28 Facts About Dota 2

Dota 2 is a 2013 multiplayer online battle arena video game developed and published by Valve.

Dota 2 is played in matches between two teams of five players, with each team occupying and defending their own separate base on the map.

Development of Dota 2 began in 2009 when IceFrog, lead designer of Defense of the Ancients, was hired by Valve to create a modernized remake for them in the Source game engine.

Dota 2 has a large esports scene, with teams from around the world playing in various professional leagues and tournaments.

Dota 2 has been used in machine learning experiments, with a team of bots known as the OpenAI Five showing the capability to defeat professional players.

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Dota 2 is a multiplayer online battle arena video game in which two teams of five players compete to destroy a large structure defended by the opposing team known as the "Ancient" whilst defending their own.

Dota 2 series began in 2003 with Defense of the Ancients—a mod for Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos—created by the pseudonymous designer "Eul".

Dota 2 corresponded with IceFrog by email about his long-term plans for the project, and he was hired to direct a sequel.

Valve adopted the word "Dota 2", derived from the original mod's acronym, as the name for its newly acquired franchise.

An early goal of the Dota 2 team was the adaptation of Defense of the Ancients aesthetic style for the Source engine.

Dota 2 includes a seasonal Elo rating-based matchmaking system, which is measured by a numerical value known as "matchmaking rating" that is tracked separately for core and support roles, and ranked into different tiers.

In June 2015, Valve announced that the entirety of Dota 2 would be ported over to their Source 2 game engine in an update called Dota 2 Reborn.

Dota 2 was first made available to the public at Gamescom in 2011, coinciding with the inaugural International championship, the game's premier esport tournament event.

Two months following the game's release, Newell claimed that updates to Dota 2 generated up to three percent of global internet traffic.

In December 2013, the final restrictions against unlimited global access to Dota 2 were lifted after the game's infrastructure and servers were substantially bolstered.

In total, professional Dota 2 tournaments had earned teams and players over $100 million by June 2017, with over half of that being awarded at Internationals, making it the highest earning esport game by a margin of nearly $60 million at the time.

Primary medium for professional Dota 2 coverage is through the live streaming platform, Twitch.

Coverage of Dota 2 tournaments have been simulcast on television networks, such as ESPN in the United States, BBC Three in the United Kingdom, Sport1 in Germany, TV 2 Zulu in Denmark, Xinwen Lianbo in China, Astro in Malaysia, and TV5 in the Philippines.

Dota 2 received "universal acclaim" according to review aggregator Metacritic, and has been cited as one of the greatest video games of all time.

Martin Gaston of GameSpot complimented Valve for the artistic design and delivery of Dota 2, citing the execution of the user interface design, voice acting, and characterization as exceeding those of the game's competitors.

Similar to other highly competitive online games, Dota 2 is often considered to have a hostile and "toxic" community.

In 2013, Dota 2 won the esport game of the year award from PC Gamer and onGamers.

Dota 2 was later nominated for the best multiplayer game at the 10th British Academy Games Awards in 2014, but lost to Grand Theft Auto V, and was nominated for Esports Game of the Year at The Game Awards at its events from 2015 to 2019, while winning the award for best MOBA at the 2015 Global Game Awards.

Month prior to its official launch, Dota 2 was already the most played game on Steam with a concurrent player count of nearly 330, 000, which outweighed the number of players for the rest of platform's top ten most-played games combined.

Dota 2 has been a part of multi-sport events in Asia, such as the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games and Southeast Asian Games.

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Popularity of Dota 2 led Valve to produce apparel, accessories, figurines, and several other products featuring the heroes and other elements from the game.

Promotional tie-ins to other video games and media have been added to Dota 2, including custom Half-Life 2, Bastion, Portal, The Stanley Parable, Rick and Morty, Fallout 4, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Darkest Dungeon announcer packs, which replace the game's default announcer with ones based on those franchises.

Dota 2 has been used in machine learning experiments, with the American artificial intelligence research company OpenAI curating a system, known as the OpenAI Five, that allows bots to learn how to play the game at a high skill level entirely through trial-and-error algorithms.