DotAlicious

» see dotalicious-gaming.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

DotAlicious Gaming opened as a public beta on 13 April 2010. Its founder, who posted as Emmeran, introduced it that day as "the newest DotA platform". The DotA in question was DotA Allstars, the custom map for Warcraft III, and the map had a problem that Battle.net never solved. Public games had no ranking, and nothing happened to a player who quit five minutes in and left four teammates to lose slowly. Third-party platforms existed to fix that, and this one ran on servers rented from Hetzner in Germany.

It had its own client. Game hosting was, in the site's words, "based on GHost++", and a dropped player could rejoin a running match through "the GPS++ Protocol developed by Varlock". Every account carried a skill level that decided who it was matched with. The rule for the bottom of the scale was written on the front page: "new players and leavers will play together on skill level 1".

The closure was announced on 15 June 2013, and on 19 June a farewell letter replaced the whole site. The admins never named a switch-off hour, and the archive shows only that player pages still loaded on the morning of the 19th and that the letter stood in their place by midnight.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the Dungeon ~

Punishment was the product. Leaving games earned bans of up to 30 days, and an invite-only Vouch League sat above the public ladder for players that others would vouch for. On 23 October 2011 the site opened the Dungeon, a separate pool where banned accounts could go on playing against other banned accounts. GosuGamers, which covered these launches, named the co-admin as Julian Holm, known on the site as Aussie.

Aussie gave the high-water figures himself on 25 January 2012: "we have nearly 90,000 members, 2500 DotA 1 games per day meaning a game starts every 30 seconds". The forum statistics page of 31 May 2013 counted 147,713 members and a record of 2,839 online at once, set on 13 November 2011. My own internet cafe years were 2002 to 2005 and the game on those screens was Counter-Strike. By 2010 I was finishing university in Turkey, and a European DotA ladder was not a place I ever logged into.

~ zero income ~

On 19 January 2011 Aussie described the budget in two sentences: "currently everything is privately financed. Meaning we work with 0 income". A premium shop followed on 25 January 2012. Paying members had the ads removed and could visit the Dungeon without being banned first. From 3 March 2013 the shop took Bitcoin.

~ three weeks before the release ~

DotAlicious tried to follow its players. A vouch-only Dota 2 League began on Sunday 13 November 2011, capped at 200 players with a prize pool of 300 dollars. The last working homepage, captured on 2 June 2013, still carried the line "The Dota 2 features are currently still in development."

The letter of 19 June opened "Dear users, as many already rumoured" and called the run "an amazing three-year journey". It credited the ESL network with two years of support, then gave the reason: "our shop and advertisement never gained enough momentum to make DotAlicious a sustainable business." Dota 2 was "constantly pulling away valuable players", and the team preferred to stop "before DotAlicious starts to decay and fall apart". The letter thanked the volunteer mediators and counted "nearly 1.000 years of gametime played here". Valve took Dota 2 out of beta on 9 July 2013, twenty days later.

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