General DiscussionWhy I Quit DoTA – Or – How to Make DoTA Better

I love DoTA, But…

Let me start by declaring that I absolutely love DoTA 2 the game. And I am not a LoL player or fan of some other game trying to ruin the reputation of DoTA. I have played DoTA for over 900 hours over the past several months because I loved the game. The game offers compelling mental activity and challenge to completely absorb one’s attention, sometimes even leading to DoTA addiction. The combination of team work (humans have evolved to enjoy team work) and war with other team (again which humans have evolved to enjoy) makes the game irresistible. We play the game again and again the get the ‘kick’ or ‘high’ we get when we kill the other hero.

So the game mechanics, concept and design of DoTA are great and moreover its free to play. Then why did I quit this game? I uninstalled it many times but downloaded it again. But finally I have got rid of the game for good and am glad that I did it. But why?
Paid minions of Valve or servile fanboys need not respond with comments like “you are gay”, “quit dota noob” and so on. Only people who can impartially assess another’s opinion and respond accordingly are welcome.

Big Brother Valve

The Answer is Big Brother Valve. The answer is that while the game itself is good the surrounding features of the game, where we interact with others and the game and the game company Valve are so bad that the player is bound to get frustrated and depressed. Anyone plays a game to relax and get entertained. When it becomes a chore to access the good experience and when we have to wade through nine hours of nightmare to access 1 hour of good gaming time, then it is not only bad but toxic for the players.

I think the problem stems from the game being free to play. Maybe the Valve has this attitude that since the game is free to play the players have to suffer much troubles to have a good time. Or maybe it is so because Valve think that by not offering a reliable and entertaining experience every time we play the game, the player will play the game again and again to gain at least one entertaining experience, like a drug addict craves the high-don’t forget that DoTA is good and addicting enough for this to happen, thus extending the time a player spends in the game and thus making us more attached with the heroes and the game itself. This then leads to buying all the cosmetic items, as the sales of these items gives money to Valve. This reasoning, if it exists, is wrong.

We can’t really know what Valve think because they are the most undemocratic and authoritarian company when it comes to DoTA. They never respond officially to any problems reported by the users in the forums or sites like Reddit. They never reveal the upcoming developments and do not encourage any discussion among the users about the changes, and don’t even think about them responding to gamer’s concerns or incorporating any changes that the users want.

When indie developers like Cliff Harris can do this, even though they do not have much time for all this, then why does Valve, who have entire departments dedicated to this task, do not interact with and respect the players opinions? Because the game is free? Once I sent lot of political quotations by great leaders to Cliff Harris and he incorporated several of them into his game Democracy. Valve’s PR departments concentrate on spreading articles and forum posts by their minions praising every shitty feature of DoTA, another thing Big Brothers in totalitarian regimes do. http://www.gameskinny.com/0ipq9/dota-2s-lack-of-surrender-option-shouldnt-upset-you

The cosmetic items are in theory developed by the community in DoTA workshop. But the items people really want to see are not present in the shop. Many items like the Alpine Stalker set for Ursa are removed because Valve does not like them. And even before an item appears in the shop Valve have to put their stamp on it, even if the users liked it in the workshop. What is the need for all this shit? Why can’t people sell their cosmetic items directly? Valve takes their share anyway? Any guidelines of design can be released and if an item doesn’t follow the guidelines it can be removed later? This is another instance of Valve’s big brother attitude.

Lack of Surrender = Being in a Saw Film

Coming back to the game itself the biggest hindrance to enjoying the game is the lack of a surrender option. WE can decide if the game is fun for us or whether we lost it. Every game has this option. What is this authoritarianism that Valve decides that we can never surrender our game? If all the five players decide that the game is lost then who the fuck is Valve to stop us from surrendering and going for the next game?

It surely is fun to come back after a hard game. But most of the times we know when the game has been lost. Any way the choice of fighting for come back or giving up should be with the players.

Abandons are already punished. Then why not provide surrender? Who can we sit through a game when it’s 15 minutes in and none of our heros has hit level 8 but their shadow fiend is already level 14 and the their PA already has a godlike streak? Many times people have to endure 45 to 50 minutes of nightmare when they already know that they are losing by 20 minutes. That sniper who builds nothing but heart of tarrasque by 40 minutes, after dying 16 times (with 0 kills)? The Venomancer who goes mid and feeds continuously, never leaves the lane and builds two headdress and gloves of haste by 20 mins in? The SF who went mid and continuously fed to the fucking Earthshaker? When I took Bristleback and have already died 11 times in 25 minutes and am still at level 11, while their enchantress is raping our team?

How can one enjoy a game when one already knows that one is losing? How can one endure a game when one is performing horribly and they enemies are screwing you hard and your own teammates are threatening to report you and hurling insults at you? How can one endure a game when someone in our team is feeding badly and losing the whole game, while the opponents laugh at us and we threaten the poor ‘noob’ with reports?

The solution to all of this is to put in a surrender option. I mean come on 20 minutes of fountain farming? It’s too much already. Teams buy items like ghost sceptre and force staff in the last stages only to fountain farm. If I get fed up and disconnect I get an abandon, if I just become afk then I get an abandon, if I just keep moving my hero here and there I still get a fucking abandon, then why is my team not allowed to just surrender the fucking game when you are punishing those who afk so much?

In developing countries like India people get frequent power cuts and net problems. I get an abandon if I get disconnected for 5 minutes. All right. But what if I come back and make significant contribution to my team? They should check the gold per minute of the player and remove the abandon if he comes back and plays. How many times we get back to a disconnected game and help our team win, only to find that we have been awarded an abandon and put in low priority!

Big Brother Valve has answers for all these, most of them sarcastic and off the point.

Many people complain about the toxic community and the amount of hatred that we encounter in DoTA. The reason why normal people become lunatics in this game, and games like these, is because of the lack of surrender. If one person abandons then it ruins the game for 9 people. But if one person is a mega noob or super expert, then that ruins the game too if we have to endure their torture for 45 minutes. Most people can’t take loss in a DoTA game lightly and start blaming others, flaming and reporting them. The reason is that once one enters a nightmare game, he/she cannot escape from it, thus making people go mad.

Many times by the end of a DoTA session, instead of feeling relaxed we get frustrated and angry. We feel like some unknown assailants draped a cloth over our head and beaten the shit out of us. We feel like we are in one of the SAW film’s puzzles. That is not what one wants from a game.

So to fix this don’t allow surrender within the first 15 minutes. After 15 minutes if all five players vote for surrender then the game should get surrendered. The other team should be given victory. After 30 minutes even if four of the five players vote for surrender then it should be so. After 50 minutes reduce it to 3 out of the 5 players. Implement this in the low priority games too. Surely no one will surrender easily in low priority as they have to win that game to get out of low priority. This will ensure that the game doesn’t become hell and that people don’t get frustrated.

Shitty Matchmaking

Speaking of which we come to match making. This is the most shitty matchmaking ever. Go the Come2Play.com. In less than a minute you can get into a game with people with skill level similar to you. There are not game rooms in DoTA. There are no lists of lobbies being hosted on different servers. Only a shitty ‘join my lobby’. As there are nearly a million people playing the game at any instant, why not just allow players to host and join games as all the other fucking games do? Why does Valve match make?

And the amount of time. Come2Play or even GameRanger allows us to get into a match within less than a minute even though hardly a hundred people play that game. But here we have to wait for 5 minutes before a match is found. Then that annoying accept or decline button. They are doing this so that we hang around and get tempted to buy some of the shit displayed.

The next thing is that due to lack of rooms and games being displayed the community cannot evolve custom rules, like CWB in total war games. We can set custom rules like no riki or enchantress, no black king bar or aether lens and so on. Why force a particular version down the player’s throats? Another instance of Big Brother attitude.

And apart from allowing rules like CWB and rooms of games being displayed, they should also allow us to choose the kind of role we wish to play like say, tank, carry, support, initiator, mid, hardlane, and so on. The player should be able to click on checkboxes or radio button before trying to find a game, and the games being displayed in the rooms should also be narrowed down accordingly. So if I select, support, tank, hardlane and melee, only those games where there is place for these slots should be displayed.

Give the Player Control

Thus the player gets control over the kind of experience they want in the current session. Why does Valve not give us this freedom when others do it? Because the game is free? OR some other sinister design, because even Come2Play does these things?

Fix the MMR

The Elo rating system can be used only for 1vs1 games. It is useless for multiplayer games. But now we can correctly assess a player’s sportsmanship with a given hero due to the amount of data generated. Everything from the amount of gpm and assists, to their positioning, the amount of damage they deal in fights, the amount of healing they do, the amount of armour buff or debuff they give, the amount of wards placed, the number of times enemies are seen in those wards and the number of times enemies are killed in those wards’ range and so on.

When individual players are being assessed in games like football and basketball, how easy it is to do so in computer games like DoTA? I mean in real games we cannot calculate the force with which a player kicks the ball or their timings properly. But here we can see the amount of spells and projectiles they dodge and so on. If I activate bkb when a massive spell is going on and successfully deal a lot of damage to the enemy team while not taking much damage while my team suffers massive magical damage, it means that I must have played better. Thus using all this data and the advanced mathematics and statistics available to Valve they can easily develop a method of correctly assessing a player’s performance based on their actual performance, rather than the shitty mmr, so that each player’s current level of expertise is displayed openly to all and people can thus find better matches, and you can do better matchmaking.

Of course each player’s performance differs with different heroes. They can give different ratings for different sets of heroes. Thus our rating with the best 25 heroes, the next 25 heroes and so on are given seperately. Before going into a room we will select which of those sets of heroes we are going to choose from. Thus only the rating with only those heroes is displayed to others and Valve uses that rating for matchmaking.

Don’t tell me that it is impossible and shit like that.

Acknowledge Problems

The next thing is bugs and errors. Stop pretending like your game is perfect. Each patch fixes somethings but leads to new problems. Remember when reborn was first launched many could not see anything in the game? We had to go into the options and change our mode from full screen to windoed and then full screen to actually see anything? Now I am getting a new problem on both my computers. The game suddenly freezes, although the game is going on. I have to disconnect, restart and connect again. If I fail to do that within 5 minutes I get abandon. At least acknowledge that this is happening and promise that it will be fixed in the next patch.

Thus to fix DoTA 2:

1. Reduce your authoritarian attitude. Communicate with the community, take inputs from us. Allow us to sell items without you rubber stamping them; take out those which violate the broad guidelines.
2. Respond to our problems and acknowledge when something is wrong.
3. Fix the fucking mmr system by actually calculating a player’s performance and giving rating with different heroes. Display the rating of the group of heroes I choose and use that in match making.
4. Allow rooms and games as present in all multiplayer games. When even Come2Play can do it, then you can too. Allow me to select the hero roles and lanes I want to play and match me or display the games accordingly. Let the players form clubs and communities within the game. Stop forcing your desires down the player’s throats.
5. Allow people to surrender the game if they feel that they are losing badly. Don’t force your silly vision on the players and ruin the fun. This will also reduce the toxicity in the community as the players are not so afraid of the bad experience and they can easily get out of it.

But I also think that these will never happen due to the authoritarianism of Valve and servile fanboys who lap up everything without question under the influence of PR minions. But still if the community puts sufficient pressure, I think that even the Big Brother will bow down. Until then, you make me sad by making me keep away from a game I love, Valve!
Your Sincerely
Mihir
Mihirviveka1@gmail.com