Adventures in DotA-GC

Money Money Money aka Selling Out

Jan 05, 2012 - by Strom

So it turns out that running a state of the art system for thousands of players isn't free.
Who would have thought?

All the money that DotA-GC generates is spent on the following tiers:
1) Paying the bills (It currently costs about 110 euros per month for the servers alone.)
2) Having prized competitions & buying advertising to get more players
3) Giving some sort of compensation to the people who actually build & moderate this commmunity
4) Profit

Thus far the income has never even completely covered the bills and as such I have paid most of it for almost 5 years. I am in no way bitter about it, it has been a wonderful experience. However moving forward, the wish of the community is to grow the player base and that will also make the bills bigger.

I am actually willing to increase my investment in GC, by spending more time building out new features & growing the player base. However my time isn't free, the opportunity cost is huge. I could be spending this time doing something else, something potentially more lucrative. Still, GC is a fine path to take, but GC would need to become self-sustainable and even generate hope of someday turning in a profit.

So how can DotA-GC possibly make any money? Well currently we have the premium name changes, which have proved to be successful. Still, they help only a little. I will probably look into adding some more premium features, but for now I will be adding advertisements to the website. The site has been ad-free previously because I hate the cheap punch-the-monkey ads. They're annoying and don't bring in any money. I will try to find some better advertisers, but in the beginning there may very well be some of that annoying shit shown on the site. Also, if anyone sees any ads with sound, let me know and I will ban that ad. I hate sound effects on ads so much.

The future. How long will DotA-GC last? I will pay for it myself for at least another 3 months. During that time I will try hard to make GC self-sustainable, meaning that GC can generate enough income every month to keep the lights on. Should I accomplish that, GC will be online for as long as it pays for itself. Keeping the lights on and adding new features are two completely different things however. I will add support for new dota map versions for as long as GC is up and running. Anything more than that will depend on if I see any hope of future profit.

Finally, for those of you that want to help with the bills directly, I have added that option. All the money received via this will go directly to the payment of server bills. Thanks!



Comments (22)

More games by faster games!

Nov 29, 2011 - by Strom

The dominating voice in the last poll requests for more games. The most obvious way to get more games is to get more people and I will certainly try to make that happen. However there are also alternative ways to increase the game count, e.g. by making games faster. The rules state that if a team surrenders, they must wait near their fountain for the other team to finish off the throne. This changes today, as I am happy to announce the release of Repel 1.7.0 which introduces a big feature which removes the requirement to wait around and ends the game immediately.

Comments (22)

Level up! Choose a perk.

Nov 13, 2011 - by Strom

It's almost a year since DotA-GC was relaunched in web form. Everything has been greatly improved compared to how it was at launch. Still, it is nowhere near of what I envisioned. Dota 2 is around the corner, Dota-League seems to have been shut down, but dota in general still has millions and millions of players and I continue to see great potential in improving DotA-GC. However the reality is that not everything can be done, choices have to be made. With that in mind I have decided to ask all of you, what needs improvement most? I will dedicate half of my time with GC on the winner of this poll.


Also, feel free to leave comments below if you think that the poll choices don't reflect your opinions.

Comments (43)

These keys are so hot!

Aug 08, 2011 - by Strom

It has been over four months since the last repel update. Some of you may have been wondering whether it will receive any new features at all. I'm happy to say that we haven't been sitting idle all this time.
Me and aRkker worked hard on adding hotkeys. We had a working version ready and tested it for some time. However I was not happy with it, it had several limitations. So we trashed it and went back to the drawing board. After a while we had the second incarnation ready for testing and I've been testing it for about a month now. Today we are releasing Repel 1.6.0 and I'm excited to hear what you think of it.

Out of all the possible improvements, why did we choose to work on hotkeys? During the four years I've played DotA, I've only used the original ingame hotkeys. Now custom hotkeys aren't a new idea, in fact I've tried several different programs over the years. They all sucked. Some are too complicated, some require manual tweaking for every hero, some ruin chat (Think of all the players who7talk7like7this) etc. The goal for us was to create a custom hotkey system that just works. Repel's system works with all heroes (think Invoker), with all skills (think Rubick), with all secondary abilities (think Phoenix sun ray), with all minions (think Necronomicon, Chen), with all objects (think Lanaya traps), with all item shops that have hotkeys and it will work with new DotA versions without needing to do anything. Also, your personal hotkey configuration travels with your account. This means that when you play at a friend's house, as soon as you log in you will already have your own hotkeys and you don't need to think about them. Finally, some of you may be worried about ALT + Q, well don't be - it will not quit the game if the repel hotkey system is enabled.

Comments (24)

Upgrade your backpacks, the liberation of items is upon us

Jul 22, 2011 - by Strom

Gone are the days of counting those scythes, looking for those bars and thinking about the limit of orbs. The original item restriction rules were conceived about four years ago. A lot has changed since then, including the nerfing of several of these items. So I took upon myself to conduct some inquiries to see what the people of DotA-GC think about all of this. I gathered the opinions of 30 skilled GC players and then I multiplied the opinion by their rating and the number of games they have played here. The results are in and the following percent of people want to restrict items:

40% Guinsoo's Scythe of Vyse
32% Refresher Orb
24% Necronomicon
22% Black King Bar
22% Eul's Scepter of Divinity

The choice is quite easy, except in the case of Guinsoo. However upon some further thinking I think allowing even unlimited scythes is the way to go. So to repeat the conclusion: all items are unlimited.

Comments (11)

Gamecamp and other banevader lairs

Jun 18, 2011 - by Strom

Since the dawn of time the banning policy for me has been innocent until proven guilty.
However places like Gamecamp (a danish e-café) have started to severely abuse the fact that I have limited resources available to me and I can not observe and investigate everything that happens here in DotA-GC. I have been gathering information for months and building a huge graph of who used which Gamecamp account when. At one point however I realized how futile and bad use of my time this is. So I have decided to change the banning policy for previously convicted people to guilty until proven innocent. This will most likely result in some bans that are not rightfully deserved, however I think the trade-off is acceptable because now instead of building banevader graphs I can focus on improving the experience for the lawful members of the community.

Comments (34)

Heroes of Might and Magic

Mar 28, 2011 - by Strom

Sacred warriors like Huskar, lane winning liches like Kel'Thuzad and game turning taurens like Raigor Stonehoof. They all have their own statistics now. You can see who really likes to play with Sand King, who wins most with Phoenix, what heroes GOSUKURDI likes to play and which heroes does zebbelito win with most. On top of all that, finished games now show what heroes were used.

Comments (19)

Another day, another patch

Mar 25, 2011 - by Strom

It's friday, and you know what that means. That's right, you get to patch your Warcraft to 1.26a (1.26.0.6401). The easiest way to update is to connect to battle.net and let the autoupdater do its work. If you can not connect to battle.net then you can download the full patch (English).

Comments (6)

Time to update Warcraft to patch 1.25b

Mar 10, 2011 - by Strom

All our systems have been updated to the latest Warcraft III patch, 1.25b (1.25.1.6397).
Everyone should also update their own Warcraft and make sure to restart repel aswell.
The easiest way to update your Warcraft is to connect to battle.net and let the autoupdater do its work.
If you can not connect to battle.net then you can download the full patch (English).

Comments (12)

Cosmetic surgery for everyone!

Mar 07, 2011 - by Strom

As you have probably noticed by now, everyone does not look like this anymore.
What was originally intended as a launch feature got delayed to insure a fast release of the new system. Remember, this was November 25th, 2010. I intended to add it a few days later, but boy was I wrong. With the advent of the launch, a whole truckload of far more critical things showed up on my radar. It is only now, 3 months later, that I have been able to go back and deal with some of the originally planned features.

Now, lets talk about the avatars themselves. We are not rolling our own custom avatar system, at least not for now. Instead we are using globally recognized avatars aka gravatars. So in order to change the look of your profile here on DotA-GC, you need to go upload your avatar into their system.

This feature should add some nice additional flavor to our community.

Comments (18)

Tired of being called Clark Kent?

Mar 05, 2011 - by Strom

It is now possible to change your name to Superman instead.

With the highlander update it was no longer possible to choose a custom name in WarCraft itself. However not everyone was satisfied with having a permanently stable name and multiple people have explicitly requested for a chance to change their profile name. I realize that forcing a single alias forever is not an optimal solution. Still, the highlander update was not a mistake, it was a patch to solve serious issues.

So the question arose. How can we let people change their names without the negative effects?
The answer turned out to be quite simple, while also having the side effect of helping keep the system alive.

Paid name changes! Yeap, after four years of being completely free we are finally introducing a premium service. It will be possible to pay for this using a mobile phone, a credit card, a debit card and some online bank accounts. The cost will be around 5 euros, slightly varying based on your country of residence and the method of payment. The reason for this variance is that taxes, currency fluctuations, transaction fees and middle men cost us differently in every situation.

Excited about choosing a shiny new name? Perhaps, instead, feeling outraged? Give us your feedback!

Comments (16)

The Times They Are a-Changin'

Feb 04, 2011 - by Strom

DotA has gotten a lot faster over the years. I still remember when 120 minute games were a regular thing. Lately however, 30 minute games are very common. The current system was designed somewhere in the middle of those in terms of game length but this is about to change.

Two big adjustments are effective immediately:
1) Formula X no longer gives that huge of a bonus for fast games. The bonus is still there, but it's basically a few times smaller, or in more detail - the curve has been shifted. This means that fast games (which are now common) no longer produce overrated players that easily.
2) It's now possible to surrender starting from the 25th minute, as opposed to the previous 30 minute mark.

Comments (3)

There can be only one!

Jan 30, 2011 - by Strom

From now on everyone will automatically be using their profile names ingame too. This will help prevent some abuse that we've been seeing, like every game having a Seppo13 or a RalleBrazil. It will also greatly improve the ease of other kind of abuse reporting. Previously people couldn't really easily say who did what so the reports came in with hero names and such. Having players use their actual profile names will reduce the amount of work required.

Comments (1)

Silver league, here I come baby!

Dec 01, 2010 - by Strom

The new system has been up and running for almost a week now. The launch went better than I expected, far fewer bugs than I anticipated. During this week there have been many new features added, including a player list that lets you see just how much you rock. For the balancers out there, I bring good news. You should now automatically be able to sign up for a new game immediately after you balance. Not getting into the same team with your friends? I fixed a critical bug on Tuesday, so now you should be in the same team far more often.

Tired of the bronze league? Now is your chance to start dominating the silver league!
We are going to keep things simple for now. Want in? Get ranked higher than 50% of the players in DotA-GC.
How exactly does it work though? When you add to the waiting list, then near the game mode selection you also get to select whether you want to add only to the silver league or both bronze and silver. If you add to both then whichever league gets enough players first will start the game.

A little taste of the future, during the next week I plan on finally implementing the basic IRC commands.

Comments (1)

What the hell is this anyway?

Nov 25, 2010 - by Strom

I am sure many of you are wondering what exactly is going on here?
Why doesn't Loom work anymore?
Why do we have to add through this web interface?

Well this wasn't an overnight move.
I've thought about doing a web based system for at least 2 years now and have actually been working on it for the last year or so. The thing is that IRC is a dying platform, or if not dying then surely stagnating. To make matters worse DotA itself is starting to age and all sorts of new fancier clones poping up left and right. There have been real low times this year for GC, times where no games are ongoing at 19:00. The move to a web based platform is foremost a move of survival, but also a move of general growth. People outside of Finland and its neighbouring countries are highly unlikely to start using IRC to play DotA, but might very well do so via a web based system. Hopefully the number of games and players will start rising fast in the near future.

I know what you are thinking. Great, more noobs to ruin the games!
Well, redoing the whole system gave some interesting opportunities aswell. The 'pro games' concept never really took off on IRC, mostly because it required some extra manual effort. In the new system I have divided everything into three leagues: bronze, silver and gold. How exactly people will get access to the higher leagues still remains to be seen, but the general idea here is important to take note of. Namely when you have access to a silver league and you sign up for a game you will be added to two 'topics', both a silver and bronze one. This means that by default everything still works as it used to with just one topic. However you can also choose (with extra effort) to add only to the silver league. This should work much better than the old pro games system, because while in the old system when you added to the pro game you were basically alone there. However with this new system everyone who could add to the higher skilled list is added there automatically, so that means a lot more silver and gold league games.

Another new feature is groups. Ever had a situation where you and your buddies wanted to play a game, but the topic has only 1 spot left? Yeah, I know right. With groups, when you create a group with your friends and add - you are all guaranteed to be in the same game automatically. The system will take care of everything, so for example when there were 9 people added and now you add with two friends, the game will start instantly. It will be the three of you plus 7 of the original 9 people who were waiting.

Wait, what happened to my stats?
Stats reset! With over 40000 games played, the old database was starting to hit 4 years of age. Definetly no small feat in terms of statistics. However, the game and the playground has changed a lot. I personally used to be a 99% player who was mostly blinking around with Shadow Fiend, poping enemies left and right. Around when IceFrog changed dagger to have a combat cooldown, I started dropping in stats. Surely that isn't the only factor, but it's as good of an example as any. A lot has changed in DotA in the past 4 years, and the players have changed also. So it seems natural that with this new system it's a good idea to start fresh.

Lets talk about hosts. Some of you probably have noticed me hosting with funny colors recently. Yeah, that was me testing the new hosting system. Now every game is automatically hosted by the new system with a dedicated 100Mbit/100Mbit fibre line, with multiple tier 1 peerings. This isn't your regular el cheapo hosting. This means that there will always be a reliable host with most excellent latency money can buy. As an example, a friend of mine has been playing with us from Australia. In general he gets pings around 500-600, but to this new dedicated line it's more around 300.

Yeah yeah, that's all great - but nothing works! Everything is so buggy!
Take a deep breath and try to calm down. I know that stuff isn't working correctly and we are fixing everything as fast as we can. We may not be aware of the specific problem you are experiencing so please come give feedback in #dota.support. I decided to launch this new version sooner rather than later to get faster feedback and to try to understand what the real painpoints are. Closed testing only reveals so much, there will always be bugs with first version releases anyway - so why not start right now?

To further that, the new web system lacks plenty of features that the old system had. Hell, even the player list and stats graphs are gone! Well, this is true. But I'm going to add most of that stuff back quickly and I won't stop there. The new system is designed to support much more features. Ever wondered what hero you win most with? Hopefully you will be able to see this information in the coming months.

Where the hell is ELO?
It's gone, it sucked and was pointless. I originally added it for fun, but time has proven that it shows nothing and will only create confusion. TrueSkill is still the same, but it is displayed a little differently to be more similar to Formula X.

Will #dota.gc cease to exist?
No! I belive that the IRC channel is still a key structure point in our community. Trolling people after winning a game? Talking about item builds and tactics? Complaining about how svents managed to feed even more than last time? These are things that can't be done that easily on the web currently and IRC will still provide that functionality. I will also add some basic !add/!remove/!stats commands back to Loom that will basically be hooks into the web system. That way you will still be able to keep using the old style of signing up for games, for the most part. Keep an eye out for this feature in the next few days.
Also, #dota.support will continue to be the central part of our support and feedback system.

Come talk to us! Tell us what you think of it all.
What do you miss the most? What new feature would you like to see implemented the most?

Comments (1)

To backdoor or not to backdoor, that is the question.

Nov 25, 2010 - by Strom

The current rules require you to always have backup in the form of creeps if you want to destroy any buildings. This being true even if towers are below 10% hit points aka 'in deny range'.
However the rules are old, and I mean 4 years old.
Since the inception of these rules, DotA has gained an aggressive regeneration system for buildings.



Comments (2)