DOTA 2 Auto Chess: When a strategy game mod goes wild

I was talking games to my 21 year old son yesterday. He asked: So, have you tried DOTA 2 Auto chess yet?

I hadn’t. He proceeded to explain this community mod currently has over 130,000 concurrent players (Artifact weeps with envy) and has taken over his gaming life.

I had seen videos pop-up all over my streams, but hadn’t paid attention to a DOTA 2 game mod.

Trump to the rescue to explain the game (though anyone who follows one of the Hearthstone streamers probably can also check out one of their videos. This game is popping up everywhere):

I havn’t looked into it much deeper than that video. But it seems like a fun multiplayer battle mode where you buy units between matches, equip them and upgrade them to higher ranks by combining identical units. The battles then play automatically. Can you build the right synergies between your units to win it all?

I think this is now on my play list for this week.

Yeah, I watched some of this being played, and it looks really interesting. I will have to try this one out.

weird beast of a game, is pretty fun though.

I went as far as installing Dota 2 yesterday, but haven’t installed the mod yet. What would be really cool is if we could organise Qt3 matches. But I don’t know whether there are any friends only options.

So the path to this mod is something like this, isn’t it?

Warcraft 3 > DotA > DotA 2 > Auto Chess.

It seems like Blizzard missed a bit of a boat here somewhere.

I don’t see why not. It’s just a custom game, right? Wouldn’t you team up as usual?

Icefrog (the lead developer of DotA) originally approached Blizzard about developing DotA as a standalone game. Blizzard said “no thanks” so Icefrog ended up at Valve and DotA 2 became a thing. Meanwhile Blizzard made Heroes of the Storm, and we know how that turned out.

So yeah… Blizzard definitely missed the boat.

I have never played Dota 2. I’m a League of Legends person myself. So I wouldn’t know.

But if that’s the case, great news! Looking forward to a few matches then.

Yup, just installed it to check. It’s a custom game and you can matchmake or create a custom lobby.

This is a lot of fun - definitely worth checking out even for non-DOTA2 players.

If you create a custom lobby, you’re always the host, so you can lock and launch instead of waiting for an alt tabbed host.

Anyway the game is a deck builder been playing the hell out of it.

I finally won my first match yesterday with a 6 warrior + 3 dragon strategy.

I wonder if this enough legs to inspire a stand alone game at some point like DoTA.

Started playing this weekend. It is very addicting and like what others have said I too wonder if it has what it takes to become a stand alone game.

The real RNG in this game is finding a game without cheaters.

cheaters? how do you cheat in auto chess?

Stuff is client side.

I’ve personally seen gold-locks (rerolling while money doesn’t change). I’ve seen reports of free rerolls and lots of tier 4 units when they shouldn’t be able to. There sub is filled with complaints today.

Disappointing, was just about to actually go check this out but dealing with hacks doesn’t sound terribly fun.

If you’re starting out I don’t think it’ll matter enough to ruin figuring out the game mechanics.

Competitive play is messed up right now though (probably on the Knight + ranks).

Well looks like all you need to do is make a little noise for the devs to come out with a fix in under 24 hours.

Today’s patch has gold-report summary, and apparently, a cheater-detection mechanism.

edit: So more drama, they got Amaz and other streamers banned. Apparently the hack tool makers got pissed and decided to troll.

edit: This looks like the way to ban ppl.

Game seems to be working again, the devs are saying they are under attack by hackers.