My thoughts exactly.

What's up xiph! I haven't posted my thorough first impressions yet, but I took down a lot of notes... anyway, I agree with a lot of what you're saying here.

Controls - the QWER is a great standard, and I really think it's essential.  While I've pretty much memorized all the positions of all the spells of dota (as most of the dota players here inevitably have, at least as far as our favorite characters), it's nicer to be able to have a standard hand placement. 

The constant zooming in and out to look at the battlefield is a bit rough as far as controlling the action.  It's fluid and feels good, but the use is too frequent, as is mentioned in other threads.  Mouse-scroll is essential here.

Xiph, are you finding it hard to sometimes identify enemy heroes versus your own? I'm not sure if the best way to solve that is a minimap or not, as some suggest.  I personally am having a decently hard time differentiating Regalus from some standard troops.  Not only that, but when I look at a group on the map, it isn't obvious whether the hero standing there is my enemy or not.  The models look amazing, but there's a distinct lack of indicators as to which side they're on, or which player they're controlled by.  Perhaps a change in tint of the characters based on side or player controlling would fix this, but as it stands, in my 4 regalus game, I wasted a ton of clicks on my teammate rather than the enemy.  While it's easier to tell the other heroes apart from the units, it is still very hard to instantly discern whether they're an enemy or an ally.  I feel that to take this game to a highly competitive level, enemies must be readily apparent, and especially distinct from friends.

One bug I encountered was that at various points of the game, after fights, some of my units would just stop attacking and stand on their path.  I found that they ended up getting killed often, but it was annoying to have them sitting there doing nothing.

What's up xiph! I haven't posted my thorough first impressions yet, but I took down a lot of notes... anyway, I agree with a lot of what you're saying here.

Controls - the QWER is a great standard, and I really think it's essential.  While I've pretty much memorized all the positions of all the spells of dota (as most of the dota players here inevitably have, at least as far as our favorite characters), it's nicer to be able to have a standard hand placement. 

The constant zooming in and out to look at the battlefield is a bit rough as far as controlling the action.  It's fluid and feels good, but the use is too frequent, as is mentioned in other threads.  Mouse-scroll is essential here.

Xiph, are you finding it hard to sometimes identify enemy heroes versus your own? I'm not sure if the best way to solve that is a minimap or not, as some suggest.  I personally am having a decently hard time differentiating Regalus from some standard troops.  Not only that, but when I look at a group on the map, it isn't obvious whether the hero standing there is my enemy or not.  The models look amazing, but there's a distinct lack of indicators as to which side they're on, or which player they're controlled by.  Perhaps a change in tint of the characters based on side or player controlling would fix this, but as it stands, in my 4 regalus game, I wasted a ton of clicks on my teammate rather than the enemy.  While it's easier to tell the other heroes apart from the units, it is still very hard to instantly discern whether they're an enemy or an ally.  I feel that to take this game to a highly competitive level, enemies must be readily apparent, and especially distinct from friends.

One bug I encountered was that at various points of the game, after fights, some of my units would just stop attacking and stand on their path.  I found that they ended up getting killed often, but it was annoying to have them sitting there doing nothing.

Weird, that placed my old reply instead of the one I typed

Anyway, I just went back a bit so I could copy/paste what I actually said:

"So far, I can pretty easily tell which side the creeps I'm looking at are on, but I'm not sure if I tell that by coloration or by the fact that they're moving towards my base rather than away.  I only had time to install and play about 3 games before I left town, so I'll look into that more when I get back.  I like that icon idea, at least in theory, because it would let you tell instantly who's on the other team, and who's on your team (possibly even who they were if it were individual colors for players), and the size idea would give you everything you needed from the minimap, without having to actually have a minimap in game.

One thing I have thought about though, is that the creeps for both sides use the same models.  I'm not sure whether I like this or not.  One thing I thought DotA got right was using distinct models for both sides.  I already said this, but I think it's really important for a highly successful competitive game... you must be able to instantly discern your allies from your enemies."

I like the icon idea, although I think having colors setup by team or for the individual player and allowing the user the choice.  In DotA, I had some friends that swore by teamcolor minimap, however, I prefered the players' unique colors so I could tell who was on the map running towards me, or in another lane, without having to click and change view from my lane.

I'd say.. let the Players choose. Create a Keysetting menu, where you can set the keybindings to your abilities/consumable etc. by yourself and everyone is happy

Thanks .

Absolutely, but getting good defaults for most people is still important.

Deifnitely a settable, that kind of thing cannot be hardcoded and still be universally good given the variety of hardware out there, but you're kind of rare. The setup I outlined is good on a vast majority of keyboards. The rest can change it to something more ergonomic on their keyboards that may not work on others. The point of defaults is being as good as possible for as many people as possible, not to be passable for everybody but still pretty awkward for everybody.

Exactly what I want to see, and I think that those defaults are more reasonable than most. Most people are used to wasd and wouldn't like to use szxc for camera movement, qwer for abilities and 1234 for items, but that'd probably be something you want.

That's a very low end card if it really is a 6200. I think that with some more optimization it should run more smoothly, but I have noticed that this game, like crysis (inexplicably on that one) seems to be more playable than the framerate should indicate (in this case because the animations are excellent).

Fair enough. I was just making an example. That kind of variance in perspective is part of the reason no self-respecting strategy game could come without cutomizable controls. I don't really need pan all that much, either, I'm so used to sins, where it is quite literally the only way to move with any semblence of control or speed, so the strategic zoom makes a lot of sense to me too.