So in January in an act of rebellion towards StarCraft II I decided I'd try out the other big competitve online game with a "2" in the title, DotA... 2. I partook in this shit festival of a game for nearly 2000 hours just this year, and it borderline consumed me. It stopped me from pursuing my passion of playing all kinds of games, and you know what? Under the right circumstances I would say it was worth every minute, but every now and then it hits me just how much I hate Dota.
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty to love about Dota. Endless playmaking potential, team compositions and progressions are just a few of the reasons Dota reeled me in. It was the same story for me with StarCraft II. I got hyper competitive and crawled my way up to diamond league despite severely lacking in mechanical skill. I watched the pros play, learned builds, experimented and watched Day9 tell me what's good and why. I still have my very first ranked match of StarCraft II saved, and it's pretty incredible just how much better I got over the few years I played it.
Old replays of my Dota exploits will tell a similar story, but instead of laughing at it and feeling accomplished, I only cringe at how awful I and the other people in those matches were. That's the kind of person Dota is turning me into. When I started I was determined to be the all forgiving "it's just a game" type, but after logging so many hours I've become very critical of people's decisions, progressions and item choices. Thankfully, I still manage to keep those negative thoughts to myself or at worst, any friends I happen to be playing with.
Playing so much Dota has taught me a lot about myself in that respect. It tries me, putting my patience too the test at all times. It has made me think a lot about people and what all the dirtbags are going through that made them that way. I often wonder if I keep playing will I become like them, or if I'm already one of them? I've certainly seen my likeminded friends fall into that pit.
When I started playing Dota 2 I figured I'd be back to StarCraft after a couple of matches. How wrong I was. It was like I started playing StarCraft II for the first time again. I was learning so much so fast. In StarCraft I had felt that I pretty much peaked with my 60-80 APM (actions per minute). It became apparent that that wasn't going to get me too much further against opponents with two, three or even four times that number, regardless of my game knowledge. Dota was a breath of fresh air in that respect. Instead of control dozens of units at once, now I only had to control one guy (for the most part).
It was exciting to learn about each individual hero and how the dynamic of the game changes based on each team's hero composition and to figure out what items work best in various situations. With a pool of over a hundred heroes and a similar number of items, Dota's potential seems limitless. In addition to teaching me about myself Dota has taught me a lot about the sort of game it is.
It's an everlasting game that thrives on its community, which makes sense since it is a multiplayer game. It has the power to keep large and passionate player base, as evidenced by a crowdfunded prize pool in excess of ten million dollars for The International 4, the biggest such prize pool for a digital sport event. The Steam Workshop is another place to see the communities passion in action. Hundreds of artists are creating cosmetic content at any given time, so Valve can sell it. While I personally haven't seen the merit in purchasing cosmetics, it's a large reason that Dota is so profitable as a free-to-play game. This same passion surely has its downsides, as it's probably what drives so much of the community towards its know-it-all madness.
Another big part of Dota is patches. Balance updates in particular have the potential to make Dota feel new again. I guess I'd equate it to playing a new Call of Duty every year with the obvious plus side that you don't have to buy another copy, and the updates are far more frequent. A multitude of adjustments make it feel like a brand new game, even though ultimately, it's still just Dota.
I went through a similar thing playing StarCraft II, albeit to a smaller degree. Small balance patches would hit every now and again shifting the meta game ever so slightly. One day Immortals are next to useless and the next they're essential to any Protoss army composition, and every matchup had to now consider how best to play around that. I've talked to friends who obsessively play those other League of Legends and World of WarCraft games and they have only echoed my sentiments about patches.
"Turn rate improved from .5 to .7," "Base attack damage increased by 4." These things sound small, because in the grand scheme of things, they are. This year saw several big updates to DotA with hundreds of changes just like those two I mentioned. These things add up and heroes that are deemed overpowered are brought down, different heroes step up to replace them and the whole meta game shifts around. This all happens in a game with practically unlimited possibilities as it is. It's why Dota doesn't seem to ever get old.
They say the first step is to admit you have a problem. Well, I have a DotA problem. I never played a MOBA before this year, and this year DotA 2 was practically the only game I played. I would chalk that up to 2014 being kind of lackluster in the game department, but now that I'm finally getting around to playing some more of this year's games I'm beginning to realize that 2014 wasn't so bad after all. I was too consumed by Dota to notice them. I'm hopeful that I'm just about done with DotA 2, but I'm sure when the next balance patch hits, I'll be reeled right back in.
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