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As a LoL player
I want to learn Dota 2
So I can play any hero

You’ll want to start downloading Dota 2 right now. It’s available for free on Steam. Patches (which happen frequently) automatically download in the background, and there’s no significant downtime during patches. You can easily play with your Steam friends, and it’s easy to meet new people.

Heroes are Free

You get access to every Hero for free. You can buy cosmetics to enhance the look and feel of a hero, but spending money won’t get you ahead.

No Pre-Game Setup

You don’t need to setup runes, masteries, or summoner spells before the match begins. Everyone starts on a level playing field and all decisions are made in game.

Roles in Dota are flexible. Your role may change depending on how much farm you get in the match.

No Region Locks

Dota doesn’t link player accounts to regions. This means you can play with your friends anywhere in the world. You can choose to play only on game servers in specific regions (ex. US East or US West) to reduce latency.

Enable Statistics

You need to opt-in see your profile and statistics on Dotabuff. Open the Dota 2 client, click the Settings cog (upper left), then the Options tab, click “Advanced Options” on the bottom and make sure “Expose Public Match Data” is checked. Learn More

Buy your Flash

Dota doesn’t have Summoner spells like Flash. A very common item to purchase is Blink Dagger, which provides you with more mobility than Flash on a much shorter cooldown. Fewer heroes have mobility built in and instead purchase it.

No Free Recalls

There’s no universal Recall spell. You can (and should) purchase a Town Portal Scroll, or buy Boots of Travel. You can Teleport to base or friendly structures, and it works while taking damage but will get interrupted if stunned.

Powerful Items

Dota has very powerful items like Black King Bar (BKB), which can completely transform a teamfight if used correctly. Other key items to understand include Bottle and Aghanim’s Scepter. Most items have an active use and they tend to be more powerful.

Fewer Rules

You can destroy trees, h > Rubick can steal spells from others, whereas Chen can control neutral creeps. Some Heroes allow you to control multiple units, like in Starcraft.

Different Jungle

There often isn’t a dedicated jungler. Anyone could farm the jungle depending on the game. Creeps can tank it. Supports can stack additional jungle camps by pulling them out of the spawn point near their reset timer (every odd minute starting at 01:00). Carries can kill stacked camps for massive amounts of gold and experience.

Complex Movement

Movement in Dota is slightly different because turning takes time. Clicking to move or attack will cause your hero to rotate to face the cast point, then move or attack only once it’s facing that direction. This will take some getting used to and adds another level of depth to gameplay. Last hitting and kiting are more difficult.

Shops and Courier

Dota has three places to buy items: the main shop in your base, s > Animal Courier to pick up and deliver items from these shops to your hero anywhere on the map.

Other Differences

Instead of Baron, Dota has Roshan, who gives gold and drops Aegis of the Immortal with no team buff. Dota doesn’t have a Dragon, but does have two Runes: powerful temporary buffs that spawn in the river every 2 minutes. Barracks (inhibitors) do not respawn, and only the melee one will regen health if not destroyed.

Further Reading

Start with Purge’s Dota 2 Guide: Welcome to Dota, You Suck. Purge’s guide goes into just the right level of detail on nearly every aspect of the game. Purge also produces great videos for newer players.

The OpenAI Dota 2 bots just defeated a team of former pros

And it wasn’t even close

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A month and a half ago, OpenAI showed off the latest iteration of its Dota 2 bots, which had matured to the point of playing and winning a full five-on-five game against human opponents. Those artificial intelligence agents learned everything by themselves, exploring and experimenting on the complex Dota playing field at a learning rate of 180 years per day. Today, though, the so-called OpenAI Five truly earned their credibility by defeating a team of four pro players and one Dota 2 commentator in a best-of-three series of games.

There were a few conditions to make the game manageable for the AI, such as a narrower pool of 18 Dota heroes to choose from (instead of the full 100+) and item delivery couriers that are invincible. But those simplifications did little to detract from just how impressive an achievement today’s win was. The OpenAI team won against well-known Dota personalities Ben “Merlini” Wu, William “Blitz” Lee, Ioannis “Fogged” Lucas — all of them former professional players — along with current pro player David “MoonMeander” Tan and play-by-play commentator Austin “Capitalist” Walsh. Walsh sums up the despondency felt by Team Human after the bout neatly:

Never felt more useless in my life but we’re having fun at least so I think we’re winning in spirit.

Sure aren’t winning in-game

The OpenAI Five triumphed in convincing fashion in the first game, not allowing the human players to even destroy one of their defensive towers. The humans recovered a little in game two, conquering one tower, but they still got demolished. And finally, in a game three played purely for pride, the humans managed to squeeze out a win.

What stands out when you watch the matches is the apparent intelligence of the AI’s decisions and the inhuman absence of any indecision. The typical Dota 2 game, even on the professional tier, involves quite a bit of equivocation about whether to engage in a fight, try and shift it to a more favorable battleground, or run away from it completely. The OpenAI team just doesn’t need the processing time that humans require, which made its play appear unnatural — but only in the speed and crispness of the decision-making, not in the content of those decisions.

The developers of OpenAI noted that the OpenAI Five were losing to amateur players within their team back in May. By June, the AI had matured enough to defeat casual players, and today, it’s shown that it’s capable of overwhelming people who’ve been playing Dota 2 literally since its inception. The next goal for this rapidly evolving AI is to take on the very best Dota 2 players at Valve’s The International 8 later this month. That’s where the best teams will compete for the grand prize of being 2018’s Dota 2 champions, and one of the side shows will be a contest between them and the OpenAI Five.