(I haven't played DotA 2 but I've played DotA and Heroes of Newerth Almost all of those things are examples of a game (DotA 2) being hard in a bad way/for the

(I haven't played DotA 2 but I've played DotA and Heroes of Newerth Almost all of those things are examples of a game (DotA 2) being hard in a bad way/for the wrong reasons. The hallmark of game design is that it should be easy to learn but hard to master, but DotA games are notoriously hard to get into because of the steep learning curve, mostly because of all the dozens (almost 100?) heroes', their abilities and all the items (some of which have active/spell abilities) that you have to learn. I was useless in all of the initial games that I played in HoN, even though I had friends to help me. I still get bitten in the ass by not knowing all the abilities of some hero, or the fact that he has some item that totally negates one of my heroes strengths. Strategy games of any interesting complexity usually have a steep initial learning curve, where you'll fuck up everything in the beginning and/or get killed by overlooking one single aspect of your base management or army control. But DotA is astonishing in that it was created in a game where you have to control up to three heroes, an army and base management, simplified it down to controlling only one hero - and made the initial learning curve of the game harder than the original game (Warcraft 3)! And this custom game with the higher barrier to entry in the end eclipsed Warcraft 3 itself when it comes to popularity!