Alright. So, I know that after reading that title, you're a bit confused as to what exactly I'm going to be doing for the next month. Well, it's video games. Yeah, I know, not the flashiest of claims for a soon-to-be-graduating senior. However, I do have some justifications, the first being scholarships. That's right, if I'm good enough at playing video games I can get free money for it. In fact, some UC campuses have e-sports teams that not only allow teams to compete for enormous cash prizes (easily in the thousands), they also award special scholarships to help cover tuition and housing costs. Pretty sweet really. Now, for the actual prompt response. I am going to be learning how to play Defense Of The Ancients 2 (DOTA) on a competitive level. I have to learn how to work well with a team, how to fulfill a role that is needed, and how to quickly strategize on the fly, all in order to be on par with people who have been played hundreds of matches and have had hundreds if not thousands of hours of practice. Now, I haven't played this game before, or any games like it, so I'm about as green as can be playing MMORPG's. It is a little unnerving, to know that I will suddenly have a team rely on me, but fortunately I have a habit of learning things really fast. So I'm not too worried. After all, it's like any other video game; you just need to remember a few core game mechanics and you build from there. Speaking of, how about I show you some of what DOTA 2 looks like? DOTA 2 is a top-down strategy game, based around defending your home base (your Ancient), and destroying the enemy's. To help you in this, you have grunt soldiers, known as "creeps," who travel along map lanes to fight and destroy enemy structures and units. My character, or hero, is in the bottom left surrounded by the little white circle, and in the center are my team's creeps. Here, you can see the two team's creeps fighting and forming a battle line. Usually creeps will fight to a stalemate with no intervention, but by helping or hindering a creep's lane, a hero can push or defend a structure, most often towers. So, by helping my creeps push on the enemy's, I have pushed far enough to attack the enemy's tower. Towers are defensive structures that launch powerful projectiles to repel enemy heroes and creeps, and losing a tower can compromise your team's defense. The two teams are Radiant and Dire, by the way, with Radiant being on the bottom of the map and Dire being on the top. Here I am helping assault a Dire tower. However, the game wouldn't be nearly as fun if that was the only dimension it had. Each team has five players, making a total of ten players roaming around the map. Some are specialized for fighting in groups, some are meant to attack structures, and others are meant to fight one-on-one with other heroes. Here, you see an enemy hero flanking me from behind with the intent to reduce my hero to giblets. The only option I have is to use an ability to slow him down (which is the smokey circle on the ground) and retreat, as my hero can't hold up to a melee hero on his own. So that is a very small and quick overview of what DOTA 2 looks like. There's still half a hundred things I need to learn and practice, but with enough time I can make it happen. See you next time a blog post is due!
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