As soon as you start playing Defense of the Ancients on Warcraft III: TFT you will start getting better. Soon you will have friends that you like to play with and the public custom games just don’t seem to challenge you any more. You start playing TDA games and for a while they seem to be a little harder but you seem to win about 95% of them with your new TDA team. Steamrolling pubs starts to get old. What’s next? Where do you go to take you gameplay up to the next level?
My knowledge of leagues is only based on what I have experienced playing on the US East server, or Azeroth. I cannot say how things work on US West / Asia/ or the Europe servers as I don’t really play on them.
CAL is the Cyber-Athletic League. They probably have the most recognizable name out of this list because of all the different leagues they operate. They operate two leagues, DotA Open and DotA Invite. Your team will start out in DotA Open and you must prove your self to be asked to play in Invite. CAL has been the league with the highest amount of longevity. They are on their seventh or eighth season (I think) and they will be around for a while.
One problem with CAL though is that no one makes you play. There are a lot of times, especially in the preseason, where you will log on to play a game and the other team will be a no show or missing maybe one or two players. This tends to happen a lot until you get further in the season where all the teams are dedicated.
DXD is the DotA eXtreme Domination League. DXD goes by the name of DXDE on the US East servers. They are one of the bigger leagues and based on player skill they are the next level up from TDA. Don’t get me wrong though, there are some extremely good players in this league that will really test your player levels.
They operate two different types of games, captains games and random team games. Captains games are where two captains pick teams, normally community leaders or very good players are captains. The random team games give people the opportunity to become noticed in the league and build up their reputation so they get picked in captains games.
DXD also sponsored the development of the DotA Client program, so they require it in every game. DotA Client is an anti-Hack tool and stat tracker.
Some other noteworthy leagues are:
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