Development

Warcraft III is the third title in the Warcraft series of real-time strategy games developed by Blizzard Entertainment. As with Warcraft II, Blizzard included a free "World Editor" in the game that allows players to create custom scenarios or "maps" for the game, which can be played online with other players through Battle-net. These custom scenarios can be simple terrain changes, which play like normal Warcraft games, or they can be entirely new game scenarios with custom objectives, units, items, and events; Defense of the Ancients is one of the latter. Created by a mapmaker known as Eul, Defense of the Ancients is a custom scenario based on a previous StarCraft scenario known as "Aeon of Strife". After the release of Warcraft's expansion The Frozen Throne, which added new features to the World Editor, Eul did not update the scenario. Numerous variants were created based on the original, but Allstars is the version that made Defense of the Ancients popular. Allstars was developed by an author under the alias Guinsoo. After version 6.x, another author by the name of IceFrog took over development of the scenario. With successive versions, IceFrog fixes bugs and adds or updates features; for example, in version 6.48, IceFrog added a feature which automatically changes the terrain from grass to snow. Each release is accompanied with a changelog. On the Allstars forum, users can post ideas for new heroes or items, some of which are added to the map. Versions of the scenario where enemy heroes are controlled by artificial intelligences have also been released.