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Not worth playing unless...
LessonLearned
Member Posts: 5
DOTA 2 just isn't worth playing, unless you have a team of 4 friends who actually care about winning the match.
If you decide to go ahead and play this game with random internet strangers anyway, you're not gonna have fun and that's for damn sure. Just don't bother, seriously.
There's an insane amount of players who just quit the match (either by leaving or being afk) and cause you to lose. You will also find in your team, the idiot who gets extremely emotional if the enemy players are skilled. Annoying jerks like that one will only make things worse by saying the root of the problem is how bad YOU are at the game. Then after insulting you some more, they usually just leave the match, and at that point you might as well just quit. 20-30 mins of your day basically gone and you didn't even get an ounce of enjoyment out of it. In my last game with random people, I had a PoS teammate who was the perfect example of that one idiot. He didn't want to acknowledge how much more coordinated the other players were (and try to emulate them), instead he decided to start a fight with someone on his side. Why deal with mentally-handicapped losers like that one?
Prior to playing the game, I thought all the comments about the DOTA 2 community being extremely toxic were exaggerated... well, I was wrong. Many people "fix" this by muting other players, but man, what a sad thing that is. What is the point of playing with other people then? Plus the obvious fact that you can't win if you mute your teammates.
I regret all the hours I wasted playing DOTA 2, all I got out of it was anger and frustration, truly a miserable experience. So just skip this game, unless 4 of your friends can join your team.
(Edited to add the following missing info)
Here's the deal, before I even downloaded the game at all, I watched tons of videos (and I do mean lots of them) by many different DOTA 2 pros like Luminous Inverse. Then once I had installed the game, I completed the tutorials and started playing against bots, I did this for several weeks (5-6 matches everyday). First on medium mode, it was a joke, I won easily every time no matter what char I picked, no exceptions. Then I tried against hard bots, it was challenging but still managed to get many wins with the heroes I had mastered. I couldn't win against unfair bots (even though I came close) because all the bots in my team always got killed a lot and remained under-leveled. All of this happened while I continued watching videos on tips and strategies.
So yeah, I did put a lot of effort into it, that's why it pissed me off so much when I started playing against real people and got teammates who left the match, plus of course the occasional idiot who brings the whole team down by acting like a troll. This is a game you have to take very seriously to win, that's why in the end it can be so frustrating and not fun at all unless you play with friends who are coordinated and determined to give it their best like you do.
Comments
Yeah, pretty much the only PC games my friends play are MMOs, and they all dislike DOTA 2.
I also gotta say, after the awful experience I had with this MOBA, I don't feel like trying another one.
You may want to try to understand what you're playing before you dive straight into the deep end and complain you can't swim.
MOBAs (in general) have a learning curve, and DOTA2's is the steepest of all of them. When learning to play a MOBA (especially if it's your first one) play against the AI first. The wins don't really matter there, and it helps you learn the game before you against people who can outsmart you. Learning what the heroes do, how last hits work, warding, stacking jungle camps, guarding runes, ganking, etc. etc. etc. is all part of winning the game. And you aren't going to learn that if you jump in, get yelled at a couple times, then quit.
I don't currently play DOTA2, but I can say that it is a game worth playing. It's just not a game for the faint of heart, or for those that like easy wins and mindless gameplay (of which, I hate to say, constitutes most MMOs).
MOBAs are all competitive, skill-based, team-based games of strategy. You don't get into them expecting wins for little effort, just as you don't start off a baseball league by competing in the minor leagues, or you don't start off chess by playing against veterans. As with all sports there is a progression of skill, and unless you have a natural knack for how they work, you generally start at the bottom and work your way up. And MOBAs are most definitely a sport.
It's the same in all online competitive team games, not just DOTA 2.
If you want to compete seriously, either find yourself a team or play a solo game like SC 2.
Trying to compete in a team game with total strangers was always a bad idea and a waste of time.
Some people do not take it so seriously and just want to have some fun, regardless of their win:loss ratio.
If you are in it just to win everything, get a team formed and train with them.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
There are two reasons why i dont play Dota 2.
1) All the characters are unlocked by default so there are no "unlocks" to pursue. And mobas dont have content to keep me playing aside form unlocking characters.
2) i dont like the characters in the game.
Im not a fan of mobas so maybe as a result i play mobas for the wrong reasons., but if the moba doesnt meet those 2 points i have no reason to play them.
I played League of Legens only to get the characters i liked. Im playing Infinite Crisis on and off for the same reason. And was playing HotS beta for the same reason. I play against AI only because if i want to be competitive i go to a shooter, not to a point and click game. I leave that to the esport crowd.
When this becomes a terrible idea is that people will play against bots specifically in League of Legends until level 30 and then jump into PvP with absolutely no idea how to play the game. It creates a terrible environment for both the PvPers who grinded to 30 legitimately learning how to play the game and the PvErs who are setting themselves up to fail and have a bad time. Also the lack of progression is the main selling point of Dota 2 with it having a legitimate even playing field among all players. What is really skewed is that people -WANT- progression in a moba.... Although I guess if you don't play against people then you don't need runes or masteries really so you would get to bypass half of the insane grind.
Edit: I tried to quote the post above me but failed. For all intents and purposes this is a response to that post.
I edited my original post to add missing info about that.
That's right, pretty much the essence of this whole thread.
I never understood the appeal to this game, you cant upgrade the creeps like in Demigod, and the game takes to freaking long, this is just one of those things in life that I just don't get why it is so popular. I feel for the OP and you know, I don't play
Demigod had it down right, and was really fun, how it flopped and how Dota 2 took off is beyond me, it has less features
Too bad the vast majority of the millions you speak of is comprised of trolls, afk'ers, early quitters and raging sore losers. The rest of the people who play the game only do so with their friends, and that's the only time the game is actually worth playing. Also what I say in this post has been said a million times already so it's not just my opinion.
I stopped playing a while ago. The mobas I'm currently playing are Heroes of the Storm and Infinte Crisis.
I made a similar post not too long ago. I really like the game but the people playing it are annoying.
I've since given up on "try hard" games and just play pub matches.
My best advice is to do your best in your role and try to coordinate with your team. It usually won't work but it's cool when it does. Lately, more and more matches I'm seeing where nobody talks at all (good, bad or indifferent).
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
The appeal to these games is that they are team-based, competitive, require some skill, and have a good amount of action. It's not unlike your typical sport, and is indeed why they work so well as an e-sport.
The problem is that the 'highs' you get from winning are very polarized by the 'lows' you get from dealing with trolls & asshats. This is because you're playing a game w/ other people over the internet, and the internet is full of the vocal minority of trolls & asshats. This is worse the more popular a game (any online multiplayer game) is, because there are more trolls you need to weed through to get to the decent people / players.
It's honestly not much different from PUGing dungeons in an MMO. It's a total crap shoot, and sometimes you'll get a team full of idiots you want to leave immediately, sometimes you'll get a bad group that (just maybe) can pull off the dungeon, sometimes you'll get people who don't want to put any effort in; or are responsible enough to join a match that takes 20-40mins to complete with only 15minutes left to play. There are many solutions to this problem, of varying success, but really the ONLY surefire one is to play w/ friends (in any game). It's not that much different from finding a server you like in CoD / CS:GO / Battlefield and sticking w/ that server instead of trying your luck w/ a bunch of random ones.
The surrender feature is honestly a step in the right direction, but you're right, it's far from perfect. For example, when I play SMITE (and I still have no idea why it happens in this game), I will continuously find matches with players who want to surrender, even though we (as a team) are winning the game. I don't usually see that problem in other MOBAs, but the 'surr or afk' thing definitely does happen across all of them (to varying degrees).
- It all comes down to how many idiotic / self-centered people there are on the internet. There is only so much you can do with a system. You can't fix these people, they aren't going to change in any reasonable amount of time, and really the only way around this is to selectively segregate them into their own little troll groups and try and get as many of the normal people into their own games. It's still not a perfect solution (clashing personality lvls, different game comprehension, different skill lvls, etc.) but it helps. I hate to say it, but probably the 2 best ways I've seen to deal w/ this problem are MMR and LoL's honor system.
This is actually really good advice ^
I'd also add that (while coordinating with your random teams) be vocal, be friendly, and reach out to friend people you enjoy playing with. Not unlike an MMO, you aren't going to make any friends by just solo-Queing and b*@tching. Taking the initiative and talking to some of those strangers makes a big difference. I've actually met a decent amount of really cool people playing MOBAs this way, and it wasn't long until I had enough people on my friends regularly to fill up at least half a team.
Once you get to that point the games tend to get a LOT easier (because you can rely on most of your team), at least until you get qued up against tryhard premades. In which case you just stagger your ques.
Same thing with DOTA 2 for me. It ended up just being fun for a couple hundred hours with my friends, then I started playing solo queue and it was all toxic people. Or Russian people queueing in the US, and getting mad when people didn't speak Russian or throwing on purpose. The only MOBA that didn't have a toxic community I've played at least for a while was SMITE. But even then when it got a broader audience it got awful. I tried to go back and play recently and didn't know the exact meta so I got reamed by one or two dudes in every game until i just said screw it and went back to MMO's.
It could be the perfect PVP genre, but people are so angry all the time in MOBAs.