Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2.

Dota 2's popularity goes against all of the received wisdom about game design I can think of. It is complicated and inconsistent and it pushes people to interact in a way that generates all sorts of well-documented discontent. What it offers can't be summed up in a single sentence, and even a documentary dedicated to explaining its competitive side can only do so much to explain what you actually do in the game, or why that is fun.

It's the single game that means the most to me and yet I hate it sometimes; most of my friends don't like it. That's weird, right?

I've picked at this problem in a dozen different ways since starting to write this column. Millions of regular players can't be wrong, but nor can the individuals whose tastes I share who looked at Dota 2 and thought, perhaps reasonably, "no, I am not going to learn the difference between a Scythe of Vyse and a Eul's Scepter while being shouted at by a racist, no thank you."

One possibility is that players are generally more interested in complex systems and difficult games than they're given credit for a trend also demonstrated by the success of DayZ and the survival genre. This is a nice thing to believe, particularly in a world where mainstream game publishers race to pitch lower and lower estimates of players' tastes and capacity to think for themselves. Another, more practical answer is that Dota 2 is popular because it's both enormously varied and completely free, which isn't a common combination. It used to be more so: the kinds of modding scene that created DotA (and Counter-Strike) offered a wealth of diverse experiences that didn't cost you anything. Now, people find some of that variety in a single game.

Dota isn't the same game for everybody that plays it. This is key to understanding why it's so popular and so fractious: for some people, it simply isn't a vastly complicated team strategy game. It's a deathmatch game where you pick the big guy with the hook and try to drag wizards out of the bushes. For others, it's a game where you kill NPCs until you've got an expensive item in all six inventory slots at which point you take part in a single battle to end the game. Some people play solo, some with the same friends every night, others with a rotating cast. There aren't quite as many Dotas as there are people who play it, but there are more than we give it credit for.

Today's announcements made it clear that Valve are going all-in with their support for custom modes. The tools are in place, and they're more powerful than they've ever been. An interface for sharing and playing them will follow shortly. This is both the end of Dota 2 as we understand it and the restoration of the circumstances that created Dota in the first place. I wonder if, in the future, we'll come to to think of the first few years of Dota 2's life as a strange bubble where there was only one game type, divided up into modes by the specific ways that you went about choosing a hero. I wonder what effect this will have on the way people play Dota every day, and on the sense of importance that Valve has invested in those three lanes, that original design, through high-profile tournaments like the International.

Imagine if everybody who locks down mid so that they can play Pudge graduated to Pudge Wars overnight. They won't, I guess, but it's the readiest example. Much of the strife that arises when playing with strangers comes from the sense that you're not playing the same game that there's an invisible distinction between players based on attitude. With custom modes more readily accessible, that distinction becomes something practical, something that designers can design around and players can plan for. It becomes less necessary, because we won't all be forced to play on the same field. The Pudge guys can play Pudge Wars. And they should.

We'll go back to having more than one Dota in reality as well as in theory. Valve's original adoption of the mod had the effect of granting special status to Icefrog's work, which had already come to be thought of as the official iteration of the game. E-sports has a large role to play in that, and arguably the most prominent 'other' form of Dota at the moment is Captain's Mode: it really is its own game, distinct from the All Pick and Random Draft that people play in regular matchmaking. It's the practical divide between competitive Dota and everything else. Soon it'll be the competitive form of classic Dota smaller, in the grand scheme of things while modders slave away at creating something better. The change in scope for Dota as a whole is staggering.

Part of me is going to miss having everybody forced to figure out their place in a single absurdly complicated game. It's this that forms the basis of friendships, that allows you to turn around to anybody in the queue at a Dota event and talk in a common language. It won't fade quickly, not at first it starts small, as custom maps gain traction as the preserve of the curious and the bored but Valve are giving the community the tools it needs to redefine the game at a fundamental level. I'm pretty sure TI5 and 6 will be played on three lanes. TI7, though? We'll see.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

The Dota 2 Workshop update is even more interesting than it first appears. The new tools include an overhauled edition of Valve's Hammer level editor, and the update download adds a 64-bit build of Dota 2. Both contain allusions to the next generation of Valve's Source engine. Set the Half-Life 3 alert to DEFCON beige.

Technically-minded modders and map-making enthusiasts are busily dissecting the tools in detail, but it's immediately clear that Hammer has been greatly improved. The interface has been overhauled, and the editor now renders the level in real-time as you tweak level geometry. It also runs on a new file structure. When you open a file in the editor, you can now choose to open a new "vmap" file, or an old fashioned "Source 1.0 Map File". The community is still puzzling over the advantages offered by the new directory system, but it looks like Valve are laying important groundwork for future releases.

It's interesting to note how user-friendly the new tools are. Dota Redditors are already having fun with functions that let you sketch out levels quickly (via DarkMio) using tilesets. As well as Dota 2's traditional forest set, there's the wintry Frostivus set and this one. Valve have a history of encouraging user-created content, including campaigns and levels. Hammer's complexity surely stunted the potential of Left 4 Dead's ecosystem a problem Valve tried to circumvent with Portal 2's lovely level-creation tools. Nu-Hammer could serve as a friendlier entry point for tinkerers.



In addition to all that, the latest Dota 2 update also adds a 64-bit version of the Dota 2 client, which you'll find tucked away in steamapps/common/dota 2 beta/dota_ugc/game/bin/win64. It contains numerous references to second-gen elements, like "engine2.dll", "materialssystem2.dll" and "vphysics2.dll", and comes with a colourful new console. It's a bit premature to say that Dota 2 has been ported to Source 2 wholesale, we're likely looking at an interim step as Valve roll out tools designed to support their current games and future projects.



This is quite exciting nonetheless. Publicly Valve have been laser-focused on Dota 2, but are of course rumoured to be working on Left 4 Dead 3 and, what was it again, Hearth-Life? Bath-Life? As someone who likes Valve games, but can't quite get into Dotes, I wait in meditative stasis for a new Valve happening, be it an announcement or an ARG. Our time will come.

Valve has announced, and released, the first alpha version of its Dota 2 Workshop Tools, which will make it easier for modders to make and share custom maps and game modes for their gargantuan wizard-'em-up. This initial release is targeted at developers, so the system requirements might be a tad high: you'll need a 64-bit version of Windows, a Direct3D 11 compatible GPU, and you'll need to opt into the Steam Client Beta. If you have all those things, you can now use the tools to alter Dota 2 to your liking, uploading the results to the Steam Workshop for other players to try.

As Valve explains at the above link, the Steam Workshop submission process has been streamlined as of this alpha release to allow players to subscribe to custom game modes, which will tell Steam to automatically update them on your behalf. To play custom game modes and maps you'll need the same specs as above, but Valve are promising support for 32-bit machines sporting Direct 3D9 down the line, so if you can run Dota 2 now, you should be able to run its mods eventually.

Seeing how the original Dota started life as a Warcraft 3 mod, it's only fitting that Dota 2 should introduce proper modding tools, and the possibilities are rather exciting. Time will tell just how robust and open to experimentation the new tools are, but many commenters on the Dota 2 subreddit are already hugely impressed, with one existing modder stating that the update is "like Christmas for all of us".

If you've been inspired to give the tools a try, you might want to read up on the extensive documentation first. The tools comprise a developer console, asset browser and the Hammer level editor, along with model, material and particle editors. Now go forth, and create the definitive edition of Pudge Wars 2 that the world has been waiting for.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' column about Dota 2.

When someone describes something as a Gordian knot the presumption is that it's waiting for the sword. There's virtue associated with solving complicated problems quickly and decisively the legend of Alexander and the knot expresses a cultural preoccupation with the notion that twisted impossible things are deserving of a direct and just and violent 'solution', normally at the hands of somebody with unusual power and perspective (read: some dude with a sword.) Anything else, it follows, is a waste of time.

There are other ways of telling that story. In 333BC, a longstanding and much-revered Persian multiplayer puzzle game was hacked to pieces by a singleminded Macedonian powergamer who valued his experience above that of the other players. The game's (possibly real) forum must have been in uproar; I imagine they had something to say about it in the pages of Phrygian Hemp Gamer. This Alexander guy, they'd write, cared nothing for the intent of the game's designers or the rules that they'd created to ensure an optimal play environment. He didn't have the taste or patience to value complexity for its own sake, and his reductive actions had curtailed everybody else's freedom to enjoy it too. What a scrub. Broke game Midas fix.

Whether you agree with Alexander's imagined critics depends on whether you place greater value on the solved or unsolved version of the puzzle; whether the knot means more to you as a symbol of enduring quasi-divine complexity or as a demonstration of curt terrestrial pragmatism. This is one of those useful notional binaries that worms its way through civilisation linking myriad historic acts of virtue and evil and art, from military interventionism to Romantic poetry to "truthiness" to Lovecraft to the guy in every comments thread on every article on the internet who begins by typing "well, actually..."

In this case I'm bringing it up because it helps to explain why you can't forfeit matches in Dota 2 and why that is broadly a good thing. This week's column is a response to Arthur Gies' argument in favour of a 'white flag' option on Polygon, in which he kindly cites my own writeup of the TI4 Grand Final. I don't entirely agree with Arthur but I can see where he's coming from, and I hope the fact that I've spent the first three paragraphs of this column framing him as the Alexander the Great of free time helps him to forgive me for taking the other side, at least to the extent that I'm going to.

A given game of Dota 2 is a Gordian knot awaiting solution by one team or the other. By withholding the 'forfeit' button, Valve withhold the sword. The only way you are going to untie this knot is by picking at it with your fingers while nine other people attempt to do the same some helping your effort, others hindering it. This principle is the source of the game's enduring complexity and its capacity to continually create new stories over time.

The life and value and charm of Dota is bound up in the notion that it is this absurd and vastly complex system of rules that players encounter socially. In order to bring out the best results from that system the last-minute upsets, the extraordinary moments of collective skill an underlying structure is needed to ensure that all of the game's variables have the opportunity to resolve themselves appropriately. That means keeping people in the game. It begins within a couple of from-on-high commandments ('Thou Shalt Not Abandon') and extends to social conventions like condemning people who rage or deliberately feed or sulk in the fountain.

Your ability to forfeit the game or not, as is the case here is part of an unwritten contract between yourself, your teammates, your opponent and the game's developer. Giving up under the wrong conditions constitutes a breach of that contract on multiple fronts: you deprive your allies of the right to try, your opponents of their right to win, and the developer of their right to provide you with an appealing alternative to not playing their game at all. The game asks you to grant it a certain amount of your time a commitment extended, as Arthur rightly points out, by the punishments levied at people who bail early on the basis that it will always be more interesting to stay than it is to leave. The implication is that the systemic potential of the game is fundamentally devalued the moment an individual or a team gains the ability to hit the 'nope' button.

In return for your commitment to a given match, the developer promises to provide a game system that continues to generate new possibilities over the course of its lifespan. In the aftermath of the International, that's not the case for Dota 2: the laning phase determines too much of what follows, comeback mechanics aren't effective enough, and the midgame is becoming an interstitial phase before a foregone conclusion rather than the second stage in an evolving debate. Before version 6.82 arrives to throw the system back into welcome disarray, pro-surrender arguments like Arthur's are given weight by the fact that the game itself is falling short of fulfilling its part of that four-way contract. You're being asked to commit your time to play but not being provided with a sufficiently diverse system to play with. As the sword is withheld, the knot tightens and atrophies. You're owed a better experience.

It's understandable to ask for your sword back in this scenario, but incorrect because the problem is within the game, and you can't fix a systemic problem by shutting the system down.

The current structure is appropriate at the level of players like Arthur and I, people who play Dota under substantially variable social conditions. Maybe we're solo, maybe we're with a few friends, maybe we're in a full party; maybe our opponents are solo, maybe they're a stack, and so on. Maybe they're assholes. Maybe we're assholes. When the composition and disposition of a game's participants are this diverse you can't leave the point at which the game ends up to group debate. Democracy doesn't work that well. Dota 2 has a problem with players who mentally or physically abandon the game as it is. Playing until the ancient explodes is the only way to manage that degree of chaos.

It's different in pro games, where the composition of each team is a known quantity and the social environment in which the game takes place carries with it an assumed level of participation. Professional players are obligated to play, so they can be trusted with the power to end the game early when appropriate. A competitive context grants the 'GG' call tremendous significance it becomes a feature rather than an external imposition, and in many cases ending a game early is a key part of ensuring a team gets off to a good start in the next one. It's about creating the best environment for continued play, rather than simply cutting the experience short to avoid discomfort.

There's an argument to be made for extending these powers further down the chain to the point where they're available to other types of player. They used to be before team matchmaking was changed, formally registered teams of five could queue for matches against one another and the surrender power was available. I miss the feature. It has become far harder for my fledgling team to practice efficiently since team matchmaking was merged with ranked. Games take too long; where before we could get two or three done in an hour we now get one. This is partly due to the metagame and partly due to changes to the matchmaking system, and it's a problem that we've had to look outside of the game client to solve. Where before we had a functioning way to practice in-game, now we're looking to scrim groups and in-house leagues.

It was very unusual to see teams abuse the forfeit option in team matchmaking because, like pro players (and this is probably the only point of commonality at the level I play) everybody involved had agreed to be there. They'd made a prior commitment to the game and their teammates. Valve should consider this: the social conditions that make surrendering viable extend beyond the competitive scene and private lobbies. Really, any time two full parties clash it can be assumed that there are lines of communication and understanding in place to offset the potential downsides of allowing players to wave the white flag. It's a more stable environment by default, and therefore Dota's vulnerable systems need less protection from rogue elements.

I'd like Valve to reintroduce the 'GG' option to team ranked matchmaking and perhaps five on five matchmaking as a whole because it's a change that encourages people to play more Dota, not less. Better Dota, too: this is a game designed to be played by a full team, and finding a full team would become the best way to ensure that you can't be fountain-farmed at the conclusion of a losing match. The solution to Arthur's problem would be to turn his three-stack into a five-stack. A well-implemented surrender power restricted to certain parts of the game could encourage greater socialisation between players and more exciting games as a result: an act of pruning, rather than cutting.

There's a 'swords to plowshares' analogy to be made here, but let's not.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Remember the International? Twenty million people watched it, so chances are you do. I wrote a couple of things about it, too. But we missed something: one of the best bits of fan service to emerge from the entire event, particularly for people who have followed the pro Dota 2 scene for the last couple of years.

As part of their series of team introduction videos, Valve produced Source Filmmaker recreations of each team's best moments. Similar to the clips produced for the Free To Play documentary, they take actual plays from the history of the competitive game and turn them into brief CGI movies. I'm not a huge fan of using CGI to promote games normally - particularly when it's utterly divorced from the reality of the game itself - but I like what Valve have done here. These are clips that communicate the feeling of a play rather than its reality, and that's a good way for newcomers to get a sense of why people get so excited about this isometric wizard battle game. Below, you'll find high quality versions of each of the clips plus an explanation of the moments that they're based on.
Alliance


Match source: The International 2013, Grand Finals - Alliance vs. Na'Vi Game 5. Watch original version.

As returning champions, Alliance received the most substantial cinematic treatment. The sequence above covers the last few minutes of game five of last year's International final - the moments when Alliance finally tipped the scales against Na'Vi and claimed the Aegis of Champions. In the first instance, S4's Puck uses Dream Coil to cancel defensive teleportations by Puppey and, by chance, Dendi. Then, we see Loda's Chaos Knight smack Funn1k's Batrider out of the air for Bulldog's Nature's Prophet to finish the job (this is about as violent a depiction of split pushing as you're likely to see, incidentally.) Loda then uses Reality Rift to outmaneuver XBOCT's Alchemist before attacking the Radiant ancient to end the siege of all sieges.

I missed EGM's Io the first few times I watched this clip - he's in the background during the Batrider kill and flies past right at the end, just before the ancient explodes.
DK


Match source: The International 2013, Lower Bracket Round 4 - DK vs. Orange Game 2. Watch original version.

This particular moment came after Burning's Weaver scored a triple kill on Orange in a teamfight around the Dire secret shop. Under the effect of Doom for almost the entire fight, Ohaiyo's Dark Seer was forced to flee with Burning hot on his heels. At the top of the stairs leading into the Radiant jungle, Mushi's Shadow Fiend perfectly timed Requiem of Souls to obliterate Burning as he approached unawares - the beginning of a run of turnarounds that would ultimately see DK eliminated from TI3. In an ironic turn, Mushi would eventually leave Malaysia to play for DK, contending at TI4 alongside the carry he blows up so spectacularly here.

This clip garnered additional attention because it's the first time Valve have shown off Shadow Fiend's new model. The hero has been due a redesign for a while - he looks like a gothic novelty shampoo bottle that has been left in the sun for too long - and rumour has it the new model will debut in-game in the same patch as Techies.
Na'Vi


Match source: The International 2012, Upper Bracket Round 2 - IG vs. Na'Vi Game 2. Watch original version.

This teamfight has picked up legendary status in the last two years, and it's the obvious choice to show off Na'Vi at their best. It begins with a strong initiation by IG on Na'Vi's entire team, leading with Naga Siren's ultimate. It's IG's fight to lose, at that point - they have Tidehunter's Ravage to play as well as Puck's Waning Rift and Dream Coil, and there's nothing Na'Vi can do to stop them as they get set up. Then, as the Song of the Siren ends, Na'Vi turn it around. LightofHeaven's Enigma activates a Black King Bar and gets off a huge Black Hole; XBOCT's Juggernaut activates Blade Fury to shrug off the magic damage; Dendi's Rubick pushes himself out of the expanding radius of Ravage with Force Staff, turns, steals Ravage and turns it on IG. Na'Vi take a fight that they should lose and turn it into a 5-0 victory.
EG


Match source: DreamLeague S1, Day 25 - EG vs. Alliance. Watch original version.

Given the way Dragon Knight moves in this clip, I see it as an abstract interpretation of EG's convincing 19-minute victory over Alliance at DreamLeague earlier this year rather than a recreation of a specific moment, but if I'm missing something, let me know in the comments. Notably, it's one of the few clips from the team introduction videos not to be interspersed with original game footage.

Update: as Brian Zhu points out in the comments, it does seem to match with Arteezy's push top at the 10:50 mark - I've updated the video link above.

Nonetheless, it shows off two important aspects of EG's playstyle: Arteezy's ability to find game-dominating gold and experience in the midlane on heroes like Dragon Knight, and Universe's best-in-class offlane play. Notably, it's AdmiralBulldog's Doom that gets burned to death by Universe's Batrider - a pretty pointed statement about the relative impact of the two offlaners in 2014.
IG


Match source: The International 2013, Lower Bracket Round 4, IG vs TongFu Game 1. Watch original version.

Hao's Lifestealer is on the receiving end of a pickoff by Ferrari_430's Storm Spirit in this clip, which marked a turnaround during IG's first game against TongFu at TI3. I doubt Hao feels too bad about it in hindsight, however - he went on to become part of Newbee, and now he's an International champion.

I like the way the clip presents Storm Spirit's Static Remnant and Ball Lightning powers as fluid parts of the same ability - it speaks to Storm Spirit's speed and controlling presence when played well, which were both a big part of IG's victory.

The 2014 International Dota 2 Championships attracted record-setting online viewership numbers, including more than twice as many peak concurrent viewers as the 2013 event.

In case there was any doubt that e-sports is a very big deal these days, consider them put to rest: Valve has announced that this year's International drew in "well over" two million peak concurrent online viewers, more than doubling that of last year's tournament. Overall, more than 20 million unique viewers tuned in to the event.

If you weren't among them and want to find out what you missed, you can catch up on what you missed with our in-depth look back on the Grand Finals right here.