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Q u o t e:
in the golden days of wc3, custom games were player-hosted and you would find all kinds of random crap being played, from hamster dance to smash tv. cheated maps were common, but the cheats were amusingly simple, with tomes of 999 knowledge hidden in the corner of the map (back when you had to press your numpad 999 times to use it up). also common were hundreds of different versions of every map imaginable. everyone had their own wintermaul or td, everyone had their own hero arena. this meant there was no meta-game for these customs. you didnt join a random hero arena already knowing what hero and items youd buy like you do in dota. instead you would have to carefully look through the options and take a risk on something. you figured things out as you played. agility heros with critical strike were usually a solid option on maps with cheap tomes, since pre-allstars hero powers really didnt scale. there was often a way to break the game, with charm or some other overlooked power, or by blinking out of the regularly scheduled duels between top scoring heros.

when the bot plague came, noone recognized the horrible potential it represented. people saw that they could play their favorite customs on a good connection, with no host abusing custom kick. there were already certain maps that were overwhelmingly popular with loyal playerbases. as bot hosting became more popular these games came to dominate the custom game list. at first the problem was that the list was so crowded you would only be able to find autorefreshed games, but the truth is after a while the mainstream custom game crowd changed their perception of the entire genre. nowdays when someone pushes ALT+G, it's not to pore over the options and pick something that looks fun, it's to queue up for the one custom theyve played exhaustively. if someone joins a non-kosher map today it's their because their fat finger slipped and they missed dota, or because they were so confident the list was 100% dota that they chose a game at random, assuming you had hosted dota with a quirky irrelevant title

highly developed custom games like dota or fight of characters or whatever else these ladder rejects play do bring a lot to the table. using all kinds of different new heros and spells that are actually balanced is a fun experience. unfortunately they just dont have the magic of a completely random unknown custom, where innovation, luck and intelligence play a larger role than how well you can execute the zombie-mode meta play

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