to that for awhile, or choose to just use that. is it possible just to focus on 2 or 3 heroes and have your bases covered?

also the purge guide seems a bit patronizing and only explains some basic concepts before going "learn to play better and you'll play better lawl" which doesn't really seem to be much help. and from what i've read so far it seems to be the better of the guides in that regard.

@ripelivejam said:

Yes, you absolutely need to know what all of the heroes do. Even if you don't plan on playing them, you'll still be playing against them; you need to know how to counter them by adapting your item build and playstyle accordingly.

The Purge guide explains the basic concepts; past that it's pretty much up to you to learn from playing. If you have any questions (basic or specific) I'll be happy to answer them here.

@ripelivejam: There is some basic stuff you can learn which is useful regardless of which hero you play. Last hitting, map awareness, ganking, warding etc. As for the heroes themselves it's a bit more complicated, obviously. Learning how their skills function, which hero counters another hero, good combos, item builds and general hero strengths and weaknesses.

However generally it's enough to know how they function, you don't have to master them to know their abilities. I've been playing since the original dota and I've never played meepo and invoker. So basically I'd check up on which heroes are newbie friendly and play those first. The truly complex ones like meepo, invoker and pudge come last.

In short, just find a group of people to play with and it'll be fine.

Hey there.

I've just played a couple of hours of the game, mainly with bots and co-op bot matches. Still trying to learn the ropes and stuff. Would love to have a friendly group to play with, whether it's vs bots or vs actual humans.

Steam ID is dstopia. Thanks all!

Still spectating but loving it! About how long does it usually take for someone to become, well..decent at this game?

I just started playing last week; no real matches yet, just messing around with bots. I understand most of the basics and have been slowly working on learning the roster. I usually play a support/babysitting lion, but it’s pretty hard to practice teamwork with bots.
Steam ID is Brigham

I just started playing last week; no real matches yet, just messing around with bots. I understand most of the basics and have been slowly working on learning the roster. I usually play a support/babysitting lion, but it’s pretty hard to practice teamwork with bots.
Steam ID is Brigham

I just want everybody to know that Riki is the bomb. It took me a while to find a hero that really made the game click for me, but I think Riki is it.

If any noobies need help picking a hero, I have found this list to be super-helpful.

Edit: Also, my Steam ID is, you guessed it, Jrinswand. I'm a noob, but I'd love some friends to play with.

WARDS WARDS WARDS.

After losing 3 games in a row we had a great long match today (70min) and holy shit I now know the importance of wards. We were pretty evenly matched to our opponents skill-wise I'd say, but some proper warding by my teammates really brought us through early and mid-game.

N00b for fellow n00b companionship.Steam ID: GigaRAMNebula

You can find me in the GB Dota 2 chat, and Steam Group.

I've just started playing Dota 2 last week and I've only played a few bot matches trying out different heroes. I would love to be able to play with some more people and learn more about Roshan, creep pulling and items.

Steam ID is Spectre Sigma

I'm also in the Steam group and the in-game chat.