Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes silly, sometimes earnest column about Dota 2. The following was originally posted on the Three Lane Highway Tumblr in September 2013 - we're republishing it today as Chris is currently on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic. Enjoy!

In 2005 the late David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech to graduates at Kenyon College, Ohio. I m going to quote a few paragraphs of it below, but before I do I want to lay out why it is relevant to you, a person who presumably came here to read about Dota.

The majority of the things you need to learn to be good at Dota are not things that will make you good at real life. You are probably never going to land a sick Sacred Arrow on a fleeing mugger. You won t place wards at strategic locations around your cubicle to let you know when you should be alt-tabbing away from Reddit. You re not going to invest an unexpected tax return - sensible as it might seem to do so - in a courier upgrade and the first parts of a Mekansm.

But game knowledge isn t the sum of what makes a person - or a team - successful. There s another skill ladder that every player needs to climb, and its rungs are the principles of empathy, leadership, and mood-management that are broadly ignored, from time to time, by everybody, and that if performed well indicate that you re making some progress as an actual human being in addition to improving your wizardsmanship.

Dealing with abuse from other players is something that newcomers need to deal with, but learning not to become an abuser is just as important. Dota is an emotive, social game, and anger and frustration and the urge to blame are inevitable by-products of playing it. Improving means learning to see anger and frustration for what they are - hindrances - and developing strategies for dealing with them. Indulging in rage because you feel bad is as detrimental to your team as not buying wards because you can t be bothered.

The reason that most players don t bother to filter their emotions is simple: it s hard, and it requires constant work. Everybody slips up, even people who spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. The funny thing about learning to see anger as a personal failure is it makes you more aware of just how many mistakes you really make. Your skill doesn t improve in a straight line: it s a sinusoidal wave, and when you learn to forgive yourself for the odd lapse of judgement you ll naturally become more able to extend this sympathy to others. It s a virtuous cycle, equivalent to the vicious cycle that makes players rage at their teammates, wreck morale, throw the match, rage at their team mates, and so on, and so on.

It helps to establish rules for yourself. Structured thinking allows you to readily find a response to a crisis when what you really want to do is yell at someone. What form those rules take is something that you ll have to figure out for yourself, based on the level you play at, the people you play with, and your own bad habits. For the sake of demonstration, however, here are mine.

Never begin a sentence with why , or frame criticism as a question.

Consider the absurdity of yelling why would you do that?! at somebody who just made a mistake. They don t have an answer. If they knew enough to avoid making a mistake, they wouldn t have made a mistake. It s far more likely that they misclicked, or weren t aware of something crucial - an imminent enemy TP, an ult on cooldown, a ganker suddenly going missing from another lane. In that moment you can either try to understand their mistake or you can interrogate them about it to make yourself feel better: I suggest the former. Why would you do that!? is rhetorical flatulence, and it s completely appropriate to roll your eyes at people who noisily indulge themselves in it.

Talk about what you need to do, not what you should have done.

Lectures aren t solutions. The time to explain ideal teamfight strategies or item builds is later, after the game, if you play regularly enough with your teammates to make that worthwhile. In-game, suggest simple, next-five-minute plans and do so calmly. Okay, guys, let s focus on getting BKBs up beats why the fuck don t you have a BKB? It s core before X, and Y, and Z every single time.

Offer as much praise as criticism.

Okay, it s going to shit. The match is running long and your team s early-and-mid-game advantage is starting to peter out. It s clear that Spectre doesn t know what they re doing - a Vanguard and a Crystalys at forty minutes, really? - and the enemy has just slapped a Roshan attempt out of your hands with a solid teamfight victory. It s time to find another plan, and that probably means asking people to correct their play. Tell Spectre to go and farm, if you need to, but mark that in your mind as a negative strike against team morale - and start looking for a positive to match it with.

Maybe you pick up a few free kills on an enemy support because of Jakiro s excellent aggressive warding. Say something! It might not turn the game around, but it makes a difference. It establishes that it is still possible to do good when most players will be reaching for the FF keys.

We think of Dota matches as being won on economic momentum - gold, kills, towers - but they re also won on psychological momentum. If you burn a load of goodwill by putting someone down, start figuring out how you re going to earn it back.

Be honest about your mistakes, learn from them, and move on.

This is the one I struggle with the most. Being forthright when you ve fucked up is great for a number of reasons. It establishes that you re actively thinking about your play, that you re willing to improve, and it defangs other peoples ability to pin the entire match on your failure. What comes next is continuing to play as if it didn t happen, making whatever adjustments you need to make and then choosing to think of the game ahead as winnable. I m sorry, guys, I m having the worst game ever is as much a self-serving indulgence as what the hell are you doing?! , really.

Figuring this stuff out is one of the coolest things about learning to play Dota. Not only is it transferable to everything else you ll do in life, but it hooks into philosophical principles that apply to the game s mechanics as well. The principles I ve listed above require engagement, awareness, and an active choice to play better. The social challenge of Dota requires a separate but parallel set of skills, another form of game-sense that allows you to take everything your brain can do with regards to perception and analysis and communication and apply it to more effectively wizarding the fuck out of five other people.

Next time you bash out FFS and ping a teammate s recent corpse fifteen times, consider that you re not only throwing the game but your potential enjoyment of the game. You are choosing the see the game only through the narrow lens of the part of yourself that is still two years old.

This lane goes both ways, of course. Being a good teammate will make you a more empathetic person, and learning to think more critically about your own responses to the world will make you a better teammate. So that s why you should go and read or listen to David Foster Wallace. There are lessons you can apply to your Dota performance that fall well outside the remit of any in-game guide.

Here are those paragraphs, by the way.



The point isn t that you should be chasing love and fellowship with everyone that matchmaking decides to party you with. It s that you have options. The urge to dispense blame indicates that you re resting in your lazy default position, blinkered by a totally natural but also totally surmountable habit of positioning yourself at the blameless centre of any given crisis. You have the power to not do that. You can place wards in the jungle of your own mind - and you should, because no-one else is going to do it for you.

You can read more Three Lane Highway by clicking right here.

Every Friday the PC Gamer team shines a torch into the dilated pupils of the week that was. As usual, read about the good stuff first, and then the not so good stuff on the second page

THE HIGHS

Samuel Roberts: Our first proper look at The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter made my week. I feel like I m looking at a hit in the making, and as a fan of almost any game that uses a Pacific Northwest-like backdrop the source of which is my ongoing obsession with Twin Peaks, as well as a strong liking for Alan Wake and Deadly Premonition and the richness of the environmental design and intriguing story, will no doubt find it an audience. It s so far from Bulletstorm in tone and pacing, and no doubt the ex-People Can Fly staff at The Astronauts are enjoying that difference.

Cory Banks: Ludum Dare 29 took place this past weekend, and it was the largest competition yet. Almost 2,500 games were created by some sleepless devs, an all-time high for the event. Take a second and think about that: Developers made 2,500 games over a weekend. I was just happy I got my laundry done.

Even better: all of these games are free. You can scroll through the entire list, but we ve picked out a few of our early favorites. Phil was fascinated by Beneath The City, a Thief-inspired, turn-based stealth game that challenges you to save your sister from a prison. Ian s early favorites are Beneath The Trolls, where you have to escape from a troll-filled cavern, and Atomical, which shrinks the escape theme of the game jam down to the atomic level. Even if these don t grab you, there are plenty more to choose from. If you re somehow out of games to play this weekend, you ll surely find something in this list.



Evan Lahti: Cheating is nothing to celebrate, of course, but we got loads of positive feedback on our investigation of hacking in multiplayer PC games this week. After the months of research that our writer Emanuel Maiberg dedicated to the story, we learned that the battle between cheating manufacturers and game developers is a constant one, and that the users of cheats themselves aren t universally the villains that we think they are.

An interesting fact that didn t make it into the final feature, Emanuel noted on Reddit, is that apparently games ported from Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 like Homefront were some of the most hackable because they were designed for a closed system.

Phil Savage: The mod scene is in an interesting place these days. On some level, you could argue that it had declined that the rise of accessible game engines like Unity means would-be developers have a better platform for hobby projects. Even where this isn't the case, the biggest projects are more likely to be released as standalone games as seen with The Dark Mod or Black Mesa.

Really, mods are just outgrowing the games they were once attached to. But even as this process continues, there are still plenty of people dedicated to expanding and improving the games that they love. We saw that plenty of times this week: the standalone Stalker: Lost Alpha introducing cut content back to Shadow of Chernobyl, Deus Ex: Revision bringing a new style to the immersive classic, Supreme Battlefeel beautifully retexturing Supreme Commander, and Morrowind Rebirth going back into labour. I wish mods were declining. That way I'd have more spare time.



Chris Thursten: The Dota 2 patch notes dropped at about two in the morning on a weeknight, which was actually pretty convenient given that I was still up and playing Dota at the time. I spent the next half hour going over the changes with my team on Skype. These bursts of social theorycrafting are one of my favourite things about a new patch even though Reddit will be reliably ahead of us in terms of unpicking the implications of every single change, there s something special about doing it ourselves. Now that the worst of the new bugs have been nixed (nyxed?), it s a great patch. I really like the changes to Axe moving Counter Helix to pseudo-random distribution might reduce the chances of a infini-spin rampage, but it raises the skill ceiling of the hero. He now plays a little more like Lone Druid, in that you re encouraged to keep an eye on your proc rates to ensure that you get those Counter Helix spins when you need them.

I m less in love with the changes to Phoenix, who has become one of my favourite heroes since he was introduced in January. Fire Spirits definitely needed a nerf I m not too fussed about that part but the massively increased cast point on Icarus Dive makes the hero a little bit less fun. His old hair-trigger escape-or-chase button meant that you could really push your luck with dives, whereas now you need to make sure you give yourself space to dive back if anything goes wrong. He feels less ballsy, now, which is a shame. I appreciate that a large number of people will have no idea what I m talking about. That s because you weren t up at 2am reading patch notes! Seriously, what s wrong with you.

Ben Griffin: Praise be, the Star Wars canon is being reined in. To prepare for the upcoming trilogy, it has been announced that the bloated, heaving Expanded Universe that stretches 36,000 years before The Phantom Menace and 130 years after Return of the Jedi is largely being jettisoned. That includes each and every Star Wars game, too. Will that give Visceral and EA a little bit more creative licence with the franchise in the future? Here s hoping.





THE LOWS

Cory Banks: I m pretty disappointed that Bungie isn t planning to bring Destiny to the PC. I m not a Halo fan by any means (though the series insistence on constraining your choice of weapons is one of my favorite FPS design choices), but a shooter MMO with Destiny s scope could surely find an audience on our platform. I applaud Bungie for at least being open enough to explain why it s holding off on the port, but I still think the studio is making a mistake. Prioritizing the PlayStation 3 version over the PC? Doesn t seem very forward thinking to me. Good luck with that.

Samuel Roberts: I echo Cory s disappointment over Destiny not coming to PC any time in the near future. I m sure the project, as it stands, is complicated for Bungie to pull off on the PlayStation and Xbox formats already, but skipping the PC is puzzling to me, particularly as the game's roots seem to draw heavily on many games that made their name on the platform. Destiny is arriving on two formats that can surely only have a year left in lifespan for a series that Bungie can potentially run for a decade, it s baffling to still not have that commitment to PC. I m sure it will happen eventually, though.



Phil Savage: I really liked Stealth Bastard. It skilfully combined puzzles, platforming and deadly robots, making for a well-paced campaign with some memorable levels. The developers have now announced Stealth Inc 2 having long since dropped the Bastard to appeal to family-friendly console markets. Normally, news of a sequel to a game that I like would be good news. Not this time: it's a Wii U exclusive.

I don't own a Wii U. Not many people do. At the end of 2013, Nintendo announced that it had shipped (not sold) 5.86 million units. For comparison, 5.35 million users are logged into Steam right now. Overall? Around 75 million. Stealth Inc 2's developers do have a reason for using Wii U, and if you squint a bit it almost makes sense. To paraphrase: Nintendo s console doesn't have many games, so it s easier to be noticed by the users it does have.

I kind of see what they're getting at, but limiting your potential audience seems crazy. If you're worried about people discovering your game, we can help. Email me and, if your game is good, I'll write about it. I'd rather do that than post a thirty-second trailer for a DLC map-pack.

Evan Lahti: Last week s Highs & Lows was published just as Dark Souls 2 was released, so we didn t get a chance to fully scold From Software for the issues the game experienced at launch. Though a 4/28 patch addressed a start-up crash affecting some players, the latest word from Namco on the VAC bans being wrongly issued by the game is that they ll have more information in the coming days.



Chris Thursten: I m not sure I ve disagreed with Ben this much since he killed an innocent backpacker with an axe for no reason. LucasArts distancing themselves from the Star Wars Expanded Universe feels like the final nail in a coffin that has been steadily building around the series since 1998. Like many others I used to love Star Wars it s one of the few fandoms I ve ever really belonged to - and the Expanded Universe was integral to that. It's what made Star Wars a world rather than just a series of movies and it s what protected the enthusiasm of its fans when the first shit movies started to appear, then the crappy cartoons, the awful games, and so on. The notion was this: that LucasArts could turn out bad products, but they d be drawn from a good place. Star Wars has been growing steadily more facile since LucasArts started to downplay the EU, and now that they re not bound to it at all there s nothing stop it from becoming a jumped-up firework display of a toy advert in earnest.

This is particularly true of the games. The best Star Wars games X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, Star Wars Galaxies, the Jedi Knight series are completely embedded in the EU not only in terms of their subject matter but also their philosophy. X-Wing is a simulator, for crying out loud it s founded on the notion that this is a coherent universe which can be simulated with a degree of accuracy. Throwing out the EU is a big FU to the fans, and an abdication of responsibility to present Star Wars with any degree of coherence in the future. I d be furious if the prequel trilogy hadn t already burned out my capacity to have feelings.

Ben Griffin: So this guy asks for my thoughts on episode one of The Wolf Among Us. It s good but really short, I tell him. Like half an hour long. Really? he says, surprised. Yeah, the whole thing is set in a bar. Turns out this is complete bollocks. The episode is actually several hours long and traverses a number of locations I was just playing on a friend s save file. I wondered why nothing made sense...

Three Lane Highway is Chris' sometimes silly, sometimes earnest column about Dota 2.

Dota 2 is a staircase. Like any other competitive exercise your progress is defined by improvements and plateaus, periods of progress and periods of stagnation. The thrill of the former is balanced by the frustration of the latter, and identifying what you're doing wrong and how to fix it isn't easy. You are asking yourself to find a lack in your own play that you are by definition ignorant of: the weakness of the staircase analogy is that staircases typically go in one direction. Dota 2's skill curve twists, turns, and doubles back on itself. Getting better is hard. It means finding new routes, opening new pathways within your thinking.

I'm one of those people that believes that doing difficult things carries inherent value: I think there's something vital about facing down the ways in which you suck. This is primarily why I don't agree with concepts like the 'trench' the notion that you can be trapped at a particular level of play by your teammates or the idea that the matchmaking algorithm is part of a secret conspiracy to ruin your day. Confirmation bias is a real thing. We are psychologically predisposed to discount possibilities that cast us in a bad light. Evolution has conditioned us to reject scenarios in which we are not the most impressive caveman. But that's all it is: caveman thinking, each player report issued in anger an impotent chest-thump from the part of your brain that hasn't seen much use since "hitting things with rocks" was the competitive enterprise du jour.

I could have written those paragraphs at any point in the last twenty-two months, and at any given time their relationship to my own skill level would be different. I'm writing them now because in the last two weeks I've been playing Team Matchmaking seriously for the first time, and it has been a revelation. In Captain's Mode I've found the next set of stairs leading upwards, and in this week's column I want to talk a little bit about how finding these areas of improvement can improve your experience of the game all over.

The team I'm playing with now is the third line-up I've been in since I started playing Dota 2. In the first instance we simply weren't experienced enough. With less than a hundred games each, we knew just enough to know how horribly unprepared we were for Captain's Mode. Drafting was an exercise in guessing which heroes might be scary to play against (Riki?) and picking our favourites because we had no idea what a coherent line-up might look like. On the back foot we'd panic and try to replicate something we'd seen on YouTube usually some variant on split-pushing but we had about as much success as the guy who figures he can land a plane because he's seen somebody do it on TV. By which I mean that we lost every game we played.

The second attempt happened more than a year later and it went just as badly. Despite being significantly more experienced we weren't ready for the rigors of organised play and, in particular, the additional social strain that comes from sorting people into fixed roles. A year of Single Draft, Random Draft and All Random had turned me into a generalist player, and in three matches I drifted between position five and position two without direction. It didn't work, nobody had fun, and we abandoned the enterprise.

I can't stress enough how different this third attempt has been. We've had our rough patches and lost a fair number of our practice matches in ranked Captain's Draft but we've been on a roll ever since we hit Team Matchmaking proper. It has felt like pedaling hard on a bike with the brakes on and then having the brakes taken off. We've been rolling. So much so that it's lead to a long winning streak in my non-team games I'm more confident and more relaxed even when I'm not playing with the usual crew. I feel like I jumped a matchmaking bracket overnight (my actual MMR does not reflect this.)

So, what changed? Three things, I think changes in playstyle and outlook that can be applied, I hope, to anybody struggling to find their footing after a thousand or so hours with the game.

First, I identified and doubled down on the things I can actually do. I am not a very good position five support even though I think I know how the role works. I cannot play Puck as well as I think I can. My Invoker is okay but I'm not fast or versatile enough with him. None of these things were especially easy to accept about myself, but when accepting them made it easier to figure out what I can actually do. I am very aggressive and quite good at identifying opportunities, so I make a decent initiator. I spent the bulk of my first few hundred hours with the game playing mid, and I feel comfortable controlling a lane by myself. These preferences have led me to the offlane, where I've discovered a new set of heroes Dark Seer, Centaur Warrunner, Batrider, Clockwerk, Nyx Assassin and a new role to play. Given a purpose, I've been able to figure out which parts of my pubmatch all-rounderhood to keep and which to lose.

I just don't let myself draft Puck anymore. Maybe I'll bring her back into the fold someday, but for now the equation has become much easier to resolve into fact: I am probably not going to win if I play her. I will probably win if I play Dark Seer. I like to win, and so the decision is obvious.

Second, I've found a group of people to team up with who are capable of giving and receiving feedback. We've had disagreements, but nothing severe. And in a few weeks we've figured out new strategies and new ways to communicate that effectively reduce the number of misunderstandings or arguments that occur. It makes a huge difference when you take the time to unpick situations and derive solutions from them. The things we've discovered aren't ground-breaking, necessarily "I'm ready" and "I'm ten seconds away" aren't the same thing, "run to me" is less useful than "run to mid" but they can make the difference between a gank and a counter-gank, a teamfight won and a teamfight lost. And it turns out that if you win your teamfights, you win your games.

Finally, I've found that treating team Dota as serious Dota has made me more relaxed and creative the rest of the time. Rather than try to impose my vision for How Things Should Be on a group of four strangers, or friends who don't necessarily share the same vocabulary, I treat these games as an opportunity to have fun and experiment. I never felt like I could pick a hero just because before. Now I can, because it's the team games that really matter. 'Matter' is a relative term, of course: we're amateurs in every sense of the word. But being able to satisfy my urge to theorycraft in a supportive environment has made me less of an asshole in all other contexts, and that's a win for everybody. In theory.

I don't expect everybody to want to repeat these steps. If you're happy picking Pudge every match then, honestly, this stuff won't apply and as tempting as it is to be snarky, I envy your commitment to your own enjoyment. Team matchmaking has helped me discover the same thing, in my own way. I suspect there's a lot of players stuck in limbo between bad and not-that-bad, however, wanting to take things more seriously but unable to find an environment that supports them. Seriously, guys: if this is you, form a team. Find each other, and form teams. Then, let's fight.

Valve has announced the teams that will participate in its third championship for our eSport of the year 2013, Dota 2's The International.

11 teams automatically qualify for the event, including the three prior champions:

Alliance
Titan eSports
Evil Geniuses
Fnatic
NewBee
Vici Gaming
Natus Vincere
Team DK
Invictus Gaming
Cloud9
Team Empire

These teams will compete against four regional qualifiers from the Americas, Southeast Asia, China, and Europe, in addition to the winner of the "Play-In" series, which is made up of the four runner-ups from the regional qualifiers. These regional qualifiers begin May 12 at 12:00 PM EST with the Americas series, ending May 27 with the conclusion of the European qualifier.

Valve's description of the qualifier format says that "In the first phase, each team plays every team once to determine which teams make it to the next phase. The top four teams advance and the other six are eliminated. The second phase is a double elimination best of three format with the 1st and 2nd place teams starting in the upper bracket and 3rd and 4th in the lower bracket. Each Regional Grand Finals is a best of five match."

All this action will lead up to the main event beginning July 18 at KeyArena in Seattle, Washington.

Dota 2 hasn't been out officially for even a year, but the most popular game on Steam is getting a host of updates and changes. Titled Spring Cleaning, the update includes dozens of changes to the game s inventory, interface, and heroes.

The changes are too numerous and minuscule to detail individually, but taken altogether they represent a large overhaul to the speed and stability of the world s most popular MOBA. Some heroes will see more utility out of their attacks: Zeus, for example, can shoot lightning at the ground, so you can target the feet of invisible enemies. Others have new abilities: If she dies, Vengeful Spirit now lowers the damage output of her killer out of pure spite. Fun!

The game's interface will also get a refresh in some subtle ways, as well. There's a new screen effect for dead players, which can be turned off in the game's options. Friend requests can be sent from the in-game scoreboard, too. Changes like these show that Valve is still interested in streamlining its popular game.

There are new treasures and a whole slew of bug fixes as well. You can check out the full patch notes to see the full list, and determine how Spring Cleaning will affect your hero of choice when it arrives next week.

The global market for PC games has "surpassed console games," according to a recent interview with industry analyst David Cole at PCR. Cole, who produces games industry reports through his firm DFC Intelligence, says two factors are at play in the worldwide growth in PC gaming revenue the ubiquity of the PC platform and the extreme popularity of online games such as League of Legends and Dota 2.

"Among core gamers there is a heavy overlap with most console gamers also playing on a PC," Cole says. "The big difference is that consoles are now the luxury item and PCs are the necessity. Just a few years ago the reverse was true. This means PCs have the broader audience."

It's not the first time this year we've heard how the interest surrounding free-to-play LoL and Dota 2 has helped expand the total global market for PC games. DFC Intelligence projected in January that the total market for PC gaming would reach $25 billion for 2014, up from $22 billion, fueled at least in part by the ascension of the MOBA genre.

"The MOBA games League of Legends and Dota 2 dominate everything else by an order of magnitude in terms of more usage than other products," Cole says. "In the first part of 2014 we saw some signs that may change with the introduction of new titles and some increased play of games outside the MOBA category."

A quick glance at the player statistics from Steam will tell you that Dota 2 has a firm grip on the imagination of PC gamers, and with its reportedly 27 million "daily active players," LoL has a few fans as well. But Cole says a some new games are also beginning to take hold. In this category he puts DayZ, Rust, and Hearthstone as new entries in his list for the top 20 most played games for the beginning of 2014.