DOTA Leavers: Your Time is Up

Leavers in DotA games – their time is gone and will never return.
By Andrei Starchenko (andrei.s@veeam.com)

Today, Andrei one of our newest DOTA writers - tells us the true story about DOTA leavers, the folks that ruin the game. Its a topic that Blizzard and IceFrog are working hard to fix - until then, Andrei says:

Ok, guys seems that’s it. Leavers at DotA games started to die out like dinosaurs. I am talking about open DotA games at battle.net of course. I have started DotA very, very long time ago – 4 or 5 years ago. And I really can see the difference. Especially I remember those times, when DotA was loading for about 10 minutes. Leavers were hated so much that I even can’t express.

So while time was passing by I noticed that there became more leaverless games. Why is this happening? I think that we got one main factor here. Some people got pissed off leaves so much, that they just created some programs to prevent leavers from joining their games. The first steps, who made DotA games more clean was Knarf with his Wc3Banlist program. That was a revolution that time. People got like crazy about possibility to ban a leaver and never ever see him in the game again. Banlist was a musthave tool for all DotA players for several years, until suddenly everyone realized that it’s not working anymore. Actually it never worked. People took Banlist like placebo – they just believed in it. The thing was is that by banning people you really will not see him again, but nothing stopped people to create new battle.net account within just a minute. So people got hundreds of thousands of banned people. But they almost never seen them again.

Recently a new team stepped in this battle. A team of guys that presented DotArank program to the DotA world. Actually no one believed in it. Their idea was absolutely opposite from banlist’s. Instead of penalizing bad, they honored good. Also they have created a ladder for DotA players, the thing that was just unbelievable to ever exist. DotArank is much younger than Banlist now, they started about 6-8 months ago, but got very impressive results. Personally I switched from banlist to dotarank couple of months ago and wonder happened. Every game I see lots of ranked people. And I can view how many games each of them played, left, won or lost. I can decide who will play in my game. And if I nthe game all 10 players are ranked I rarely have anybody leave. Really very rare.

So what I can say in the end – DotA lives. With so much efforts put by the DotA community to make games more fun and interesting, I believe DotA is almost ready for it’s next battle. I hope everyone understand that I am talking about Starcraft 2. Really there are tons of speculations about this. Will DotA survive SC2 release or not – the time will show. But the one thing you can be sure - that DotA is ready!