Dota 2 places you in a team of five to battle another five-person squad on an asymmetrical, three-dimensional map. The two teams, Radiant and Dire, each have a base of operations called a stronghold where they spawn at the start of the match, or after teleporting back to base to recover lost health and mana at their team-specific fountain. Characters also respawn there when they die in battle more on that in a bit.

How do you improve a game that has millions of active players, spawned an entire genre, and introduced new words into the gamer vernacular while it was still a mod for a decade old strategy game? Valve chose not to, instead approaching Dota 2 more like chess. The game itself is sacrosanct and not to be changed, but everything else, from the infrastructure behind online matchmaking to its graphical presentation, is fair game for updates and improvements. The result, unsurprisingly, is a world class service for a game that is just as brilliant and frustrating as it was when I fell in love with it four PCs and nearly a decade ago.

You are probably aware of the basics of the MOBA genre at the very least. Two teams of players fight in one large arena, with several lanes connecting their two bases. The game you play is to fight alongside the droves of NPC troops that your base produces, levelling up your hero, knocking down sequential defensive enemy towers, until finally your team smashes their way into the other team's fortress like base in a dramatic end to the match.

Dota 2 is a multiplayer game primarily consisting of five-on-five battles to destroy the other team Ancient. Before the game begins, each player must select a hero from a pool of over a hundred different characters, ideally fulfilling roles that might be familiar to MMO players. There are supports, and tanky cores, and DPS heavy glass cannon damage dealers, and plenty of roles in between, and teams that choose a line up that synergizes well are more likely to win.

Principally, it means that this is a dizzyingly deep competitive team strategy game whose core design benefits from fifteen years of unbroken refinement. It was in this strategic sandbox that the basic assumptions of the MOBA were established: two teams, three lanes, five heroes per team, towers, creeps, jungles, bases, and Ancients. On paper, your job is to lay siege to the enemy base and blow up the enemy ancient. In practice, your job is to manipulate the strategic, economic and psychological tempo of the match, a challenge whose variables change every time you play.

Dota 2 learning curve is mountainous, but everybody has to start somewhere. You’ll start by picking a character you like and learning how to use their abilities effectively, lining up stuns, dishing out damage, turning foes into frogs, being the best helicopter or bear or fishman that you can be. Then you’ll learn something about how to play that hero as part of a team, which stat boosting items to buy Cheap Dota 2 MMR Boost, and at what stage in the game you’re at your most powerful.