In the past year or so, there have been many hosting programs introduced to the DoTA scene. The most popular of these are: ListChecker, DoTA Client, and Delay Reducer. Each has its pros and cons and I will discuss all three in this post.

You can download and install each of the programs by following these links:

  1. ListChecker
  2. DoTA Client
  3. Delay Reducer

Ease of Installation

Delay Reducer is hands down the easiest to install, and DoTA Client is not far behind. ListChecker is by far the most difficult to configure and install, and there have been entire posts and forums dedicated to troubleshooting the ListChecker program.

Ease of Use

Delay Reducer once again takes the cake here. All you have to do is open up the program before the game begins and host games as you normally would via Battle.net. You ccan set your latency using an ingame command which is nifty to ensure that you’re running at the optimal latency.

DoTA Client isn’t too difficult to use either. Some initial configuration and you’re ready to host just like you would host a normal game on Battle.net. There have been reported problems that people can’t connect to the correct server and that DoTA Client simply won’t work. It worked fine for me but I didn’t use it much longer than 2 weeks before I started using ListChecker again.

ListChecker is the most cumbersome of the three programs. You have to start the program, go into LAN, and then create the game using in-game commands. By far the annoying thing as you have to exit Battle.net to host the game. Once the game is over, you have to sign back into Battle.net for any post game discussions.

Latency

Delay Reducer and DoTA Client both have the flexibility of configuring the latency in game.

ListChecker has a default latency of 100ms, which is a great improvement over the Battle.net standard of 250 ms.

Stability

Stability is key in DoTA to ensure that people do not drop and that games will be fun for all. The king of stability is ListChecker. I’ve used ListChecker for almost a year now, and its stability is unparalleled. When you have people from different countries (or cross country) playing a game, ListChecker pretty much handles it like a champ.

Delay Reducer and DoTA Client seem to work much better when the people playing the game are much closer to each other.

Overall

Overall, I would have to designate ListChecker as the champion of Hosting Programs. Sure, the installation and ease of use is no walk in the park, but once you set up the program, all of your games will be lag-free and your games will be stable as a rock!

My next choice would be Delay Reducer for its incredibly simply interface and ease of use. I’ve use this one with minimal problems. Sometimes when I’m too lazy to exit Battle.net to host with ListChecker, I just use Delay Reducer instead.

The forgotten program here is DoTA Client. I haven’t used it in a while, but I had some problems with the stability issue so I went back to ListChecker. In addition, many people have problems connecting to the correct server.

Future Potential

DoTA Client by far has the most potential of any of these three programs. They offer a range of goodies such as anti-hack.

ListChecker hasn’t changed much since its introduction to the scene, so I predict it won’t be changing much in the future.

Delay Reducer has some potential to do some cool things as well.

In Summary

hosting chart