Speak to a “traditional” game designer about Dota 2 and you’ll likely receive a couple of eye rolls. By most mainstream game standards, Valve’s flagship MOBA is filled with poor game design decisions and baffling mechanics. From a purely academic standpoint, Dota 2 should not work as a game.

And yet, it’s one of the most popular and well-regarded esports in history. Those weird, unintended mechanics and intricacies are what make Dota 2 the game it is today.

Thanks to Dota’s origins as a WarCraft 3 mod, a number of mechanics are a result of that game’s relatively old engine. Interestingly, when Valve decided to bring Defense of the Ancients into the modern era, they committed to bringing even the most obscure mechanics over into Dota 2.

These are three of the weird bugs, unintended mechanics, and otherwise goofy stuff that make Dota 2 the great game it is today.

Murdering your own lane creeps is key to the early game of Dota 2 (Valve/Gamepedia) More

Denying creeps

The act of murdering your own dudes for fun and profit doesn’t make much sense. Why would any new player think it’s a good idea to cut down a member of your own team, no matter how minor their impact on the overall game?

Well, as it turns out, it’s hugely beneficial from a strategic standpoint.

In Warcraft 3, you could attack your own units by attack-clicking on them. Sometimes, if a game went into the later stages, a player would have to do it just to clear out food resources to build more units. Not necessary in every single match of Warcraft 3, but definitely something worth sticking into the game. In fact, the mechanic is pretty standard in Blizzard RTS games.

When the original DotA was thrown together, supply concerns weren’t an issue. But the ability to kill your own dudes persisted. High-level players quickly realized how big of an advantage they could get by last-hitting their own creeps and denying their opponents experience and gold. At first, denying, well, denied every bit of gold and experience, leading to massive leads for the player that was better at it.

Rather than fight the Warcraft 3 engine, the original DotA modders just accepted it. They changed the way experience works, giving partial experience to anyone nearby a denied minion. Even with those nerfs, denying became a core element to laning in DotA, and remains essential to high-level play in Dota 2.

Want your Juggernaut to get huge? Better stack those camps (Valve) More

Stacking

The guys who made Defense of the Ancients weren’t professional game developers. They were modders taking the ideas presented by Aeon of Strife and its creator Aeon64. They were amateurs making a fun mode for the love of the game. They were Eul (the originator of the map) and a team of volunteers making DotA the best they could in their free time. Their solutions to problems weren’t terribly elegant or even very balanced. Most of the time, they just looked for the most efficient way to do things and moved on.

That’s how neutral stacking became a thing. Whereas later MOBAs had neutral camps spawning dynamically, depending on when they were cleared in the first place, things don’t quite work like that in Dota. (The two Buffs in League of Legends respawn five minutes after their deaths, for example.)

Rather than a dynamic respawn, neutral camps respawn every couple of minutes, just as long as there aren’t any units within the area. That means if an intrepid player pulls creeps away from a camp at just the right moment, they can get the camp to respawn without having to kill it beforehand. Do it correctly and it’s possible to stack a whole bunch of monsters in the same spot until they or their teammates are strong enough to kill them, resulting in a huge burst of gold for whoever manages to bring them all down.