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There is a $30,000,000 Prize for Playing a Video Game You Never Heard of
Every year, a bunch of the best gather to instantly become multi-millionaires
I’ve played DoTa for almost two decades now. It’s the most difficult, elegant, misery-inducing, and gratifying experience I have ever known.
A million iterations of this game have existed — with each change, a birth and re-birth have occurred.
Defense of the Ancients didn’t start as a standalone game — it started in the idea lab of Blizzard’s Starcraft engine. It was a modification of the actual game. That game was eventually known as DoTa when the concept was ported over into Warcraft 3.
The best analog for DoTa is a chess game on steroids where your moves, instead of sequential and turn-based, are in real-time and split-second.
DoTa stayed as a modification on the Warcraft 3 engine for many years before Valve began to develop Dota 2, a standalone version which became the popular entity it is today.
Dota 2 is heavily complex.
The game involves ten heroes chosen between two teams. Two sides will fight along a map that looks like this for resources, gold, kills on enemy players, and objectives.