Why I stopped playing DOTA

DOTA stands for Defense of The Ancients. It is a custom map created for the game Warcraft 3 by a fan of the game.

Players are divided into 2 teams. Each team’s objective is to destroy the opposing team’s main building while defending their own. The game ends the moment a team’s main building is destroyed.

Players control a hero, which initially starts off weak, but as the game progresses has the capacity of becoming strong. The heroes can become strong by gaining experience and gaining money.

Do not get me wrong, I used to love the game a lot before I slowly lost interest. So why did I lose interest?

Initially I would say I hate the players but I love the game. After reconsidering it, I did hate the game at one point.

Let me begin my rant.

DOTA is not just a game. It is a teamgame, that should be played as a team. I may be over exagerating but I feel players who say “it is just a game” are not real DOTA players. You need 5 players to form a team. Your team needs to battle other teams to improve. Playing DOTA with one or two friends (incomplete team) is a waste of time.

Why do I say that? Let me tell you the process that you need to take if you want to play DOTA.

First you need to either host a game or join a game. Either way you will be brought into the game’s waiting room/lobby. You will require 10 players to play a “complete” game. Minus yourself that would mean you would need to wait for 9 other players to join the game. It is not uncommon that this process can take more than 3 minutes depending on the amount of players waiting to play DOTA. On a good day, one can obtain all 10 players within less than 10 seconds. After obtaining all 10 players, the host shall start the game.

To start the game, there will be a 5 second countdown before the game is loaded. During these 5 seconds, some inconsiderate players may choose to leave the game once the countdown starts. The countdown itself is a stupid concept as once the countdown starts it cannot be stopped and no other players may join the game after  the countdown starts. So what happens is players are required to wait 30 seconds to 1minute for the game to load before they can quit the game and remake/rejoin a new game.

Phew.. I haven’t even started about actual game play and it already seems tedious.

Assuming all 10 players were good enough to wait after the countdown, the game will be loaded. Loading speed depends on computer speed, and regardless if your PC can load the game in a split second, the game will not start until all the players have loaded the game. So if by chance there is a bloke who using a very poor performance PC, the wait could go on to 3-5 minutes and possibly even longer.

Now comes the game play.

It is a fact that some players would be better than others, which is why teamwork is so important. When playing DOTA without a proper team, players get frustrated easily. How? I ll tell you how.

1. A weak player on your team – The weak player will be identified and targetted by the opposing team. They will hunt him down gang kill him and rape his ass off to the point he would be so weak that leaving the base could be the equivalent of him ending up dead again. Badabing badabang badaboom, he can get killed in less than 5 seconds, having him alive becomes a liability. There would be nothing he could do about it and he might lose hope and quit the game.
2. A player becomes a feeder – Almost the same as above. When there is a weak player on your team, he definitely can become a liability. To be fair, there are weak players who are willing to improve and listen to instructions which makes these weak players strong (teamwork is essential, even if you are weak individually, if you play as a team you can be strong). How ever there are people who are so stubburn or just plain jackasses who for some reason ends up getting killed over and over again almost deliberately one would say. The penalty for their death is that they lose money and have to spend time penalty where they have to wait for a certain amount of time before they can continue playing. The penalty is small, however there is a bigger price to pay. As a result of his death by the opposing team, the opposing team’s heroes gain more experience and gold thanks to his constant “suicides”. The game would be unbalanced and that player’s team would likely feel the game is pointless.
3. Poor team play / Kill Stealing - As I have stressed out, that DOTA is a teamgame, How do you expect 5 players who do not know each other to play well as a team? Who is going to lead this team? Will anyone question this leader? Even in real life it is easy to disagree with other peoples opinions. Not only that some players play DOTA as a single player game. Their goal is to kill as many heroes as possible, this would include a term called kill stealing/KS. To score a kill, a player must either attack the opponent using a normal attack or special ability to cause his death. KSers would wait for their team members to weaken an opponent and deal the final blow at the last second. To truely define a KS is that the KSer does this with full knowledge that the team member has the capability of killing the enemy and does not lift a finger to help weaken the enemy, instead wait to deal the finishing blow. This “wastes” their team members hard effort, using their skills and potentially facing death but in the end they get no gold out of their effort thanks to the KSer who took the final hit earning the gold that was not supposed to be his with little effort.
4. Bad ethics - Let’s face it. There are a lot of people who play DOTA. You definitely will bound into people who are vulgar, rude, boastful and total jerks. You will also find yourself playing with people who have the mentality of a child and some of them are in fact children. If they are on your team, they will scold you if you play badly. If you do play well they might even be sarcastic and still annoy you. If they are on the opposing team and you do bad, they will taunt you. If you manage to kill them they will curse you. If your team gives up he will taunt your team and say you will have poor sportsmanship. If your team continues on he will torture your team dragging the game longer than required and insult your team for being so weak or be arrogant of his team winning. The examples can go on and on.
5. Leavers – These people are people who leave the game just because they “feel like it”. Sometimes, they gamble their luck trying to kill an enemy hero within the first 10 minutes and fail, resulting in their deaths. They get fed up and just leave the game. There are many reason to why players leave the game. Players are expected to continue the game until at least the game’s conclusion is obvious.
6. Unbalanced games – At first I would say sometimes that a game would be unbalanced. Most likely through the fault of the game itself. DOTA has become a game where the weak grow weaker and the strong grow stronger. An average DOTA game lasts around one hour. Sometimes, it is quite possible to predict the conclusion of the game within the first 20 minutes. Sometimes teamwork is not enough. When the opponent is too strong there is nothing you can do. A worse case scenario is that all 5 of a teams heroes cannot defeat a single enemy hero, instead that 5 team heroes are all killed by that single enemy hero. How do you expect to play when that happens?

All these things add to a players frustration. Players get fed up and leave the game. What happens if a player leaves? The game becomes inbalanced. Which makes other players fed up and leave.

In the game of DOTA, once the game starts, all players are expected to be commited to the game. In tournaments it is a known fact that some players have to hold in their crap because going to relieve themselves could cost their team the game. How can you get this amount of dedication in a team of people who don’t know each other? Without a team DOTA is not worth playing. If you want to play DOTA for “fun” I suggest you play DOTA AI, which pits the players against computer controlled opponents.