Get a DotA setup going.

DotA is my favorite WarCraft III mod, and is probably the game I have spent most of my gaming time playing. If you want to get started with DotA or if you are already a player but without the proper environment, then here is a quick guide for setting up a fantastic environment for DotA. All the links and software are owned by the respective companies and I bear no responsibility should your computer explode, become self-aware and take over the world or any other problem resulting from the use of this guide.

Link your licenses to a battle.net account.
You need a copy of WarCraft III Reign of Chaos, and Frozen Throne for this. I am assuming that you already have it, or have just gone and bought one after reading this. Go to www.battle.net (if that does not work try us.battle.net) and create a new account. Once you have completed all on-screen instructions you have a brand new battle.net account. Use the ‘add game’ menu to add all your blizzard game licenses. This links your keys to the account, and you can now download your games anywhere and have access to all your keys from your battle.net account. Pretty sweet huh? Don’t throw the discs away though, they are always valuable. Now either download the game if you don’t have your discs handy or use the discs to install the game. Blizzard games no longer require CD authentication, so if you download the game from battle.net you will not need your CD to play. Once you have installed Reign of Chaos (RoC) and The Frozen Throne (tFT) you should fire up tFT and connect to battle.net to update. Now you have a functional WarCraft setup ready.

WinPCap and WC3Banlist.
Banlist is a program that helps you with joining, maintains banlists, custom phrases and much more. I simply cannot play DotA without banlist. It bundles WinPCap 3.1, which doesn’t work on Vista and is old, so you want to head over to www.winpcap.org and get the latest stable build which currently happens to be 4.0.2. Don’t get the beta, its not worth it. Once you install that, banlist can work. Now go to www.wc3banlist.de and get banlist 3.0 from the second mirror in the downloads section. When you install it, make sure you have unchecked the WinPCap install option since you have already done that. Also grab the banlist 3.1 beta zip file and simply extract it to your banlist directory to update banlist to the 3.1 beta which is actually pretty darn good, so you want that update. Once you fire up banlist it will take you through a wizard where you are mainly interested in selecting the right NIC. Unless you do this, banlist will not work. Use the NIC detector, and press detect if you are not sure which NIC you want to use. At this point you can use banlist successfully. If you feel confident, go mess around some more like custom phrases which I personally like to use.

Custom kick – absolute must for hosts.
Another tool you want, especially if you are interested in hosting games is visual custom kick from www.visualcustomkick.com. All you need to do is download and extract to any folder. Once you run the executable in its unconfigured state you can use it to kick unwanted players by simply giving a /vkick command while in WarCraft. I use the other features like autorefresh, host helper, latency reducer, automatic rules and others. They are great especially if you are a host. Tinker around in the tools and you will find some cool stuff.

Maps.
DotA is a mod for WarCraft III, so you need to get the map itself. You can get the latest release, latest stable and AI maps from www.getdota.com. Maps need to be in the /maps/download folder. The download folder is not present when you first install the game. It automatically gets created as you download maps from bnet. Most hosts will not allow you to download so you want to get the maps manually first.

Optional but useful stuff.
DotA shortcuts are generally quite intuitive and easy to get your hands on, but if u don’t feel like remembering them for over 80 heroes, then you want warkeys from warkeys.sourceforge.net. It’s a nifty program that allows you to remap your keys how you want them. I use the force align to grid which basically maps the control set in WarCraft to the rectangle marked by Q-V. After that I remap attack to A, patrol to E and hold position to Q and some others for my convenience. The disadvantage of using this, is that they don’t update as often as DotA, so sometimes you may have to manually hack into shape your customkeys.txt file in WarCraft. Another interesting utility is the DotA patcher from www.dota-allstars.com. This program automatically downloads the latest version, allows you start up multiple programs, changes your desktop icon and some other fun stuff, however it doesn’t download the latest version to the downloads folder, but creates its own, and there is no way you can over-ride that. So I don’t use it because it screws up the replays as replays with the map in the custom folder will not work on computers with the map in the download folder.

Happy DotA-ing.