What about Dota 2?

Nov 24, 2012 - by Strom

I have been receiving this question frequently for at least two years now. What about Dota 2? The answer has always basically boiled down to "I don't know, we'll see". Well, today I am happy to announce that I do, in fact, know how Dota 2 will fit into DotA-GC. That is to say, it won't fit at all. That's right, DotA-GC will never be extended to support Dota 2, it will always be a highly focused classic DotA community.

Separate of the fact that GC won't be supporting it, Dota 2 is shaping up to be a brilliant successor. It's quite close to being a mechanical clone of the original game and the hero roster is growing at an incredible speed. On top of that, it is technically superior in almost every way.

With Dota 2 being so great, how come there will not be any support for it? Well actually, I will be developing a Dota 2 community - Lopya. It's just that it won't be affiliated with DotA-GC in any shape or form. There are many reasons why I decided to do it separate from DotA-GC, but basically the essence of it is that this is a chance to do it all from scratch. I have almost 6 years of experience building and managing a DotA community and during this time I've learned a lot about the game itself, team balance, what motivates one to win, what an enjoyable dota experience looks like, and about human nature itself. The truth is that there are several types of cancer that have been spreading inside the DotA-GC community. I'm talking about deep-seated problems with the culture of playing DotA here. It is incredibly hard to fix this after-the-fact, especially so if it is still actively spreading.

With Lopya, I aim to carefully craft a well mannered, friendly & skilled community. There won't be any room for venomous people, who take pleasure in insulting other people. Neither will there be room for players who are still learning the game. Additionally, language usage will be highly restricted. In the beginning, it will be english-only everywhere, however in principle I am open to dividing the Lopya community into sectors. For example, if there are a lot of active Finnish players, it may be possible to sign up for a Finnish language game.

Lopya is currently under active development and the plan is to start testing it with real people sometime in the coming weeks. You can sign up for beta testing right now. If you're awesome but don't have Dota 2, you can still sign up and should you be selected for Lopya testing, you will also receive Dota 2 beta access.