DotA 6.44

Defense of the Ancients All-Stars v6.44, a popular custom map for Warcraft 3, came out early this week. Now DotA is a peculiar game in the sense that it's outlived the original game it was based on (at least in the rest of the world... Warcraft 3 is probably still a popular game in Korea). The 6.xx series has had lots of updates, this being somewhere around the 44th one I assume (I started playing around the early twenties).

Right now the game is boasting 88 characters to choose from. I think what makes this release unique (aside from the long wait) is the fact that it has six new Heroes to choose from. Now that might not seem like a huge number, but usual patches of the game mostly involves bug fixes and balance changes. Occasionally, we'd get some new items or even one or two new heroes. I think it's only now that we've seen six new heroes in one go (alas, no new items in this patch).

Personally, I've been playing the game for so long that I know each Hero's strengths and weaknesses, and play them optimally (some better than others). For most games, I randomly choose a character, but some of my friends still stick to a handful of heroes during our games despite years of playing it.

Anyway, I'm thrilled at the six new Heroes (and people at the forums are, as expected, screaming "imbalanced!") but alas, friends have given up pen-and-paper RPGs and network gaming for World of Warcraft...