Competitive DotA in India, as it is!

16. January 2009 by admin.

An interesting discussion was sparked off two days back in the Indian section of the Garena forums.  Cranberry, a prominent DotA player from Mumbai started this discussion through a small write-up about the current status of competitive DotA in India.  He named the write-up as ‘Indian Competitive DotA - Downward spiral?’ and it has become an eye-opener for the non-competitive gaming crowd in the forums there.  Cranberry’s point was simple & straight forward.  The current top DotA clans in India, (who have been on top for quite a while now) are gonna move on pretty soon. But the new clans don’t seem to be that serious about DotA and they aren’t participating much in the local events.  This post created a quick wave of response from other senior players who felt the same way.  Teams that not many people knew about but were active participants at local events came out & explained how they enjoyed playing in tournaments & how it is all about having a good time.

Why this sudden interest in players who don’t have a full-fledged clan?  Well, its very simple, they are the future.  DotA is a game that has a long learning curve.  So many heroes, so many spells and so many combinations.  It’ll take months before you learn everything well enough to enter the competitive arena.  It is also a team game, which means, you need at least 4 other players along with you.  After going through all that, if you go to a tournament, face the best there is and get beaten badly, well, its not exactly a pretty sight.  And this, we believe, is the problem faced by most of the gamers out there right now.  So, its up to the senior players to address this issue, which is exactly what that post is trying to do right now.

The above scenario is what a normal person sees.  But if yout want to beat the best, you can’t be bound to the views of a normal person.  The idea behind today’s gamer in India is very simple. You spend time with your friends, be ready to spend a few hundred bucks, have fun and learn something new from every game that you play or watch.  That is all there is to it.  Gaming isn’t a profession yet in India.  Gaming is neither sponsored much, nor motivated by public or corporates.  Gaming is something we do coz it is our passion.  It provides a medium to have fun, communicate, improve ourselves and struggle together to succeed.  Why give too much importance to winning & losing when participation is the key.

The opportunity provided by such events to face the best is what you should be looking forward too.  Form a team, that is the single most important part of competitive DotA.  Bring together 5 players who want to game, play with them, struggle together, that is how you really have fun.  Find your team & half the work is done.  Then keep finding reasons to stick with them and play hard.  Don’t just think about winning an event, think about winning an event with those 5 players.  Once you’ve formed a team, you are not alone, you can’t give up, you can’t lose and you can do miracles.  Even if you don’t win the event, you’ll still end up having great fun which combined with the competitive struggle is what this is all about.

To do our part in this, Ravi (IndianTiger) from ImbaGamer has proposed to host a purely online event just for the promotion of the game.  Of course, we’ll have prizes but not huge cash prizes.  Depending on the response in the thread, a decision will be taken soon.  Unfortunately, we are not in a position to hold yet another extravaganza right now.  Though there is immense support for ImbaGamer and our last event was a huge success with the gamers, somehow, we seem to be struggling with our finances right now.  But we are not worried about that and we want to help in any way we can.  So, post your thoughts there or here and we’ll come up with something pretty soon..

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