1. Hey there Mooseman and m0rdiN. First of all thanks for your time. Could you please introduce yourselves to our readers and of course tell us a little bit about your job at Dota-League?
Moose: Hi, my name is Moritz Zimmermann and I am the lead designer here at the Dota-League. Apart from that I mostly take care of public relations- , marketing- and sponsoring related matter and of course do everything I can to improve the site in any way possible.
That can range from news-writing to helping out Carnie, m0rdin and Spudlich and all the other admins with the league- and tournament systems. About myself: I am 26 years old, from Germany and finished my studies in Media-design last year with the focus on video and film.
m0rdiN: Hello, my name is Martin Hermes, I am 26 years old, living in the west of Germany, Muelheim an der Ruhr, close to Cologne. I finished my education in spring 2007 at the university of applied sciences in Duesseldorf in business economics. During my academic studies I played DotA and founded the DotA-League with 3 friends of mine, which is one of the favourite platforms to play DotA nowadays.
At the beginning I coded the website and did a lot of administrative work, but today I am acting more in the background. I am one of the guys behind the league and my job is to develop the future plans for it and to hold all divisions of the site together.
2. What do you think was the biggest factor in the development of the League?
Moose: Interesting enough, I think the biggest factor in the development of the league was to create a site that a lot of people would be interested in visiting. It is important to first of all have a site that is working well and offers something to re-visit and one that also is an eye-catcher.
But over the years we have learned extremely much from the community, so that we were able to improve it according to their wishes and ideas. Everything that we have created was supported by the community and they helped us building up this site immensely.
m0rdiN: In 2005, we saw the potential of the great game DotA. It is based on the popular strategic game Warcraft 3 with a lot of features to build up your individual hero. You can choose one of around 90 heroes and buy special items for them, which gives nearly endless possibilities for teams to build up strategies. Another factor is, that the strategy, the teamplay and the skills of the individual players are very important to win a round. Especially the team-element could even be compared to Counter-Strike, one of the most popular online games ever! But if you compare DotA with CS, you have much more possibilities to set up your team and be successful.
This combination makes the game DotA the most awesome game and because of that it will grow further on in the future.
One of the important things at the beginning of DotA-League was the decision to set up the project with an international scope. At the beginning in 2005, there were only a few DotA-Teams in the German scene, so we decided to keep the whole website in English.
3. You’re a part of the Dota-League from the very beginning. Why did you start the project and did you expect it to grow this big?
Moose: The idea was created by Carnie and his brother Spudlich. It started off by just playing DotA ourselves and since we (Carnie, Spudlich, m0rdiN and I) are all friends, we started building up on the idea to create a league which was missing three years ago. Now our HQ is in a garden shed where we set up a little office to sit together and program, design, find new ideas how to improve the site and think about future projects to make DL the coolest site for DotA.
When we started the site we thought we could have a chance to make it an interesting site for people to play the game. But we, of course, didn't have any really decent reasons for people to go there fist except for others to find companions with the same goals – to play DotA.
But as we improved the site with the help of the community it started to get really exciting to watch more and more users join our site. That is a very big compliment to us!
m0rdiN: We started the project in 2005 and saw the potential of the game, because we loved it so much! At the time, there was no organized website to play DotA and after a while we were sick of playing public games. This was the reason to create a platform for teams and individuals to fight high quality games against each other.
I never expected that this project would grow up so fast and that it would reach such a high number of members as it has today. At the beginning
I remember the point we had our first 100 (!) registered users, and we were very proud to reach the DotA-community that much.
4. DL exists for almost three years now. Have you ever tried to play DotA professionally yourself in that long time?
Moose: Ha ha, well in the beginning, we all played DotA like crazy. As I mentioned before, that was one of the reasons why we started the league. But we also only had a few hundred users which meant that we had less work than today. Nowadays we have more than 100.000 users registered here and all of them need to be supported. We get a few hundred support questions every day and these need to be answered. We take contact to our users very seriously. But that also means that according to all this work we have with the big DotA-bunch of users, we don´t find so much time to play ourselves anymore. My stats say it all
. But playing DotA is very important for us. Otherwise we would not know what to improve!m0rdiN: No, I am not made for professional DotA gaming. I would say I am a very bad DotA player and I don’t have the goal to be a professional, because the league is demanding a lot of work from the founders. Though I find myself wondering how it would be to play professional.
5. The past season was won by Meet Your Makers over SK Gaming and mousesports. Did you expect that result?
Moose: I for myself did expect a result like that. The Pick League is becoming more popular these days. This means that bigger clans are taking part in it and only the name “Mousesports”, “Meet Your Makers” or “SK-Gaming” can let a chill roll down people´s spines who are not playing in such a professional clan. And of course the pressure to win immediately rises.
These clans are extremely organized and professional, which fun-clans or clans created out of a friendship mostly don't have. So the competition is not as high for professional clans yet, as for example in more mature games such as Counter-Strike or StarCraft. The more people play it, the harder it gets to become and stay No. 1. But I highly doubt that MYM, SK or mousesports will lose their spots in the high ranks. ;)
m0rdiN: In general there are a many DotA teams who are extremely professional, who are very well organised, who fight for the wins between each other. But there are a lot of other clans climbing up the ladder who get more and more organised so that we can expect exciting fights between teams in the future. MYM has been there in the very beginning which means that they had a lot more time than other teams to improve their game- and teamplay. That is of course a big advantage. But other teams will follow and the hunt for first place is on.
6. Who do you think will win the upcoming season?
Moose: It would be nice to see a fresh and rather unknown clan win the season. A clan no one would expect to win.
m0rdiN:May the best team win. There are many candidates.
7. What is the expected number of participating teams of the pick league?
Moose: The amount of participating teams for the current season is around 500 teams. That is the biggest number we have ever had and we will do our best to manage that large number of players attending.
m0rdiN: We have had a lot more teams signed up than we had last season and having more than 3.000 people participating in the pick league clearly shows that is is beyond our expectations and makes it the biggest league for DotA world wide.
8. You recently announced prizes for the Division 2. What was the reason for you to add them?
Moose: We upped the prizes since we thought that not only Div 1 teams should have the chance to win something. It´s always the first, second and third who win something. If you look at sprinters in the Olympic challenges for example, it´s even worse. The first one is the only one who gets all the recognition, even though the second was about half a second slower. That's not a lot and we think that people who worked as hard as a first placed and did their best, should get recognition as well.
m0rdiN:The standard in Division 1 is even as high as in Division 2 which should be rewarded as well, according to the rise in quality and organization in the second division. We also want to reach out to more people to show them the path for a more professional gaming future.
9. Until now you always gave away product prizes to the top three teams. Could this change during the ninth season or maybe in the next and if yes what would be the reason?
Moose:We are working hard to compete with other tournaments and leagues who give out prize money.
This is our goal for 2008.
10. Could there be a possible LAN Event organized by the DotA-League?
Moose: We already thought about that some time ago. We want to get bigger with the league and want to be able to meet and greet, and of course get bashed in DotA, by the people who play through DL. It´s at this point still a huge thing to plan, so we focus on more important matter first: Improving the site. But that is definitely a goal.
m0rdiN: Yes of course, this might be possible. At the moment we are focused on online gaming, but if DotA will grow further on, there might be a chance to arrange some offline events. I think the community is big enough now and there would be lots of intercessors, because the whole scene is getting more and more professional.
11. Did you ever think about joint events with other organizers like the DreamHack for further DotA events?
Moose: We, of course, also put some thought into having offline Dota-League events on LANs such as tournaments. But as I mentioned before, one thing at a time.
m0rdiN: That is not planned at the moment, since we focus on the main work in the online world. But according to the answer I have given before, our thoughts of course go further into the offline scene too. A cooperation could be possible in the future though.
12. Besides the Pick League, you’re also running the DotA Masters 8 ½ at the moment. Are there any plans to expand to a 2on2 version of the Pick League?
Moose: As the name “8 ½” already says, it is a tournament “in between” and people seem to love it. We will definitely have more 2on2 tournaments in the future. The high recognition we get by 2on2 teams shows us that DotA is in fact interesting even for the league system.
m0rdiN:The 2on2 was picked up greatly by the people at DL and it shows that something has to be done in this branch but momentarily it´s not planned yet, though we are thinking about adding a 2on2 or 3on3 ladder system.
13. Okay that’s it! Are there any final shout-outs or greetings?
Moose: Greetings to everyone at DL, especially all our admins and everyone who is taking part in the pick league. Shoutouts? Here is one: Eat more carrots! Improves the eye-sight for better vision ingame! xD
m0rdiN: Thanks to all our admins for the good work. We want to do the best possible for the game and the community to make it grow greatly to bring DotA to the next level and give it a highly professional touch.
Source: SK-gaming
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