SirActionSlacks told about anime, Valve, tutorial and community efforts

Anime

God, there's nothing worse than just reading the entire wiki of Hunter x Hunter, and then moving on to One Punch Man, and just being like, what the f**k am I doing with my life? I'm sorry anime fans out there, but good God… What's wrong with anime? I don't want to offend anybody, but it seems like in every anime, things get really weird. Like one character starts dating another character and then they find out that they're brother or sister; there's always some kind of a tentacle coming up; worst of all, oh yeah, a girl looks 13, but she's actually a 10,000-year-old dragon. F**k off anime people. What the hell is wrong with you guys? Every single anime has one of these characters. Just stop. There's something wrong, okay? You guys need to get help. All of you. The only anime that's legit is JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Just some muscly dudes fighting. Nothing weird. No panty shots out of nowhere. It's just dudes fighting. That's okay. I'm into it.

Dragon`s Blood

They were trying to wrap their heads around Dota lore to write it, and this dude shared that he and the entire writers and even the actors watched all the LoreGasms to build the world. So it was really cool to know that a lot of that universe was based on stuff that you thought might be canon, and that's all crazy. So I'm a huge fan of the anime.

Marketing

I think that Valve does not operate under the human condition. They don't think of things like marketing or advertisement or anything like that. I think that somebody thought it would be a neat idea, though I have zero evidence of this. I don't know anything about it. But to me, it feels like someone thought it was a neat idea. And another guy thought it was a neat idea and they let it go. But no, in my opinion, they would never say ‘Let's do marketing’. So yeah, negative on that one. Again, if Riot Games actually had a game that didn't suck, they would be the biggest game developer in human history with how much they spend on marketing and advertising. But it's hard. It's like Overwatch. When you have a game that sucks, that legitimately is shit. And then you have to trick people into playing it. That's so hard. Dota has it so easy. We have the greatest game ever made, but it's some kind of dark secret that we don't want to spread out, which, you know, I don't blame people for. If you get your friend into Dota, you're basically a crack dealer that sold crack to your best friends. That's messed up, man.

Tutorial and Community

So that was the whole idea behind it. It was also very interesting to get in touch with Dota's incredible mod community for the first time. These are guys that make custom games and it's such a talented and dedicated group of people that have been burned so many times. It's incredible. It's like the workshop artists: everyone can see a workshop artist and be like, wow, that person has a lot of talent, and there's still a few in the Dota community because they can still make money off it. But these modmakers can just make such incredible things with the limited tools that they are given that break every single patch and they can make such amazing things out of it. And nobody gives them any money. Nobody pays attention to them. And it's a goddamn crime. Dota was a mod. That's how we started. I mean, it's our essence and just being able to let them sink their teeth into something and get paid for it. It was an amazing feeling. I was pretty stupid though, I told everyone I wasn't going to take any money out of that project. And we raised $30,000. So that was pretty stupid, but it felt really good to pay those people. For the love of God, after all that they've done for the Dota community!

I won't lie and say that I don't think that we had a very big influence on making sure that that actually happened. We were contacted during the development of the mod and they said, ‘Hey, we have seen what you guys have been doing, we were also working on some stuff, and let's work together’, which was nice. I think that, well, we'll never have confirmation that the tutorial was what *made* that happen. I feel like it was a pretty big draw to say, 'Okay, look at all these people, they care enough that they want to make one themselves. So maybe it's finally time for us to come out with ours'. So again, no confirmation or anything about this, but I feel like every person that donated to that project, built their time or funded it through the fundraiser, really, really helped make the new player experience thing come to life. I wasn't mad at all. I thought, either way, Dota improves and that's great. Do I look probably a little more stupid? Yeah, sure, maybe. But I think it was for the good of the game. I mean, how long have people been asking for the new player experience? Four years? So it was great.