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[Nillo]

Also holy crap the iG vs. EHOME game is still going after 88 minutes.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

yeah -- starcraft 1 and 2, as sports, eclipse many "real" sports in terms of popularity, number of professional players, and tournament prize money. in south korea, there are two television stations devoted just to starcraft games. for most intents and purposes starcraft 1 and 2 are two of the biggest professional sports in the world

[Trevor Dunbar]

oh man, what a boring game...and it was >90 minutes too. Holy crap. Too much conservative play. eHome gave up on Roshan like 2 or 3 times before they finally got him like 10 minutes later.

I REALLY don't like the hero models, oh well. They all look like plastic robots with little personality. Dear god, I can't wait to see what they will make fuzzy wuzzy look like. He won't look anything like a bear/badger in armor.

I could hardly tell what was going on half the time, and I've played DotA like mad balls.

[TeeGee]

I kinda like how it looks. It's nothing special, but at least it's still clearly DotA. In this particular case, I'm okay with just a re-make.

The game was awfully boring, though. And lack of commentary absolutely kills it. Same for technical issues. It doesn't create an impression of a big, serious, million dollar tournament.

EDIT: Oh, I love the ability for the teams to ban certain heroes during character picking. Should make things more interesting and prevent  teams from always using the same rooster.

EDIT 2: The commentary thing is awful. It gets stuttery whenever something actually interesting happens  .

[Nillo]

There's a new game going on. I'm hearing some commentary too.

I kind of like the new models myself. The new Tidehunter looks a lot better in my opinion.

There are a lot of technical issues with the stream, the game is lagging a lot (you can see the teams typing "lag" in the chat pretty often) which I imagine is part of the reason the teams are playing defensively.

[TeeGee]

This game was much more dynamic than the last one. Pretty fun to watch, even if a bit one-sided.

[Nillo]

Wow, iG stomped Mineski pretty hard. Their Anti-Mage was level 22 and had 11/1 in K/D when the other team were all below level 16.

They've got some good commentators talking too, but most of the time you can't really hear what they're saying because of all the lagging.

[The Monster King]

Mineski would've had a chance if their catwoman didnt feed.

I think I might play this more than League even though I never liked dota and yes I am aware this is "dota but it looks good". but HOLY SHIT it looks good. the art is awesome.

[TeeGee]

Mineski would've had a chance if their catwoman didnt feed.

It was painful to watch. Especially as PotM is my favorite hero.

EDIT: The next game started with an awesome first blood gank!

[Zaphos]

What's with the lag?  Are the teams not all playing from the same location?  Seems like half the time the game is paused due to crippling lag or something.

[Uykered]

I'd probably prefer if it was zoomed out a little more. The interface looks mediocre, the attributes are too small as well.

[Nillo]

I must say I'm enjoying the picks right now. The games have all been pretty unique because of the different picks on the teams. In the current game we're seeing Drow, Wind, and Crystal among others that we didn't see before.

[Nillo]

MYM just got slaughtered. Holy jesus.

Edit: It looks like they did much better in their second game, but that one didn't get streamed on the website. Oh well... 

[TeeGee]

These matches show one major flaw of DotA -- technically it's not a zero sum game, but it kinda plays like one. All advantage gained by one team is at the cost of the other. In most matches, you can already tell who's going to win halfway in, as a last-minute comeback is pretty much impossible. It's usually 20 minutes of actual game, and 20 minutes of one-sided slaughter.

[Nillo]

Venomancer's model looks totally sick. Especially his wards. I hope this one will play better than the last guy. 

[Mhaine]

These matches show one major flaw of DotA -- technically it's not a zero sum game, but it kinda plays like one. All advantage gained by one team is at the cost of the other. In most matches you can already tell who's going to win halfway in, as a last-minute comeback is pretty much impossible. It's usually 20 minutes of actual game, and 20 minutes of one-sided slaughter.

As far as I know, losing teams aren't really allowed to surrender either - the longer a game is, the more advantage a team gets in case of a tie at the end of these group stages.

[Trevor Dunbar]

I'm kinda sad storm spirit isn't a panda. Really? It's not like Blizzard can copyright a friggin' animal.

Also- I cannot watch any replays...as they don't exist...Nevermind, I found some.

[TeeGee]

They can't copyright an animal, but they have all the rights to the Warcraft 3 character designs (as it should be). I imagine that re-designing the heroes, so that they are recognizable and unique at the same time, was pretty tricky.

[Nix]

Oh, it just struck me that Valve != Blizzard

[s0]

It's pretty strange that Blizz hasn't made any serious effort to capitalize on the DoTA (MOBA sounds dum) hype yet btw.