I’ll preface this to say that Dota 2 is the only MOBA I have played in my life. I have never played League of Legends (LoL), Smite and any other competitors. These changes are what I think that Dota needs: from my standpoint as a player, and from the mind of a self-proclaimed entrepreneur.

I’m going to split this article into sections, for easier reading. There is definitely more points for improvement, these are just my top ones.

Tutorial needs a ton of improvement

This point has been brought up on Reddit nearly everyday for about a year now. This is not how I am going to justify this point, however, I will justify by comparing to League of Legends. I have created a new account for LoL and tested each tutorial, and raise points on improvement.

In LoL, the tutorial sends you to a custom, smaller version of the map. With two turrets and a nexus. As you can see in figure 1.1. When you first go into the tutorial, the game does not let you do anything. There is a cut scene with a voice over explaining: What the objective of the game is, what a champion is, who you will be playing and how to move. This is a fantastic feature, as someone who finds listening easier than reading, this was great. They also showed how your hands should sit on the keys, which is a nice touch, as seen in figure 1.2.

What I didn’t really like was that they didn’t teach me how to use the camera, so I had to tinker with settings for a while until I got the camera controls down.

In Dota, the tutorial puts you right onto the actual map. All lanes flowing with creeps. As you can see in figure 1.3. The only guidance is the text boxes that appear as you complete the tasks given to you, as well as the scan icon on the minimap. There was not much communication between the game, and it felt like a lot of information for a new player to process. Same as LoL, no camera control tutorial, so I would feel a little confused if I hadn’t already played the game.

After the basic LoL tutorial, I had to complete another tutorial. This second tutorial introduced me to the the full scale map. I was put into a bot game, playing as Ashe once again, and was told by the announcer to essentially: ‘get on with it.’ So I took Ashe bottom lane and once I reached the lane, I got told: what last hitting was and how turret aggro works. This helped a lot, since I had no idea what the turret did.

As you progressed through the bot game, little tips on the side would appear concerning an action to do/you should do. An example of this is in figure 1.4, with the ‘laning’ pop-up. They also had a quite cool system of having an active quest, so the one in figure 1.4 had me try to destroy an enemy turret. This was a neat feature, which gave me an idea of what to do.

Apparel and merchandising

I absolutely love Dota, and usually when I love something as much and have invested so much time into, I like getting some merchandise. It seems like it is almost impossible to find merchandise outside of events and the Valve store. As someone from the UK, shipping costs from the US costs as much as a tshirt or pillow, so it puts me off it so much.

I ran a Dota LAN event over the summer, called the Manchester Showdown, and trips into the venue made me realise how little merchandise Valve has on offer for any game. The venue I used was Belong: Manchester. You can see a picture of it in figure 2.1.

When you walk into the store, they have a ton of merchandise from WoW, LoL and Overwatch. They had stacks of these LoL vinyls on offer. I mean they had a load of this stuff. Those tops in the back of figure 2.1 were LoL hoodies. The only Valve stuff I found were: The SteelSeries Fade Rival and a £20 Steam card with a picture of Jugg on it. Nice.

Last month, Belong Manchester ran a #LeagueUnlocked event in their arenas. When someone came in to the store and completed an ingame LoL quest, they would get a ‘mini-poro’ plushie. Down below is their tweet for the event. I mean I gotta give Riot a lot of credit for this, a ton of publicity for LoL. They had loads of these plushies around the store all the time. Even if someone came in not knowing what it was, they would just see them as cute and would probably enquire about them anyway.

Valve used to have ValveStore.com, and I have no idea why they got rid of it, in favour of welovefine.com. It’s great in the fact that it allows creators to submit their own content and earn some money through royalties, I’ll give them that. Other than that, there is no excuse for the absurd prices for shipping.

Social Media

It’s the 21st century, everything and everyone has social media. I have no idea why Valve do not use social media to communicate everything. They are shooting themselves in the foot by not using social media actively, plain and simple.

When I search ‘Dota 2’ on Twitter, the fact that S4’s account shows up before the official Dota account is absurd. S4HEAD. The LoL official account has 4.something million followers on Twitter, compared to the Dota account which has around 700k.

There are many reasons why a brand would want to use social media. One of the main being the gauging of community opinion. I know Valve browse Reddit, and a lot of minor updates and bugs have been pushed due to posts. Imagine how many more bugs could be raised if Valve actively used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to interact with players. A lot could be done.

@LeagueOfLegends on Twitter use various forms of media, whether it be their own of a member of the community, to engage with followers. If you go onto their account, it’s full of memes, patch notes, and posts.

Random small bugs

I still don’t know why I have 1,608,758 first bloods. Little things like this should still not be an issue.

The Takeaway

Valve need to realise that if they want to improve their game, they must improve the experience for new players and current players out of game.

A serious tutorial rework needs to happen. That will be a great first step. As much as Dota is driven by community, Valve needs to write their own, definitive guide and whack it up on their site. They need to either tweak bots, or write some more specifically for the tutorial.

They need to hire a few community managers. A couple for each region who interact with the respective communities for Valve. They need to get a grip of social media and realise the benefits. Valve have accounts on most platforms, but they are just not used. It’s a real shame.

Merchandise. They need to make more. I follow a few Dota creators on Twitter, who have made a ton of Dota related merch. I’m sure they would be thrilled if Valve approached them asking to sell it on their behalf. Plus I really want some Dota merch, I just don’t think a Jakiro pillow is worth around ~£40.

Thanks for reading, please know that this is my opinion. It may not be correct, but this is what I believe Valve need to do to the game I love.

-Rafee

@RafeeJ_ on Twittah