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Bridging the gap between casual and pro at the Chicago Dota 2 Winter Open
At Ignite Gaming Lounge in Chicago, Illinois, the crowd is losing its mind. It's grand finals of the Chicago Dota 2 Winter Open, a two-day, double-elimination, 16-team throwdown, and for some reason someone has just picked Meepo. For those of you who aren't in the Dota 2 loop, suffice to say that Meepo isn't a standard hero pick for a tournament. Picking Meepo in a match with $1,000 on the line is a lot like jumping out of a plane and wishing for a parachute -- an incredible, amazing story if it works and an embarrassing, painful death if it doesn't, with the odds heavily on the latter. The announcers, broadcasting the match simultaneously on Dota TV (Dota 2's in-game spectating client) and Twitch, are dumbfounded. The chat channels are exploding. And as everyone witnesses the Meepo gamble pay off in the most incredible way, the excitement only expands and intensifies. But perhaps what's most special about this Meepo pick, about this final game between two local teams that have bested challenger after challenger, is not the risky strategy or the money on the line. What's special is that anyone is watching it at all.
I went to a Dota 2 tournament and not one person called me a noob
There are many things you could say about people who play MOBAs. Most of those things would be negative. Games in the MOBA bracket, most notably League of Legends and Dota 2, have a reputation for being unkind to new players, both in terms of the mechanical skill required to play and the vitriolic communities that tear apart new players for not being instantly granted that skill upon downloading the game. Conduct in MOBAs is so awful that it has become a design issue. Riot Games created a Tribunal system that allows players to report the bad behavior of others, and Valve has done much the same thing. Every new developer showing off an in-development MOBA is at some point asked the question, "How are you going to deal with all the jerks?" Built-in mechanisms for handling abusive teammates and opponents are now considered mandatory features. There is no question that some MOBA players are bad apples. But something has always bothered me about the pigeonholing of these gamers into this negative space. Surely not all MOBA players are elitist snobs waiting to smack down any new player stupid enough to join a public match. Surely not all of these passionate gamers are horrible humans waiting in the dark to pounce on unsuspecting noobs with a barrage of verbal abuse; there have to be some friendly diamonds in the manure-piled rough. I swung by the first-ever Chicago Dota 2 Open, billed as the biggest open Dota 2 tournament in the Midwest, to find out.
