How to Play DOTA 2 (or Where I Went for Ten Months)
Quit.
That would be the best advice I might be able to offer.
For those of you out of the loop (or as DOTA acolytes like to call it: “the pre-noob penalty box” {actually I just made that up}), DOTA 2 is a sequel to DOTA which is similar to League of Legends, but somehow not, and is a subsidiary of some other game empire, ran by the elusive Morlocks at Valve Entertainment. The basic setup for DOTA 2 is strategy. Ten unique users are split into two teams of five on a battlefield composed of towers on three lanes. Each team selects from the 100+ characters (aka - heroes) and attempts to defend the lanes from the opposite team, during this time the heroes gain experience and gold as waves of creeps (non-hero/non-player units) exude from the teams’ bases in each lane and duke it out until towers are taken or until the other team’s fountains are destroyed. Hold on, I’m not done. Each hero has four (up to six at times) active/passive skills that scale upwards as a hero gains experience (XP). There is a swath of items that can boost your hero’s abilities or give the hero support like healing salves, staves, tomes, dust, et al. Hold on, I’m still not done. Each hero has its own function or number of functions on the battlefield (i.e. - Carry, Support, Nuke, Pusher, etc.). These functions also denote what you do on the battlefield, such as pushing lanes, fighting other heroes, supporting your teammates, or creating general havoc. The game requires a general effort and patience to learn and accomplish even the most basic of moves. Then there is the annoyance of loading the game, waiting for other players to load the game, and finding the patience to wait several seconds after being killed in the game. Sometimes the matches last anywhere from 30-50 minutes, but on the rare occasion will it sometimes drag on to over an hour. On top of it all, the worst part of the whole experience is hearing the howling taunts of under-stimulated sycophants popping off insults like it’s a community basketball court.
And that’s a simple exercise in analogy, a comparison with the real world. Some of the DOTA community have failed at physical activity, but now that they have a proverbial court of their own, they become the terrorizing jocks of their tormented youth, bullying anonymous people from the safety of their microphones and avatars. That’s half the fun of the game for some people. I was swept into the game from a suggestion by another friend. “it’s fun, you’ll like it.” I sewed my mouth to the DOTA tit and sucked the milk until it soured. After driving home from work, I would sit and stare at the screen, tapping the peripheral devices before me until my shoulders couldn’t hold up my arms anymore. And the entire time I am playing the game, users with the patience of a flea bouncing from dog ass to dog genitals, hurl--from their rudimentary, hastily-gathered vocabularies--epithets and slander, attempting to either improve my gameplay or unwittingly succeed at having me rage-quit.
As is true with most competitive sports, people talk shit, trying to either psych-out their opponents or to hear their tongues flapping. I couldn’t stand the atmosphere when I played physical sports, and I can’t stand it in e-sports. Yes, I said that: DOTA 2 (and its consumers) considers its platform a sport. And why not, people play a game competitively to garner reputation among their peers (and access to Cristal and hookers). But it was taxing, cognitively and existentially.
So I pulled the plug.
I’m a patient person, a person that has taught classes with fragile egos that can’t handle rejection or correction easily. Sadly, I hear the conflicted voices of kids I’ve had the luxury of teaching hurling invective at other users, and it’s a farce, that this game’s community is the best we have to groom a collective creativity. Granted, I wanted to unwind when I got home from work, but playing DOTA 2 depressed me after a while, not because I had a horrible time winning at the game, but due to most of the people playing the game, deep-down, hailing themselves as impervious winners.
