What the hell. Just hanging out and their whole team just shows up there.
In the couple minutes leading up to that you had no vision on the enemy team, you were deep in their territory, your team was nowhere to be seen and you had no way to escape if something bad happened (town portal scroll for example).
You can read a million wikis and know a million pieces of trivia, but few things will help you improve faster than getting into the habit of looking at your minimap and asking yourself "where is the enemy?"; if you can't answer that question, be wary and have a plan.
Damn, I was busy yesterday so I missed out on all this.
Few points that really stuck out:
-Lane positioning. At this level of play there's not much going on in the lanes so it doesn't matter so much, but you're spending a lot of time chilling waaay back, not doing anything. XP is only granted when you're within a relatively small radius of the creeps when they die, and you're outside of that with no good reason fairly often.
-Camera control. You're spending all of your time with the camera trained just on your guy, even when there's big fights going on right next to you. Ideally, you want to be watching skirmishes so you know if you can run over to help and clean up, or if it's a lost cause.
-Map awareness. As DevilUknow said, you need to learn where people are likely to be hanging around, and the paths they can take through the map to come kill you. If you haven't seen anyone for a while and you're not back near your base, you're liable to get killed.
-Aggressiveness. Probably the biggest stumbling block for new players, but the most important. Currently, you very rarely actually do anything active. All your game consists of standing in lane, killing creeps, and taking fights or running away when they attack you. You want to start taking fights to them (even if it's just chip damage/harass), roaming around a bit, and being more of an actual presence in the game. It's only by using your abilities in fights with guys that you'll really start to get a feel for how the game plays out.
Aggressiveness will also make the game way more fun once you get good at it. Managing creeps and items kinda becomes secondary once you can, say, kill Roshan 5 minutes in then gank mid.
You can read a million wikis and know a million pieces of trivia, but few things will help you improve faster than getting into the habit of looking at your minimap and asking yourself "where is the enemy?"; if you can't answer that question, be wary and have a plan.
Prime example - I know a lot of those bits of trivia, and I'm still as bad as you are, Scott. I know (sometimes) what I'm meant to be doing, I know roughly what's happening, but I lack the skills to execute.
Too many things happening at once in real time. Last hitting/denying is already an entire game in itself that occupies all of my conscious thought and concentration. In between creep waves it takes all my brain, and a break from the action, to check gold and buy items and such. I'm also vulnerable at that time because I'm basically in a menu reading stuff not looking at the game. On top of that, if there's a fight I have to remember my abilities, but also abilities from any items I have that need activation. I prefer passive abilities since they don't take up space in my brain. Then you also have to consider looking at the clock every two minutes for magic runes. Memorize all the bajillion heroes. Memorize all the bajillion items. At least reduce the numbers to manageable Street Fighter levels of characters. This shit feels like it has more characters than MvC2. Oh, and also remember that day and night do shit as well.
I think I've figured out my first fundamental improvement to this genre. The ancient that you are defending needs to be super weak. It shouldn't go down in one hit, but it should go down if a lvl 1 hero is left to attack it undefended. Right now it's crazy strong. That forces everyone to level up and the game to go long. It's like if you were playing CTF and the flag was a badass that defended itself.
There are times in this game where you want to kill your own units. There are times when you want to let the enemy push closer to your base! It's a war you can only win by intentional attrition just to level up your guys. I feel like if we steamroll the other team, at any point, even the very beginning, we should be rewarded with victory. You should never be happy about the battle lines moving closer to your side of the map. It's war, and losing territory should be bad, period.
While all those things are true, they're not necessarily appropriate for your current level of play. Your hero's abilities are, generally, FAR more important than any item abilities. You can get away without ever using item actives. You can't get away without ever using ability actives.
Learning the heroes and items is obviously super important, but the knowledge will come as you play with and against them. It's still far more important to get a feel for the ebb and flow of the game as a whole, rather than thinking you can't be effective until you learn all the stuff.
You also shouldn't worry about the runes unless you're mid or playing a roaming-ganking support, which is again above your level. You might even be a detriment if you take a rune in the early-game that could have been better used by your mid.
Day/night will have basically no impact. Don't even think about it.
See, I think I've found the problem - You're going at this ass-backwards, you're trying to learn EVERYTHING at once. Narrow your focus. It's all fundamentals. What you're trying to do right now is to memorize every gun and every damage fall-off and every bit of equipment in counterstrike, before you can even click heads. It's all about your fundamentals - like I said, if you need an example, right here. I know a lot of this stuff that I've picked up over time, but my fundamentals are still weak, and thus, I'm still really fucking bad.
Forget about the wards for now - people who already know about them will likely use them better. Focus on your fundamentals. Like last-hitting and denials, which are really the same thing - Basically, a denial is taking the last hit on your own guys, instead of the enemy taking it. If there's not an enemy in range, forget about it. When you'd last-hit a little guy from the other team, that's when you'd want to deny your own guys, when they're at that point. Improve one, you'll improve the other.
As for day and night, that doesn't do much. It just changes your sight range a little, and ONE hero has spells that work better at night. The only reason I know that is because I thought that other than the small vision thing, Day/night had no effect, when it actually has no effect for anyone BUT one hero called Night Stalker.
Also, forget about memorizing all the heroes. It's like memorizing all 51 states and state capitals, neat trick, but not that useful. As long as you have a vague idea of how they roll - not hard, it's basic mechanics, this guy is ranged, this guy isn't, this guy is stealthy, this guy is blatant, etc, etc - you get visual cues like "carrying a bow" or "carrying fuckhuge swords", or "keeps appearing up my asshole and shanking me" - you'll do fine. And generally, you can pick it up from seeing them work. You don't need to know that XYZ hero's spell has a range of blahblah hundred and has a damage of exactly ABC at this level. The trick is not memorizing the heroes, it's memorizing the mechanics that all the heroes play off.
It doesn't matter if one guy has a silence that drops in a small radius, and another guy has a single-target silence - If you know how silence works, you can still deploy either effectively, and you can still combat either effectively. Some of the more stand-out abilities are memorable for various reasons, and you'll slowly pick them up as you go along, but trying to Memorize all the heroes is a fool's errand.
Same thing with memorizing the items - you'll pick them up eventually just by repeated exposure, but trying to memorize them all is once again, a fool's errand. Just know why you would buy something - for example, increasing agility on an agility hero - and just grab those things. Or pull up a Build Guide for your hero, and follow that.
Day/night will have basically no impact. Don't even think about it.
Then why you put it front and center in the user interface?! DESIGN FAIL.
It does matter, but you shouldn't think it too much, the biggest effect it has on game is the reduction of vision and that happens automatically. Of course if enemy team has Night Stalker, then night time means a lot more. Then it means that you should be afraid. And if you forget that, Night Stalker will remind you.
I don't know about you people. I don't like to play a competitive game where I only know half the rules. Let's play Monopoly, but I'm not going to tell you about houses and hotels yet. Oh yes, I'll be buying them, of course, but you shouldn't yet. It's too advanced for your first time.
In other news. I took a recording of the very first game I played against bots yesterday before I streamed. Putting it on YouTube. It's uploading, just wait. The point of this video isn't really to ask what I'm doing wrong. It's to show people what kind of behaviors a pretty experienced and somewhat competent gamer will exhibit in this fucking opaque ass genre. I want to let the people inside the box see from outside the box.
Day/night will have basically no impact. Don't even think about it.
Then why you put it front and center in the user interface?! DESIGN FAIL.
It does matter, but you shouldn't think it too much, the biggest effect it has on game is the reduction of vision and that happens automatically. Of course if enemy team has Night Stalker, then night time means a lot more. Then it means that you should be afraid. And if you forget that, Night Stalker will remind you.
I don't know about you people. I don't like to play a competitive game where I only know half the rules. Let's play Monopoly, but I'm not going to tell you about houses and hotels yet. Oh yes, I'll be buying them, of course, but you shouldn't yet. It's too advanced for your first time.
Except, here's the thing - You're not learning about how houses and hotels work. You're trying to memorize every Community chest and Chance card, and the prices of every property, because you think that counting cards will help.
Of course, the other problem is that you seem to be thinking it's five individuals on one side vs five individuals on the other side, to see who out of the ten can win, it's a team game. Nobody is trying to sabotage you, or keep you from anything that might benefit you.
Seriously man, I'm not trying to lead you astray here. I used to think literally the same thing that you do, until finally it got beat into my head that it doesn't help, and the reason I was bad was because my fundamentals were bad. I was trying to cram on all the external information like heroes and items and stats and shit, and simply couldn't figure out what the problem was, why I wasn't succeeding, and it's because of that - It's not a game about having more external information. It's a game about skill in executing fundamentals.
I had fun yesterday.
Despite all my bluster otherwise at times, me too. Extremely enjoyable playing with all of you.
I still say there is huge potential to take the good parts of this game and remove the bullshit resulting in a game that is MEGA huge. Even bigger than LoL. You know how Goldeneye, Halo, CoD, and TF2 simplified and streamlined the FPS pissing off all us hardcore FPS people, but actually being much more successful than Quake, Tribes, or Counter-Strike? The same can be done for the MOBA.
I don't know about you people. I don't like to play a competitive game where I only know half the rules. Let's play Monopoly, but I'm not going to tell you about houses and hotels yet. Oh yes, I'll be buying them, of course, but you shouldn't yet. It's too advanced for your first time.
You express this like it's something specific to dota or mobas, but in every competitive video game genre I can think of, there are mechanical rules and things that newbs don't know about and should not focus on before they learn the basics.
Fighting games have the properties of each move, their frame data, how they link or cancel into each others and such. FPSes have the properties of each gun. RTSes have abilities, properties and upgrades for every unit and structure.
Sure, dota has relatively lot of mechanical details, but the important part is the same. First priority is to learn to play the game and learning the exact mechanics is like third or fifth thing.
I still say there is huge potential to take the good parts of this game and remove the bullshit resulting in a game that is MEGA huge. Even bigger than LoL. You know how Goldeneye, Halo, CoD, and TF2 simplified and streamlined the FPS pissing off all us hardcore FPS people, but actually being much more successful than Quake, Tribes, or Counter-Strike? The same can be done for the MOBA.
Probably, but as we all know Quake, Tribes and Counter-Strike are better games than CoDs and TF2.
I still say there is huge potential to take the good parts of this game and remove the bullshit resulting in a game that is MEGA huge. Even bigger than LoL. You know how Goldeneye, Halo, CoD, and TF2 simplified and streamlined the FPS pissing off all us hardcore FPS people, but actually being much more successful than Quake, Tribes, or Counter-Strike? The same can be done for the MOBA.
Definitely, I've been considering long enough to have half a (shitty) design document in my head.
A lot of the "bullshit" allows for player creativity and is a big reason people get sucked into Dota.
The day/night cycle feels superfluous until you get a feeling for how it affects the sight lines of different areas of the map: suddenly whole new world of ganking opens up.
A big different in LoL vs Dota 2 was actually how much they streamlined the jungles (ie: the neutral camps). However, creep momentum (well, maybe this will scare you away if that last link didn't) is a pretty big deal in MOBAs, which means that high level play in the lanes in LoL now revolves around a lot of exploiting the even fiddlier aggro mechanics of the creeps.
I just think the whole concept of feeding variable for force/power escalation is silly, and I've always hated it.
I agree. How would the game play if everyone was stuck at say, level 10 the entire game with no way to get more XP, and started with some amount of gold, with no way to get more? You buy items and choose abilities before the game starts, then you go.
"Leveling up" in the course of a match is a fine mechanic. That optimizing this and this alone is so important is what bothers me, coupled with how passive of an activity that itself ends up being with simple (if non-obvious) heuristics.
It's interesting to see what Scott says about the whole deal, after observing both what he says about it, and how he plays - both from an outside perspective, and from his screen.
Rym, if it's not too much trouble, could you explain some of these heuristics, and maybe roughly how you'd optimize it? I won't argue, I don't have the knowledge, but I am interested in your thoughts on the issue.
I agree. How would the game play if everyone was stuck at say, level 10 the entire game with no way to get more XP, and started with some amount of gold, with no way to get more? You buy items and choose abilities before the game starts, then you go.
I see no reason to pick anything but heavy pusher heroes. Carries would be useless because they are all about getting late game levels and items and gankers would be useless because they are all about killing enemy heroes while they farm to get advantage on levels and gold. Pushers and supports would be pretty much the only reasonable choices.
I don't know about you people. I don't like to play a competitive game where I only know half the rules. Let's play Monopoly, but I'm not going to tell you about houses and hotels yet. Oh yes, I'll be buying them, of course, but you shouldn't yet. It's too advanced for your first time.
Dota 2 is more like Basketball: you don't need to know how to dunk, or alley-oop or execute a no-look pass to play. You can even play at a relatively high level without those skills. However, since the game allows for that level of expression it becomes that much more fun to watch and learn.
Getting kills and not getting killed and then spending the money you get on ANYTHING is what wins the game. If you're are getting more kills than deaths and buying items, regardless of how complex your play is or how tight your mechanics are or how optimized your build is, you're doing fine and if you're doing it as a team, you'll probably win.
Once you have the basic mechanics down, all the other stuff comes in as more skilled players attempt to gain an edge.
I agree. How would the game play if everyone was stuck at say, level 10 the entire game with no way to get more XP, and started with some amount of gold, with no way to get more? You buy items and choose abilities before the game starts, then you go.
I see no reason to pick anything but heavy pusher heroes. Carries would be useless because they are all about getting late game levels and items and gankers would be useless because they are all about killing enemy heroes while they farm to get advantage on levels and gold. Pushers and supports would be pretty much the only reasonable choices.
You're considering the idea within the context of the rest of the game not changing. Throw every assumption about the game out the window except for the fun core. It's fun because you are on a team of people battling another team of people. You each have unique characters and are fighting a war to defend your base and destroy the enemy base. That is the core of fun in this game. Imagine how that core game would be designed if we decided that the characters would not increase in power level throughout the game.
Maybe we should just do a show on it. If I try to type it all up, it'll be a design document... ;^)
I think MOBA as a concept is amazing. I quibble only on details of implementation.
It'd be pretty cool if you could sync up with the Idle Thumbs guys at PAX Prime and do a show on this topic. They had to do a spin off show Dota Today because a couple of guys talked about it too much on their main show.
They and a majority of their guests are game developers as well.
I think MOBA as a concept is amazing. I quibble only on details of implementation.
What's even more interesting is that a lot of the bullshit could actually be more tolerable if the user interface were improved. Without changing any of the BS rules of the game, these user interface improvements would make it way better.
Zooming Out: The game is zoomed in so far you can't get any situational awareness besides the mini-map. But the mini-map means you are taking your eyes off of other important things. Let me zoom out, so I can last hit and also see what's happening around me.
Information visibility: The game really likes to tell you when someone gets a rune, if someone is missing, or if someone killed Roshan. Not only is that not always important, but it's incomplete info. How about telling me who died where instead of MONSTER KILL. How about "Your teammate Skeleton King in middle lane was killed by the entire other team." "Your teammate killed the enemy Viper in the top lane!" How about every two minutes it should say "A rune will appear in ten seconds..." How about instead of "missing top" how about saying which hero is missing?
Also, I have to keep opening the scoreboard to see if I'm falling behind in levels or not. How about making it really clear what level I am, and what level everyone else is by putting numbers across the top where the hero pictures are? How about level numbers on the actual players. Then I can easily see that I'm 15 and he's 20, so run the fuck away. I could also easily see that I'm 20 and he's 15, so I'm coming to get you! As it is now, I'm afraid of even a level 1 guy because all bad guys look the same with no indication of how strong they are until you are already dead or they run away.
Items: Let me plan out an item chart, and have the items automatically get purchased in that order as soon as I have enough gold. Don't make me get distracted from the action to click on items and shit. Don't make me click the courier button or buy a courier, just have the courier know what's up and act intelligently. Don't make me walk to some secret shop, let the courier go there.
Last-hits: Enemy health bars are two colors, the color of health and black showing the health lost. They could have a third color that shows what their health would be on average if you hit them with your basic attack once. This way you have a visual indicator of when to last hit/deny because their remaining health is entirely that color.
Slowing shit down in general: I know that it's weird for me to say a game should be slower, but there's a difference between fast and unfair. Human reaction times have a limit. Even in Quake you can dodge rockets. In DOTA you have no chance.
One second everything is quiet. Then there is an explosion of color, and you're already dead. There needs to be at least one or two seconds after the explosion of colors during which a victim can possibly react and at least TRY to survive before they are already dead. Not knowing the meanings of the color explosion is one thing. But the fact that I am dead the moment the explosion starts as opposed to a couple seconds afterwards is bullshit.
Imagine if in Street Fighter Ryu's Hadouken was an instant kill. The only way to block or dodge it was with a particular reaction move. Now, in actual Street Fighter you get to see a few frames of hadouken animation before it actually fires, which allows you to react to it. In DOTA the screen is blank, and then you see a color explosion and you're dead. You were dead before the first frame of explosion animation even appeared on your screen. It's not even so much that I'm dead. It's that there isn't even a chance to do one basic attack between the time the explosion starts and the time I am dead and watching the respawn counter. It would feel much more fair and less bullshit if it went something like this instead.
"Surprise! Here we are bad guys jumping out of the woods! You have about a second to do something before you are teh dead."
"OMG use my attack!"
"Ok, now you are dead because it is 4v1 and you are too slow to run away. You also clicked in the wrong place and your attack didn't even hit."
"Well, at least it seemed fair that I got to react before dying. Perhaps next time I will do something different like use fast boots to run away during my short reaction time."
Comments
For example (jump to 0:56:00 - 0:56:30ish). In the couple minutes leading up to that you had no vision on the enemy team, you were deep in their territory, your team was nowhere to be seen and you had no way to escape if something bad happened (town portal scroll for example).
You were just hanging out... in the danger zone.
You can read a million wikis and know a million pieces of trivia, but few things will help you improve faster than getting into the habit of looking at your minimap and asking yourself "where is the enemy?"; if you can't answer that question, be wary and have a plan.
Seriously though, never forget to call missing.
Few points that really stuck out:
-Lane positioning. At this level of play there's not much going on in the lanes so it doesn't matter so much, but you're spending a lot of time chilling waaay back, not doing anything. XP is only granted when you're within a relatively small radius of the creeps when they die, and you're outside of that with no good reason fairly often.
-Camera control. You're spending all of your time with the camera trained just on your guy, even when there's big fights going on right next to you. Ideally, you want to be watching skirmishes so you know if you can run over to help and clean up, or if it's a lost cause.
-Map awareness. As DevilUknow said, you need to learn where people are likely to be hanging around, and the paths they can take through the map to come kill you. If you haven't seen anyone for a while and you're not back near your base, you're liable to get killed.
-Aggressiveness. Probably the biggest stumbling block for new players, but the most important. Currently, you very rarely actually do anything active. All your game consists of standing in lane, killing creeps, and taking fights or running away when they attack you. You want to start taking fights to them (even if it's just chip damage/harass), roaming around a bit, and being more of an actual presence in the game. It's only by using your abilities in fights with guys that you'll really start to get a feel for how the game plays out.
I think I've figured out my first fundamental improvement to this genre. The ancient that you are defending needs to be super weak. It shouldn't go down in one hit, but it should go down if a lvl 1 hero is left to attack it undefended. Right now it's crazy strong. That forces everyone to level up and the game to go long. It's like if you were playing CTF and the flag was a badass that defended itself.
There are times in this game where you want to kill your own units. There are times when you want to let the enemy push closer to your base! It's a war you can only win by intentional attrition just to level up your guys. I feel like if we steamroll the other team, at any point, even the very beginning, we should be rewarded with victory. You should never be happy about the battle lines moving closer to your side of the map. It's war, and losing territory should be bad, period.
Learning the heroes and items is obviously super important, but the knowledge will come as you play with and against them. It's still far more important to get a feel for the ebb and flow of the game as a whole, rather than thinking you can't be effective until you learn all the stuff.
You also shouldn't worry about the runes unless you're mid or playing a roaming-ganking support, which is again above your level. You might even be a detriment if you take a rune in the early-game that could have been better used by your mid.
Day/night will have basically no impact. Don't even think about it.
Forget about the wards for now - people who already know about them will likely use them better. Focus on your fundamentals. Like last-hitting and denials, which are really the same thing - Basically, a denial is taking the last hit on your own guys, instead of the enemy taking it. If there's not an enemy in range, forget about it. When you'd last-hit a little guy from the other team, that's when you'd want to deny your own guys, when they're at that point. Improve one, you'll improve the other.
As for day and night, that doesn't do much. It just changes your sight range a little, and ONE hero has spells that work better at night. The only reason I know that is because I thought that other than the small vision thing, Day/night had no effect, when it actually has no effect for anyone BUT one hero called Night Stalker.
Also, forget about memorizing all the heroes. It's like memorizing all 51 states and state capitals, neat trick, but not that useful. As long as you have a vague idea of how they roll - not hard, it's basic mechanics, this guy is ranged, this guy isn't, this guy is stealthy, this guy is blatant, etc, etc - you get visual cues like "carrying a bow" or "carrying fuckhuge swords", or "keeps appearing up my asshole and shanking me" - you'll do fine. And generally, you can pick it up from seeing them work. You don't need to know that XYZ hero's spell has a range of blahblah hundred and has a damage of exactly ABC at this level. The trick is not memorizing the heroes, it's memorizing the mechanics that all the heroes play off.
It doesn't matter if one guy has a silence that drops in a small radius, and another guy has a single-target silence - If you know how silence works, you can still deploy either effectively, and you can still combat either effectively. Some of the more stand-out abilities are memorable for various reasons, and you'll slowly pick them up as you go along, but trying to Memorize all the heroes is a fool's errand.
Same thing with memorizing the items - you'll pick them up eventually just by repeated exposure, but trying to memorize them all is once again, a fool's errand. Just know why you would buy something - for example, increasing agility on an agility hero - and just grab those things. Or pull up a Build Guide for your hero, and follow that.
In other news. I took a recording of the very first game I played against bots yesterday before I streamed. Putting it on YouTube. It's uploading, just wait. The point of this video isn't really to ask what I'm doing wrong. It's to show people what kind of behaviors a pretty experienced and somewhat competent gamer will exhibit in this fucking opaque ass genre. I want to let the people inside the box see from outside the box.
I had fun yesterday.
Of course, the other problem is that you seem to be thinking it's five individuals on one side vs five individuals on the other side, to see who out of the ten can win, it's a team game. Nobody is trying to sabotage you, or keep you from anything that might benefit you.
Seriously man, I'm not trying to lead you astray here. I used to think literally the same thing that you do, until finally it got beat into my head that it doesn't help, and the reason I was bad was because my fundamentals were bad. I was trying to cram on all the external information like heroes and items and stats and shit, and simply couldn't figure out what the problem was, why I wasn't succeeding, and it's because of that - It's not a game about having more external information. It's a game about skill in executing fundamentals. Despite all my bluster otherwise at times, me too. Extremely enjoyable playing with all of you.
Fighting games have the properties of each move, their frame data, how they link or cancel into each others and such. FPSes have the properties of each gun. RTSes have abilities, properties and upgrades for every unit and structure.
Sure, dota has relatively lot of mechanical details, but the important part is the same. First priority is to learn to play the game and learning the exact mechanics is like third or fifth thing. Probably, but as we all know Quake, Tribes and Counter-Strike are better games than CoDs and TF2.
The day/night cycle feels superfluous until you get a feeling for how it affects the sight lines of different areas of the map: suddenly whole new world of ganking opens up.
Similarly, how the jungle and be used to affect the lanes; suddenly all that stacking and pulling and blocking of the neutral camps bullshit feels essential (if this doesn't scare you away from Dota 2 forever, nothing will btw).
A big different in LoL vs Dota 2 was actually how much they streamlined the jungles (ie: the neutral camps). However, creep momentum (well, maybe this will scare you away if that last link didn't) is a pretty big deal in MOBAs, which means that high level play in the lanes in LoL now revolves around a lot of exploiting the even fiddlier aggro mechanics of the creeps.
Rym, if it's not too much trouble, could you explain some of these heuristics, and maybe roughly how you'd optimize it? I won't argue, I don't have the knowledge, but I am interested in your thoughts on the issue.
Getting kills and not getting killed and then spending the money you get on ANYTHING is what wins the game. If you're are getting more kills than deaths and buying items, regardless of how complex your play is or how tight your mechanics are or how optimized your build is, you're doing fine and if you're doing it as a team, you'll probably win.
Once you have the basic mechanics down, all the other stuff comes in as more skilled players attempt to gain an edge.
I think MOBA as a concept is amazing. I quibble only on details of implementation.
They and a majority of their guests are game developers as well.
Could be interesting.
Zooming Out: The game is zoomed in so far you can't get any situational awareness besides the mini-map. But the mini-map means you are taking your eyes off of other important things. Let me zoom out, so I can last hit and also see what's happening around me.
Information visibility: The game really likes to tell you when someone gets a rune, if someone is missing, or if someone killed Roshan. Not only is that not always important, but it's incomplete info. How about telling me who died where instead of MONSTER KILL. How about "Your teammate Skeleton King in middle lane was killed by the entire other team." "Your teammate killed the enemy Viper in the top lane!" How about every two minutes it should say "A rune will appear in ten seconds..." How about instead of "missing top" how about saying which hero is missing?
Also, I have to keep opening the scoreboard to see if I'm falling behind in levels or not. How about making it really clear what level I am, and what level everyone else is by putting numbers across the top where the hero pictures are? How about level numbers on the actual players. Then I can easily see that I'm 15 and he's 20, so run the fuck away. I could also easily see that I'm 20 and he's 15, so I'm coming to get you! As it is now, I'm afraid of even a level 1 guy because all bad guys look the same with no indication of how strong they are until you are already dead or they run away.
Items: Let me plan out an item chart, and have the items automatically get purchased in that order as soon as I have enough gold. Don't make me get distracted from the action to click on items and shit. Don't make me click the courier button or buy a courier, just have the courier know what's up and act intelligently. Don't make me walk to some secret shop, let the courier go there.
Last-hits: Enemy health bars are two colors, the color of health and black showing the health lost. They could have a third color that shows what their health would be on average if you hit them with your basic attack once. This way you have a visual indicator of when to last hit/deny because their remaining health is entirely that color.
Slowing shit down in general: I know that it's weird for me to say a game should be slower, but there's a difference between fast and unfair. Human reaction times have a limit. Even in Quake you can dodge rockets. In DOTA you have no chance.
One second everything is quiet. Then there is an explosion of color, and you're already dead. There needs to be at least one or two seconds after the explosion of colors during which a victim can possibly react and at least TRY to survive before they are already dead. Not knowing the meanings of the color explosion is one thing. But the fact that I am dead the moment the explosion starts as opposed to a couple seconds afterwards is bullshit.
Imagine if in Street Fighter Ryu's Hadouken was an instant kill. The only way to block or dodge it was with a particular reaction move. Now, in actual Street Fighter you get to see a few frames of hadouken animation before it actually fires, which allows you to react to it. In DOTA the screen is blank, and then you see a color explosion and you're dead. You were dead before the first frame of explosion animation even appeared on your screen. It's not even so much that I'm dead. It's that there isn't even a chance to do one basic attack between the time the explosion starts and the time I am dead and watching the respawn counter. It would feel much more fair and less bullshit if it went something like this instead.
"Surprise! Here we are bad guys jumping out of the woods! You have about a second to do something before you are teh dead."
"OMG use my attack!"
"Ok, now you are dead because it is 4v1 and you are too slow to run away. You also clicked in the wrong place and your attack didn't even hit."
"Well, at least it seemed fair that I got to react before dying. Perhaps next time I will do something different like use fast boots to run away during my short reaction time."