Dota Origins

[amigofriend]

Hi. I'm not sure if it warranted a new topic so I decided to reply to you guys here.  I'm a dota enthusist, however, albeit a new one compared to most people on this forum (Been a fan of the last 1-2 years). Out of curiousity I looked at many "History of Dota" and I felt they were extremely lacking in detail. (There are basically years missing from the timeline). So, I dug deeper and I found several names, such as Ryude, Quantum.dx and Kaye- and some others, and it appears that they all were active in this community for a long time.

So, I came to this forum to see if I could get some recollections of the events that happened during the RoC years of Dota. I'm mostly looking forward to how the project was done at that time, who was in charge, and how many hands did the project pass through? Oh and how Eul ended up working for Valve, if anyone knows that story, I'd be very interested.

[HEMA]

Back then Eul was a bit of a prick, he created a map and then left it in the hands of other people, moving on to Thirst for Gamma.
I think Kegsta was one of the first, followed by Kaye (who back then was known as Risonyra). Ryude tried to keep RoC DotA going after Allstar had long become the major player. And yes, once upon a long ago they were part of this community.

Eul, Guinsoo (who stole DotA) and Icefrog (who made Allstars playable) all started working on different DotA-inspired projects and got paid for this. I forgot who went where.

[guimontag]

quantum.dx would be a good source of information

[amigofriend]

Should I go and hunt quantum.dx down?

Most of the history posts I've read state that Eul left the map "open source", does this mean he open sourced it, and Kegsta was the de facto sucessor or did Eul actualy "pass it on" to Kegsta?

Oh, and is "The Real Eul" a joke or is "Eul" actually Eul on these forums?

Thank you for your time, guys.

[guimontag]

If you can hunt quantum.dx down, go for it.  Kegsta fixed some bugs that had built up due to blizzard patches to ROC.  Digimajik, avohir, and tals, would also be good people to ask about this.

[DigiMajik]

I can try to answer any of your questions you need. If you want a long write up with all the details, I'll have to do that when I'm off work.

[amigofriend]

I'm no journalist, so I'm uncertain on what kind of questions would be most critical to ask without having to comeback every 2 days. So if you could write all the details when you're off work, I would be very appreciative.

Thanks in advance, Digimajik.

[DigiMajik]

Alrighty.. I'll post this as I remember everything.

We picked up Dota right around when we first got going which was around the end of 2002/early 2003. It was during the time of WarCraft III Reign of Chaos, before The Frozen Throne expansion pack came out.

The original owner of this site 'Mutant Monkey' (I was site admin/dev/design back then), recommended we host this new mod that was starting to get a bit popular and any other we came across as well. I hadn't heard of the mod (Defense of the Ancients) at that time, but after playing a few fun games and seeing it was an up and coming popular mod I agreed with him.

Some how or another I ended up getting in touch with Eul and we decided to hire him as a staff member. We gave him his own forum and admin privileges to run it as he saw fit. From that moment on we became the 'Official home of Dota' and both TheWarCenter and Dota benefited quite a bit from the relationship.

Once Eul was hired, he started listing TheWarCenter as the place for discussion and to get new versions inside the mod. This helped our member base to climb as the map got more popular and we did what would could to help him grow his fanbase as well. I remember us holding some Dota tournaments and contests around that time as well as hosting tons of guides etc.

Well this went on for a few months and the community kept skyrocketing. Eul would do map updates and we would post them and their patch notes, so on and so forth. Somewhere around this time, I took over complete ownership of the site.

Right around the time that the Warcraft 3 xpac The Frozen Throne was about to release, maybe a couple months after, Eul made it clear that he had decided he was going to do an entire new map for the expansion instead of porting Dota over. The new map would be called "Thirst for Gamma".

Somewhere during that time period, I remember someone hacking Dota, stealing all of its assets, and creating a terrible hack job port that would run on the expansion and called it AllStars. I believe some said it was Guinsoo, I may be incorrect.

Well, naturally this angered the over ten thousand members we had and that's why we didn't support it and didn't host it, which, if I remember correctly, someone brought up back then. So we completely ignored it and continued to support the 'real' version of Dota, which is called 'Roc Dota' now or something like that. We supported that and the new map Eul was working on.

Over the next few months, Eul handed off the development and support of Dota to numerous people so he could spend his entire time working on Thirst for Gamma. Like Hema said, Kegsta, Kaye, and Ryude for a very long time, were some of them.

Thirst for Gamma ended up tanking after a few months and by this time AllStars had started picking up steam. Around that time Eul disappeared (to go play Halo 2 i believe) and we continued to host and update the map (Ryude etc).

That was pretty much the state of things for the next few years. Blizzard started pushing World of Warcraft so we tried and failed to find any kind of foothold in that community but continued on nonetheless. During the next couple of years Roc Dota did pretty well here (over 20k members), but the community was slowly trickling over to the AllStars side.

It was after these few years that our website was hacked and it took me a long time to get it back up and running since it caught me completely unaware and during a time I was trying to handle a lot of real life issues. We lost a ton of traffic due to that and I'm sure it played a hand in hurting Rod Dota as well.

That's about all there is to say as we followed the original and Roc Dota. As for the Allstars and current version, you can now see where that version started and hopefully you can fill in some of your timeline. Feel free to ask any questions as there may be something I'm overlooking.

Oh, and as for 'The Real Eul', yes it is really Eul. Around 2006, I believe, the forum software I was using started charging a ton for what I could find for free elsewhere and our hosting started turning bad so I switched us to a new host, created TheWarCenter.net, which is now the main site (.com redirects back), and set us up on the new forum software.

Unfortunately I had a huge database error when trying to convert over the members and posts which wiped out all passwords and posts, but kept the user accounts and posts counts etc. That's why Eul created a new account to post with instead of using his old one when he came back. He had already left before that transition and therefore had no way to contact me to set his password up for him on his old account. That's also why you'll see members with 10k posts, but you can only see 2k of them.


That's about all I have for now. Let me know if you have any questions.

[guimontag]

I can confirm that Eul went on to do quite a bit of Halo2, I know he tried doing it super competitively but I'm not sure if he ever made it professionally.

[amigofriend]

Ok, I think I have a solid understanding now.

I'd really like to get a solid timeline ( at least in regards to sequence of the map editors)

Eul-> Kaye- -> Ryude or Sess (Not sure either or) -> Quantum.dx -> Danite
Then somewhere parralel to these developers you have indviduals named Meian and Ragn0r who made the first Allstars which was later taken/stolen/who knows by Guinsoo.

I'm not sure where to put Fluffy_Bunny or Kegsta in this timeline. And I'd like to know who Colingross / Mr.cuddles are.They're listed on the side of wowwiki on Dota all stars

   (FYI, the reason I got so curious is because I found an AMA from Fluffy_bunny http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/jkyre/i_was_one_of_the_original_dota_mod_developers_7/ and that got me incredibly curious)

[DigiMajik]

Wasn't quantum like the guy who was going to do his whole new dota site and it bombed? I could be wrong, hell it's been almost a decade for some of this.

There was also 'Song' (I think that's the name) that was an editor I remember while Eul was doing TFG.

[amigofriend]

From what I gather Quantum edited the map, but he wasnt in good standing with the more the lasting people of this forum. (accusations of him being a compulsive liar etc)

And Song... I don't recall that name. Another person I want to hunt down. Yay..

[DigiMajik]

This is about all I can think of to help you establish a timeline.

Eul
Date Registered:
    April 27, 2003, 11:05:07 PM

Kegsta
Date Registered:
    July 02, 2003, 11:51:32 AM
Last Active:
    August 30, 2005, 11:09:06 AM

Song
Date Registered:
    August 08, 2003, 10:37:59 PM
Last Active:
    October 01, 2004, 09:05:59 PM

Ryude
Date Registered:
    November 18, 2003, 01:15:50

Fluffy_Bunny
Date Registered:
    February 16, 2004, 11:02:08 PM

Also, Eul open-sourced Dota a long while after it had been hacked and made into Allstars. Allstars wasn't born from an open source map, but a hack. Perhaps Icefrog, when he got it, decided to use more of the open source than the hack, but I have no idea.

[amigofriend]

Yeah, before I started researching this (note my interest in dota actually only goes back 3 or so years) , My idea of a timeline was probably

Eul started dota, made it open source, a bunch of people made clones/sucessors, TFT came out, more clones showed up, and Guinsoo consolidated all of them.

That's why I've taken interest in the history, because the above is absolute bulls***.

The most interesting thing I've found out that Roc dota (as in following eul's sucessors directly) was being developed along side All-stars.

I was like wtf when I read this post: http://web.archive.org/web/20090225215845/http://www.thewarcenter.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=19852 (Not working atm but it's Eul's goodbye post and it was dated September 2004, which admitedly I'd like to know who was in charge of the project when he made that post because im wondering if that was "the end" of the line.

[7_SeCoND_KiLL]

I know that Fluffy_bunny worked on 3.7 (and from your posts it appears 3.8 ), and ryude worked on the 4.x series (http://www.thewarcenter.net/forum/index.php/topic,252.0.html), so you can place him between kaye- and ryude.
3.7 was the definitive ROC map in 2006 (when I was first getting into roc (http://www.thewarcenter.net/forum/index.php/topic,85.msg485.html#msg485)), and it was played heavily in favor of the 4.x series.

The community split into a more competitive section that played 3.7 and the more casual players that played 4.x. sixbrownsnakes2 and jpls worked on the more serious version with the help of collingross and dotaforum.com (http://www.thewarcenter.net/forum/index.php/topic,1602.0.html) and took it up to 3.76c which was the most balanced state the ROC dota was ever in. (http://www.thewarcenter.net/forum/index.php/topic,3075.0.html)

In a blizzard patch broke it for some reason and ryude updated to 3.76d which ran on the new patch
http://www.thewarcenter.net/forum/index.php/topic,4567.0.html

As far as I know, danite worked on his own version of the map, Danite's hell, which scrambled the spells of the heroes and randomly assigned them. He may have helped six, jpls, and the dotaforum crew actually update the 3.7xa series because it was very difficult to convert from the TFT editor (where it was coded) to the ROC editor (from where it was released)
If you have any more questions from like 06-09 I can try to answer them too.