League's Wikipedia page describes it as "inspired by Defense of the Ancients, a custom map for Warcraft III." I believe they also hired some of the core Dota devs to work on League. I guess if you want to be pedantic it was a custom map, but that was more a consequence of WC3 lacking support for mods. They ended up having to work around a lot of limitations to make Dota work in the custom map framework.
They hired a former dev, guinsoo. At the time when LoL was announced dota was being developed by icefrog for a few good solid years already. Most of dota's popularity happened during icefrog's years. Icefrog later joined valve and helped create Dora 2.
League's Wikipedia page describes it as "inspired by Defense of the Ancients, a custom map for Warcraft III." I believe they also hired some of the core Dota devs to work on League. I guess if you want to be pedantic it was a custom map, but that was more a consequence of WC3 lacking support for mods. They ended up having to work around a lot of limitations to make Dota work in the custom map framework.
They hired a former dev, guinsoo. At the time when LoL was announced dota was being developed by icefrog for a few good solid years already. Most of dota's popularity happened during icefrog's years. Icefrog later joined valve and helped create Dora 2.
And some hijacking of the old DotA forums to advertise LoL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13439036