Action Real Time Strategy

OK we all know theres more genres than this right? What about MMO's? What about mobile apps? what about RTS? Yes yes yes, I hear your cries for more, but I only have enough room for 3 more webpages unfortunately. Because of this, I have chosen the 3 genres of gaming that I am the most knowledgable about, have played competitively and still play today. I no longer play MMO's due to work and UNI commitments as well as finding them no longer as challenging as vanilla WoW or Ultima Online and haven't played any RTS solid since starcraft, Tiberium Sun and Red Alert 2.

The key player to the ascension of this genre has been Defence of the Ancients (DOTA) downloaded from GetDota.com. This was originally a mod created for Warcraft 3 roughly a decade ago and has grown to be one of the most played genres around today. Development into new standalone games for this genre coming out since 2010 this is a growing genre filled with exciting play and some of the most skilled players in the world. Dota 2 is on the horizon with 2 other big players Heroes of Newerth (HoN) and League of Legends (LoL) released and showing promise. With HoN more designed for Pro players and LoL designed purely for noobs DOTA 2 is looking to have a balance between the two, including elements which made the game great and a system to allow noobs learn over time with little effect on ratings. With this system in place Dota 2 should be to easy to learn and difficult to master.

The vast majority of my compeditive gaming is in this genre, having played since 2003 I have played many versions of the game including the first failed game to join the genre Demigod. I have played in many inter-Lan cafe tournaments, local tournaments and WCG qualifiers but my greatest achievement came from coming 4th in a WCG qualifier in 2007 with my clan BUFU. We went 6 wins 1 loss in the qualifier losing to a travelling malaysian team. We entered the WCG as a massive underdog coming from canberra, having no reputation and seeing some of the best teams in the world gathered in the one massive hall.

They called us up to register our team and nominate our main picks and secondary for the tournament as captains mode had not yet been implemented in Dota. I played as Priestess of the Moon (POTM) along with Earthshaker, Tinker, warlock and Tidehunter. We has an unorthidox lineup which we played to perfection come opening day. We won our first 3 rounds with zero losses. In round 4 we lost our first and after a pep talk we were set for game 2. It wasnt until somewhere around the 70 minute mark where we looked like we had a chance but an epic show of teamwork and skill proved us superior. It started with a skilled long range 5 second arrow hitting pudge as he walks up the ledge in the middle lane as we pushed hard, combined with a blind blink-ulting tide hunter catching all 5 members then a blink ulting earthshaker combined with an ulting warlock and myself leaping in and unleashing the powerful dps of an end-game POTM, tinker comes in and quadruple nukes their strongest hero, Darkterror, dropping him in seconds with all the area-of-effect dps we are dealing. We managed to kill all 5 of them within about 7-10 seconds and began to kill the middle barracks. 3 of them buy back and we begin to fight again, darkterror leaps in and ults but I leap away and launch an arrow hitting him for a 4 second stun nullifying any damage he could do in his ultimate. A thankful warlock promptly curses and poisons him as he runs away, a flurry of chained stuns and a double nuke from tinker makes sure darkterror is a threat no longer as we force the other 2 team mates back and begin to triple Rax them. They concede after the 3rd barracks is killed and we start the last round.

The final round is nowhere near as impressive as the second with us winning early with a 8 kill streak from our soloing tinker and zero deaths from our team within 20 minutes easily ensuring victory. In round 4 though however we were completely outclassed by a european team showing amazing teamwork and strategy. They shut us down completely with silencer and rikimaru, a devastating silence combo and in both games silencer got a "sheepstick" as early as 25 minutes. We were knocked out in round 4 but we managed to secure a top 64 spot, something like 58th out of almost 300 teams.

In 2008 we managed to qualify for the WCG again, this time with Captains mode and with a new line-up we were sure we would succeed. In round 1 we struggled alot with teams using invoker which we had not picked and with a skilled chen on the other team ganking early we had to play very conservatively. We managed to win 2/1 after a very messy few games. We were knocked out in round 2 with consecutive losses with the same issues, so a less exciting scenario for 2008 however but I managed to take alot out of the experience.

Since then I havent played much compeditive play in Dota, thought I have in HoN. In a random HoNcast inhouse game I managed to secure a spot with reknowned players like Angry_testie and H4nni. I was profoundly lucky in this game, playing in bot lane on the sentinel side, I managed to snake the rune at the bottom spawn and go to mid and gank. I was voodoo with a bubbles on my team in mid against a wretched hag. I would release my stunning cask while he sat next to a ranged creep, stunning him 2 times for 2 seconds while i curse him. Bubbles nukes in and uses his aoe silence allowing us both to rain down dps on his face. The curse continues to do damage over the 15 seconds killing him on the last tick. I successfully did this 3 times while killing bottom multiple times with nymph constantly giving me mana and stun/heal comboing with my stun and curse. By the time the game was conceded at 17 minutes I was 8 kills 0 deaths and my video on HoNCast.