Each year leading up to the international I consider a perilous question, "Should I play a game of Dota?" The answer is a resounding, NO, I shouldn't. But with the extraordinary skill of making horrible life decisions, obviously I fire up the game and play a match.

Now beforehand, I've looked at a couple of recent guides and tutorial videos before the match. I pick a hero I determine to be decent(?) for my skill level that wont screw up my team (sandking).

And as my better judgement warned me forty minutes prior, the game goes poorly. I am severely berated for being bad, and much further berated for agreeing that I'm bad.

Despite being called a bunch of names and having a general bad time, I've now paid the Dota price 2017; I've played a game of Dota this year in anticipation for the TI. I'll enjoy the hell out of watching the competition, as I do every year, but I doubt I'll play another game of Dota in 2017. And maybe the next time I contemplate the question, "Should I play a game of Dota?", I'll listen to my better judgement.

My only question to you is, have you paid the Dota Price of 2017?

I've played 3700 hours of Dota 2, and in the process, lost a part of myself. This year I slowed down to only a few games in January/February and then a single game in May, the least amount of Dota I have played since December 2011. I still feel the urge from time to time but I must look deep inside myself and resist the temptation to carry on the depression...

Is the Dota Price just the Iron Price for masochists?

We were the real Dota 2 all along.

Or is it like the Dark Price for statue impersonators?

Sorry Dota, but I'm still obsessed with Paragon.

Play Heroes of the Storm instead. Or Maybe Paragon. Look. I get it. Dota 2 is awesome. But it's got an awful steep curve to get past being berated all the time, and it takes like 20 minutes to get to the good stuff. Grinding every game for 20 minutes no matter what isn't fun to me. What is fun is Heroes of the storm. No items, just level up ability buffs. Shared team leveling. The COMBAT, the actual PvP is the focus from the very start of the game to the end, and better yet the average match is between 10 and 30 minutes, usually hitting around 20.

For me, Heroes is WAY more fun than Dota.

I thought this said "Dota police" and I got really curious.

I paid about 1500h of dota price a few years ago. I have effectively killed most of the urge to do it again! Haven't really played more than 4 games I think since early 2015. :O

Every day I'm thankful that my DOTA Price only came out to 70 hours total before I came to my senses.

I tried to go back and play that new campaign mode and good lord, that game really is impenetrable. I died in the first encounter and the rest of the team left.

Tried again and got a little further to some town and died again.

:/ I feel like this game needs a community of mentors who will hold your hand through the basics.

If I think I'm not going to be as good as I once was, I'll play with bots or with friends.

It sounds like you're putting a lot of pressure on yourself to be very good at the game, and it's something I see a lot with competitive games. This strong desire to not just win, but play exceptionally well.

If you're in unranked and having fun I don't see the big deal with playing at a subpar level. It's a game, have some fun.

Now I don't mean to say you're bad or anything but I dread to think how low a level of Dota you're playing if it's taking you 20 minutes to grind out stuff. Regardless of the role you're playing there should be plenty of stuff for you to do in the laning phase that you're constantly doing something, be it roaming the map as supports getting ganks in, winning your teammates' lanes etc, or winning your own lane as a core.

The days of farming your carry up for 20 minutes then winning with a 6 slotted AM are long, long gone.

The biggest issue with getting into Dota 2 right now is that the tutorial is semi-broken and bots aren't in great shape as well. Valve could certainly stand to improve the new player experience some because trying to just jump into online matches immediately is a really poor decision.

I love the game to death (5000+ hours) but totally understand how some people can't get into it. You almost need a friend or someone to show you the ropes.

That's really not right. Dota is an incredibly active game early on with tons of movements happening around the map. Sure, your cores will probably want to minimize moving around early but supports absolutely move around all the time.

I'm not really going to try and compare it to other games just because my experience with them are limited (I've played a little LoL and a little HoTS). I just wanted to dismiss this idea that Dota is somehow nothing but 20 minutes of AFK farming and then fighting. It's more complex and active then that.

(Also I found HoTS incredibly dull. but w/e)

It's a fucking terrible game. Don't bother

@alwaysbebombing: The dota police, they live inside my head. The dota police, they come to me in my bed.

The dota police, they're coming to arrest me now, oh noooooo

I get that it's stressful at times to play dota with strangers, but i can still have a lot of fun with the bots. Especially early game it's pretty nice to have them be ultra agressive on you, because it lets you realize what the boundaries are / how much necessary damage you will take against certain heroes and how much regen it takes to play that lane right. At that point, playing against humans on a beginner level will be often easier, since many of those players tend to be quite passive and focused on lasthitting instead of bullying the other person at the start.

I've been using this Ranked AI bot script from the workshop lately, and while it has similar flaws as the default bot AI, it's still refreshing to play against AI that's slightly different. Pretty nice how Valve integrated that in the UI itself. I'm not sure how popular it is, but you can always play with humans vs AI for a bit to get the hang of the game. It's also a lot of fun to use botgames to figure out what items it takes to make a build work. Especially seeing whether you run into health / damage / mana issues with a certain build can be quite enlightening. That said, the itemguides always give you a decent option.

I just went for a fun core bounty hunter game where i realized i needed a hood early on to protect me from all the magic damage. I kept the hood until i had enough items & movement speed where i could kill someone and get away before anyone could help the poor victim. That's a welcome insight, since i could also have chosen to make myself even more durable against magic users while losing out on what makes my hero good in the first place (roaming around and killing people fast). Figuring out that against this composition of heroes there's a better way to keep myself safe while investing in items that truly suit Bounty Hunter is a valuable thing.

And of course, if you don't understand most of the game, you'll get matched with people who don't neither. Sure, they might act all high and mighty, but that's easily solved by a mute if they get annoying.

Purge is coaching Day9 in Dota for the some months now , so the least i can do is post that stuff here. They've been going at it for months so there are quite some videos up. The first two topics are huge for starters. Laning and trading with heroes. If you manage to get 2x as much gold as anyone else in the game ,by getting an advantage in the lane and using that to snowball, you will just start winning games. There are a few tricky heroes with abilities that are hard to use (Meepo, Arc Warden, Visage, Earth / Storm / Ember Spirit, Lone Druid Puck), but there are also plenty of relative simple heroes ( Wraith King, Sven, Lich, Viper, Luna, Crystal Maiden, Necrophos, Lina, Juggernaut). Just pick a handful of heroes that feel comfy, and go with them in games to see what other heroes do and what items do.