I'm not sure in naming the game DoTA 2 that Valve is attempting to describe the game as appose to the game being Defense of the Ancients 2. In that sense it is a just a title much like how Halo 2 or Halflife 2 are titles that connect the new game back to its predecessor.

That said, because of the success of the original DoTA, and how young the genre is in comparison to the amount of say fps, rts, rpg, etc etc. type games are out, the community only has a hand full of comparisons to look at, the prime one being the original. Because of that the use of DoTA has become an indicator of they game map/play style. Riot attempted to use MoBA as a descriptor in order to distance themselves and show the difference in their game, yet when I started playing LoL it was references to DoTA that informed me how the game worked.

Another point could be the usage of names that become assigned to actions. For instance, if someone performs an act of betrayal they maybe called a Benedict Arnold. Plenty of people in history have been traitors, but in the USA it is Arnold's name that we hold synonymous with the act. To much the same, DoTA being the the first widely popular game of its type will, its name will always have a direct connection to genre.

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