ИДЕЯ ДЛЯ РИЗОМА

It would be nice to be able to alt+click on an aura/power-up and automatically say in team chat something like:

• <Ability> available (e.g. level 2 speed-up)
• <Ability> on cooldown, xx seconds remaining (I need 5 seconds to go invul)
• <Aura> disabled due to usage in team (I could activate mpa but it's pointless)

basically allowing a team of several people to communicate faster in times when typing time is at a premium - e.g. under duress.

Also, the same alt+click mechanism should send to team chat messages such as:

• Under the effect of <Madness>
• Under the effect of <Fear>
• Under the effect of <Blind>
• etc

All of this is useful both in pvp and in pve..

sounds like the perfect reason to use voice chat to me MJ. but i do agree with the idea because for some reason people are afraid to use voice chat (even when there are players that have access to it, and others that offer it {there is a "grave of the fireflies" channel on the teamspeak server i admin for a reason})

talk

(ps. there are countless free public servers out there that are often UNUSED by anyone...)

Several reasons why these two things don't overlap:

- in a hot action scene, you would have to hover over an action, wait for the tooltip, then read it out aloud ; alt+clicking is way faster and frees you to click something else sooner ; not to mention the flickering when several targets are around you, for instance in an OP battle

- these messages can be translated in a multi-language team ; so if my teammate has the client set to Russian, she will see the message in Russian, just like emotes are translated automatically to the target language ;

- there are multiple reasons why someone would rather not use voice at a time - I don't want to speak today, my microphone is broken, I dislike another player's voice, I dislike using TeamSpeak etc

- a team is fluid ; the mechanics of asking someone to leave your channel on TeamSpeak and asking someone else to join takes far more longer than it takes to adjust the team in game

Trust me. I've played Dota for a few months. You can't replace this thing with anything else.

Thanks for the support though :)

Speaking in a RP sense if you are under sleep you wouldn't be able to inform your teammates of this. This all boils down to awareness and sense of teamwork. Having the awareness to realise that your teammate is under an affy- and making a quick decision about it, or the foreplanning to let your teammates know when you are going to use an aura- these are things which I believe should be gained through experience and not given to players at the click of a button.

MJ you put thought into your response to me and now i see the points your making, and they are quite valid. (the language thing is a very good point since there's no translation with voice chat)

that's true virg, but i think part of the goal of MJ's idea was to improve teamplay without requiring everyone to be super close players that know how eachother play by heart.

personally i doubt i'd use such a feature because the way i play doesn't generally require me to need the features, not to mention that i already have a hard enough time keeping track of what my keys do already (even after all these years)

talk

I would like to point out that even if you don't know your team very well (because it's a pickup team) and you don't have/don't like Teamspeak, some debuffs are really clear. When fighting Vorkoo, for instance, if I can't see the speed lines of the sword/axe of the tank, it's time for extra healing. :)

Even with a pickup team- with experience you should be able to know/do these things. Yes the newer players on the team won't but that's the whole point of the term 'experience'.

Bittty -

Let's say you're at an OP, and your team is fairly dispersed. You see several people under different spells - madness, fear, etc. Can you quickly tell if your healers are able to perform, or they're affected? Probably not, especially if you're a frontline tank and the pod is behind you. The compass is practically useless with 50 dots moving in and out of position.

Just one practical example :)

Virg -

We can have a complex and difficult game without making the learning curve steeper than necessary. I don't see how giving tools to the players somehow substracts from their experience. If we were going by this logic, the System Info shouldn't even tell you you're under a spell, you can just figure it out yourself from the visual effects.

I'm not persuaded by the appeal to roleplay. In roleplay you may help plants to take root by casting something on them -- but in the actual game, you are simply casting Root on an inert object ((actual example from an event)). There's a good reason why only Around is treated as IC, while the other chat channels are not.

Thank you for your thoughts though.

The tools are already there- you can create macros if you so choose (and if players want to- then they are putting in effort and good for them). I don't think this game needs to be made any easier- I think it needs to be made harder. There are aspects of PVP that I absolutely love. I love the depth of the mechanics and having to always be alert of not just yourself, but also of your team mates. For me, PVE is mostly button-mashing. PVP is the true thrill always having to adapt, watching everything, constantly switch weapons, recharge them etc. Anything that makes this 'easier' I wouldn't want. Just because something would be 'useful' in PVP- doesn't mean it should be added.