PlayDota

» see playdota.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The address playdota.com was a parked page of casino links on 22 April 2009, with a line saying the domain might be for sale. Less than eight weeks later it was the official home of Defense of the Ancients, the Warcraft III custom map that a whole game genre was later built on, with 9,702 registered members and 4,882 people online at the moment the Wayback Machine looked.

The move was forced. DotA's community had lived at dota-allstars.com, a site run by Steve Mescon, known as Pendragon, which by May 2009 had over 1.5 million registered users. Mescon joined Riot Games, the company building League of Legends, and the domain ended up on Riot's side, which split the community. On 14 May 2009 the map's pseudonymous developer IceFrog announced a new official site, PlayDotA.com. The old forums were taken offline in July 2010.

IceFrog kept his development blog there. On 5 October 2009 he used it for a post titled "Great News For DotA Fans", which said he was joining Valve, and the project that followed became Dota 2. For the next several years PlayDota served both games: hero guides and replays for the Warcraft III version, a beta key forum for the Valve one.

On 8 October 2016 a new volunteer team moved the forum to fresh software under the name PlayDota Reborn and moved the old posts to an archive at a separate address. The Reborn forum's last posts are dated 23 April 2019. From 29 April every capture of the site shows the same page: "A server error occurred. Please try again later." Nobody posted a notice, and the domain no longer resolves.

~ the dossier ~

~ 35,352 on christmas eve ~

The forum footer kept a record of the busiest moment. On 24 December 2010 it read 26,263 users online at once. Exactly a year later it read 35,352, set at 3:19 in the afternoon of 24 December 2011, when Valve was handing out Dota 2 beta invitations and a temporary board called Beta Keys Chat had reached 495,338 posts. The main DotA Chat board passed 1.7 million posts by January 2016. There was a board in Chinese and, by then, a marketplace for Dota 2 cosmetics with 165,823 threads.

~ the cafe game ~

DotA was an internet cafe game in much of the world, and PlayDota's front page showed it. In August 2009 its events box listed a qualifier at a cyber cafe in Singapore with a 45 Singapore dollar entry fee, next to leagues played over Garena. My own cafe years in Turkey, 2002 to 2005, were Counter-Strike years, and by the time this site opened I was at university with TTNet broadband at home.

~ where are the admins ~

The Reborn announcement said the core administrators had handed over to a new team more than a year earlier, and that for years the site had been "operating on an outdated forum platform". The front page agreed: its copyright line still said 2010 in the spring of 2016. The new rules required every member to link a Steam account and wiped all old bans. "I can finally leave /r/Dota2 for ever!!!" one member wrote on the first day. The reply under it: "Don't kid yourself, we'll all still be checking it out daily for our drama fix."

The reply was right about where people were. When the site failed, the Reborn board for Dota chat held 27,459 messages after two and a half years, against 1.7 million on the board it replaced. The old archive at archive.playdota.com had been failing before that, and a thread from November 2018 is titled "PlayDotA archive still down?"

On 8 October 2019, three years to the day after Reborn opened, a member asked in the PlayDota Steam group whether the forum had closed and whether an archive existed. The first answer came four months later: "Looks dead to me." In May 2021 the same member wrote that there had been "no information at all" and asked where the admins were. The Steam group is still there, with 1,068 members as of September 2026.

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