Back in the day I played quite a lot of wc3 and Frozen Throne. Some of my friends and I tried to play multiplayer (cr*cked one, no b-net) over lan. We succeeded but were only able to do so in my house, on the two pc-s that were able to run it. Alongside classic wc3 and tft games, bundled with cr*cked version of the game came a map called DotA.
We tried it and we liked it. However, we were only able to play the game again, in my house over the lan. With time, we discovered game ranger, which catapulted us in the world of online dota, continuing our "careers" on garena and finally in DotA 2. I distinctly remember one of my first (if not the first) online games on which i rushed bloodstone on venomancer, and ended up being called "noob", "stupid veno no dps" and "omg idiot". I never quite liked veno after that, especially not the "dps carry" one.