Dota Hosting: Listchecker and WC3 Banlist

By this stage of Dota, many ways of hosting are available (dota client, listchecker, WC3 Banlist, Banlist Beta, GG client). In this post I plan to break down how to use listchecker and run WC3 banlist at the same time. For those of you who are not familiar with listchecker, it is a 3rd party program that you can download by searching google that allows you to host Dota (or any custom game) with little to no lag, assuming the host connection is halfway decent, would recommend at least 5mb dsl/cable or equivalent connection. Anything less than this will lead to monstrous lag and extreme spiking as listchecker is very unforgiving. However, given the right connection capabilities, listchecker is a wonderful program to host with. It hosts with little to no lag because it basically sets up a lan game, as the program bypasses the bnet server system and hosts directly from you to the other players in the game. Downloading and setting it up is somewhat complex and is far too long to implement into this post, so the site I recommend getting it from which does a very good job of explaining how to set it up is here.

Once you have downloaded it and got it working the way it should to host, here are some useful commands (All assuming you have read the manual in the given link). Once you have made the game public by typing /bnethostpublic [game name] ... then some useful in game commands are:

/refreshbnet . . . . allows you to refresh at will in game which is good to use every once in a while if your game is taking a while to fill because the auto refresh on listchecker is quite slow in my opinion

/pingclients . . . . will allow you to see everyones pings in your game..... anything over 90 to 100 i do not keep as usually they will spike or lag and most likely drop

If you are running WC3 banlist along with listchecker, to use its commands while hosting w/ listchecker simply type /bnetcmd then whatever you want to do in WC3 banlist. For example, if i want to check everyones locations in my game while running listchecker I would type . . .
/bnetcmd /fromall
This tells listchecker that you wish to use a bnet function. You use /bnetcmd to also whisper people or do anything else you would normally do if you were logged directly onto the bnet servers.

FYI : For those of you who use custom kick programs do not run with listchecker because since it is a lan game basically when you custom kick someone the whole group of players in game will get booted as the program thinks all players are on a lan. Kicking one leads to the entire 10 players being kicked, including the host (I know this because in my listchecker noob days I did this).

If you are having problems setting up listchecker on your computer or getting it to function properly with other things like WC3 banlist after reading the site I recommended you can leave a comment and I will attempt to help you solve your problem.