Normally, I play DOTA alone. There are a few reasons, but the biggest is that I feel a lot of stress to perform when I'm in a party, and I really don't like letting my team down. If I'm playing alone, I don't know anyone at all, and while I try my best, if I fail, I can just mute everyone and feel a bit less bad for playing poorly.
Just now, I was invited to a GB party group, because I'm around on DOTA frequently, and I'm friends with a few people who play often. I didn't ask to be invited, and I normally turn down the invite, but I had two games ahead of me and was just starting to play and thought "well, at least for these two games, I won't be flamed".
First game, golden, I think we raxed at 25 minutes or something, and just blew up the other team (and I did a really good job staying alive in the offlane, 1v3). I should've been more complimentary to my team, but instead I noticed I'd reach 420 wins, and, well, I joked about blunts. One person commented that that was funny. Maybe it wasn't, but there were 5 people on my team, and they said nothing (and had been fairly silent most of the game).
In our second game, I ended up feeding a bit early, and generally our lanes went a lot worse (I was playing Undying). I started to get a bit flustered, because I was trying to juggle my mek, arcanes and glimmer cape, and team fights were hard. Anyway, I may have messed up a few times (I had reasons, but it doesn't matter much). Instead of being bros and not taking it too badly, one dude on our team starts flaming me, telling me I'm clueless, that I should drop my stone sooner etc.
I don't think he played all that well, honestly. Regardless, that guy has 4x as many wins as me. I'm not going to be as good, and I didn't misrepresent my skills. But instead of commenting on a stupid joke, or being nurturing, this dick decided to flame his teammate.
I play with GB people to *avoid* this bullshit. And I'm not going to name names, but I hope the dude who flamed me in the game reads this and understands that his behaviour reflects really poorly on the GB community, and on the DOTA community, and *even if* I suck (which, let's face it, I do), maybe assume that your teammates feel *worse than you do about failing* than assuming that they're sitting around feeling stoked about all the mistakes they're making.
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