It's a curious phenomenon, isn't it? As a long-time DotA player myself, I maintain a separate "DotA Persona" which I fall into when playing. It's basically an offensive response to assholes: also be an asshole.
I think it essentially comes from the nature of the game: as an individual, you're suddenly stuck with a bunch of other people you have to cooperate with. It's not like tf2 or CS. The teams are smaller and the stakes are much higher. People care about winning games in DotA a lot more than they do in most FPS games, where the journey is the destination. In DotA, the win is the destination and it's the validation of your abilities (k/d ratio doesn't cut it).
You would think having the win be so important would make it easier or better to work together, but the fact of the matter is most DotA players suck. Even people who consistently win public games still suck. Players hold everyone else to incredibly high standards and get frustrated when they feel like their team "drags them down." This is compounded by a feeling that, if you're doing badly yourself, you should scapegoat a team member in order to shift the blame.
DotA 2 is actually a lot better. I'm not sure why exactly, and it depends on your level. Maybe there's hope.
You might be right that is the nature of the game. I played DotA for the thrill of having a powerful character exerting his dominance over other players. It just doesn't happen if your team isn't performing. Plus, DotA has incredible death penalties.
The fact that you are launched into a game where your fun depends on the performance of a bunch of strangers in a fast -paced, hostile environment that penalizes mistakes heavily with only short bursts of text to communicate is a recipe for vile players.
The weird thing is that the stakes are largely only whether the game will meet the player's expectations.
Also, humans are generous when judging their own abilities and are miserly when judging a stranger's abilities.
Also it's a compounding process. Having a game that's fun only when you're succeeding selects for players that like that, which creates a social component that makes it so it's only fun to succeed.
I don't find this genre fun whether I'm succeeding or not, for me it's 100% journey (casually and socially exploring the way mechanics combine into interesting gameplay - including failures as much as successes) and these games and their player base seem to be the precise opposite of that.
The death penalties are what really turn me off to Dota. A player A killing a player B results in player B being unable to play for a short time, player A getting experience AND player A getting gold? It seems like far too many matches quickly become one sided and you either farm them or are the ones getting farmed.
That's actually curious -- studies have shown that people from more collectivist cultures don't tend to make the fundamental attribution error, such as places like East Asia, and the former USSR states.
This game is massively popular in both of those regions.
If you force slaves to work harder, they'll work harder. Whoop dee effing doo.
I think MOBA games (except for the kiddie ones like LoL) are popular there because they like their games to be challenging. Most games today are rich in graphics but poor in gameplay, dumbed down for the masses to enjoy. At least in D2 and HoN even the most dedicated players still get a thrill out of sharpening their skills and being better then the other guy.
All this discussion about dota (and LoL etc) boil down to one thing: you NEED to play as a team.
A lot of games involve team work, but it isn't crucial: that is you'll play better if you work as a team, but you don't need to and you can still enjoy the game if you ignore your team.
This is manifestly untrue for Dota. if you ignore your team you'll have a horrible time and so will the rest of your team.
As result this is actually an interesting social experiment: based on dota it looks like a lot of people don't like working as a team.
In FPS games the gameplay is a lot more ephemeral. You're racking up point after point, and your teammates are all interchangeable. In DOTA, there's only one real point. Your teammates are people you're stuck with for the entire duration of the match. And you can see their every move, no matter how far they are from you. And the worst player? The scrub? He's not just ineffective, he's actually feeding power into the opposition.
I spent some time analyzing this when playing WoW. The strongest correlation is with the "goal" aspect of the players.
Imagine that baseball games were played using a non-discriminatory matchmaking service. So start of the "Dodgers vs Giants" game there would be a pause and then 25 "players" would materialize. Some of them would be athletes in their 20s with strong skills, some would be 40+ year old veterans who have good skills but aren't in shape, some would be 10 year old little leaguers who are very knowledgeable but inexperienced and out of shape, and some would be people who just randomly picked "play baseball" as their selected activity, not really knowing even what the rules of the game were. Then there is a "manager" who has to create a starting lineup, assign positions, and win the pennant.
Extremely frustrating.
Blizzard was working on "fixing" this by segregating selection of players into "twinks" and "non-twinks", "experienced" vs "non-experienced" and "hardcore" vs "casual" which helped but it still made for a crappy experience a lot of the time.
Dota 2 has fantastic matchmaking, so it avoids the problem of total newbies playing with experienced players. Because there are over 100 different heroes to choose from, sometimes you end up with people who are very experienced at the game but completely new to their heroes though, which can be frustrating for them.
How the hell does it end up 50% wins all the time? It frustrates me to no end that, no matter how good I get, DOTA can still make sure I only win half the games.
Also, I realized that I feel around ten times worse when losing than how good I feel when winning, so the expected derived pleasure from the game is really really negative, so I scaled my playing down a whole lot.
>How the hell does it end up 50% wins all the time?
Because that's what the system was designed to do. If you're winning more than 50% it means that some percentage of the time, the game can't find 5 people who are better than you to put in a game. You'd have to compete at a semi-pro level to get this to happen.
I think you're vastly exaggerating the situation, especially for people who are not at the extreme low end play skill. 10 years ago this may have been the case for some games, but a lot has been done towards fixing it. Guilds in WoW allow for players to only do 25 man PvE or premade PvP with people they both know and are equally skillfull. Besides, arena is is the only PvP that's truly competitive in WoW and that has both a matchmaking system and ability to have premade teams.
Other games such as Dota 2, Starcraft 2 and League of Legends feature excellent match making. Anyone who takes these games seriously usually has a set group of people to play with, and only do public games when they have to.
You forgot the part where every time somebody drops a catch / pitches a ball / gets a strike the other team gets stronger and faster and if one player were to get struck out / get a walk the game often becomes a forgone conclusion.
That's why matchmaking in MOBA is not "non-discriminatory". LoL has elo points, HoN has MMR, Dota 2 has some hidden rating. Overall it converges to win ratio about 50% for most players.
you wouldn't believe how much effort was put to actually make LoL matchmaking reasonably correct. Game collects a lot of data points per match and it is fine tuned frequently
It's not inherently the nature of the game. It's the nature of matchmaking.
I played HoN before matchmmaking, and it was quite interesting: you created a lobby, people would join, and you as leader could vet your teammates and kick the ones you didn't want to play with. Then the game proceeded once both sides were happy.
It took about ~10mins to get a game going, but the games were far higher quality.
I played DOTA back in highschool and HoN for the first year or so. The toxic nature of the DOTA community has nothing to do with matchmaking. You can certainly filter people in your own games, but that only identifies the people who are so socially inept that they can't make it to the start-game-countdown without being a jerk. In the WC3 era, people left during the 5 second countdown (i.e. after attempting to ensure they were not jerks) so often that the various hosting assistance programs would watch for it specifically.
The real hazard in DOTA / AOS / MOBA games are the people who slowly (or quickly) transform from quiet or reasonable people into insanely angry trash talking monsters. After all, the DOTA community got its reputation for being awful back in WC3, totally independent of any matchmaking.
I'd like to introduce you to www.dotanoobs.com - a personal project to create a rage-free environment for both new and experienced players to have fun together.
Just moved from Wordpress to Flask, got the Valve Dota2 replay-parser running on Linux and am preparing some cool stuff with that on the back end.
tl;dr: get on teamspeak (voice.dotanoobs.com) and play with people who aren't mean.
Awesome. I've just started playing dota2 in a semi-serious way and it's incredibly frustrating not having 5 to play with. I don't mind being called a noob and getting critical feedback, but it's exceptionally difficult to learn how to play effectively with others when the pub community is so bad. Unfortunately, to play with good people, you have to learn how to play, and that's very hard if you can't play with good people. Your little community sounds like it'll be my gateway out of MM noob hell. I'll be on TS to try it out tonight :)
Glad to have you! While real-life might keep me away from my precious DotA this evening, hopefully I'll catch you soon! Feel free to add me on steam, name is the same as HN username.
We started with Mumble server but moved to TeamSpeak because it is more feature-rich. I have the website now able to link your TeamSpeak/Steam/Forum accounts and am working on an interface where we can create "events" (in-houses, all mid days, other games, whatever) and you will earn "points" for attending those events.
TeamSpeak's serverquery let me do a lot of cool things easier than Mumble/ice. There is a TeamSpeak client for linux (http://www.teamspeak.com/?page=downloads)!
Fair enough. Historically, the TS linux client was always more limited and harder to work with than its Windows counterpart, but it's been a few years since I've dealt with it at all.
Did you ever submit any feature requests or talk to the Mumble people about those integrations you use? Being an open-source project, it may not be too far-fetched to see them added in.
+1 for doing something genuinely pleasant for online gaming. This is something that would have been nice when I was into online gaming; hopefully it becomes more common for people to run their own vent/teamspeak servers not just for personal friends but based on attitude and level of commitment.
You should try Dota2. Out of all the games in that genre (HoN, LoL, original Dota), Dota2 seems to have the best community out there. There is match making, so you will be paired with people that are at least somewhat close to you in skill.
To deal with trolls/toxic people, they have a reporting system. If someone gets reported by a number of people they will be muted and/or put into the low priority queue. Muting lasts X duration (depending on repeat offences) and prevents that person from talking at all in game (they can still use the chat wheel I believe).
The low-priority queue is a separate match-making queue, where only people in this queue will play against one another. It is for people that regularly abandon games (or are toxic players). It tends to be filled with the trouble-making players.
Toxic communities are intrinsic to the DOTAlike genre. Think about it - if you have a bad teammate, what happens? In other games, a bad teammate will be around for only a short game, or you switch servers, or the server will auto-scramble the teams, or the teams are large enough that the one player's failures will be diluted among the rest of a large team. At the very least in a normal game, a bad teammate will simply be inneffective.
In DOTAlike games? You're married to the bad teammate. If you drop, the game brands you a leaver. You won't be scrambled. The round won't even end any time soon - you're just stuck with him for many, many minutes of play. But the worst part is, he's actually feeding power to the enemy. Every time you get in a fight and get your ass kicked, you're going to think of the screwups your bad teammate did.
And there's no perspective, no fog-of-war between teammates. You can see his every screw-up. Can watch it in hateful detail.
And then the other team just reams you and clobbers you because they've cranked their power up.... but the game doesn't even have the dignity of ending quickly, you're stuck while they pummel you until the game ends properly instead of being trapped in this moribund state.
And all the time, your hatred for that idiotic scrub boils.
The game is practically designed to make you hate the weakest player on your team.
> You're married to the bad teammate. If you drop, the game brands you a leaver. You won't be scrambled. The round won't even end any time soon - you're just stuck with him for many, many minutes of play. But the worst part is, he's actually feeding power to the enemy. Every time you get in a fight and get your ass kicked, you're going to think of the screwups your bad teammate did.
It sounds like you need to do the opposite -- help the bad teammate. Yelling at the person is just going to make them less cooperative. How is it that we've been programmed to yell at these people when that makes it worse? (or have we learned that yelling works and we apply it to everything?)
It sounds like you need to do the opposite -- help the bad teammate. Yelling at the person is just going to make them less cooperative. How is it that we've been programmed to yell at these people when that makes it worse? (or have we learned that yelling works and we apply it to everything?)
The Dunning-Kruger effect gets in the way of this. A lot of unskilled people take offense at unsolicited advice, particularly if they're so unskilled as to deem themselves the best player on the team. It doesn't help that the game tracks somewhat superficial stats such as kills and deaths; a score that can run counter to the actual hidden score in the game: gold/experience differential. Like a basketball player who shoots all the time and refuses to pass, bad players will often prioritise individual success in lieu of team success. Then when you try to help them they lash out at you for not having as many kills as them; seemingly ignorant of the different roles on a team.
I've played dota, dota 2, and... well far ganes more than I Care to admit.
I have played War 3 competitively, at my best was ranked second nationally in my country when it was a thing, and I went and managed/founded a team as well.
From personal experience, I disagree with the implication that the dunning-krueger effect gets in the way of it.
I have a hard time explaining how precisely atm, but you can often get the weaker players to work with you, and at the same time create a team even in the middle of a pub game.
TO give an example of some of the core tricks: in WoW battlegrounds the simple act of constantly YELLING the enemies incoming to a node, and keeping up the communication banter (even alone in local chat) will result in a spate of wins.
If I were to simplify it, it would be know what to communicate, and communicate simply. Your greatest enemy is discord, and poor communication.
Further: in pub games its probably easier because a modicum of co-ordination will get you quick battle wins over the opponents and so solidify camaraderie. Strong opponents who know what they are doing better than you can assist will leave you with few opportunities on the field to capitalize on.
----
For weak players in DoTA 1 and 2.
No one likes being cursed, and become more receptive to someone who steps in, while also providing some space to enjoy themselves and win. I've found myself saying
> "Chill out. All of us were noobs once. Player X, you did screw up, but it happens. Next time, call out, or let us know." Or
> "mate, we're bugged because we NEED your skill to land, thats why they are pissed, they depend on you."
Those lines sound cheesy when I write them down, but context, delivery and crafting of the appropriate sentence matters a lot more.
Side note: In DoTA I've found you can control your team better playing a support role.
I've never played these games so I may be missing something, but why is that a problem? Somebody else in this thread mentioned that lossing in Dota is worse than losing in other games, but didn't explain why either.
I'm getting the sense that the real cause of the issue is that for some reason people take Dota way too seriously. If you lose, what's the big deal? You still had fun right?
A coworker told me a few days ago that he use to play "league of legends" but quit when he realized he wasn't actually having fun since the experience become too stressful.
I've played a lot of games, and when I lose a game of Dota it's absolutely devastating but when I win a good/close game, I am absolutely euphoric, sometimes even into the next day. I don't think (most) people actually take the game very seriously, it just has to do with the mechanics involved. First, it requires a high level of knowledge and focus. There are constant macro and micro strategy decisions to be made and a high level of constant fine motor skills required. Additionally, you are highly dependent on your teammates, as they are on you. If one person on your team makes a big mistake, it can cost your team the game. However, there is frequent opportunity to work with your teammates to set up great plays, which are extremely rewarding to pull off successfully. The third important factor is the match structure. Each game of LoL/Dota is a discrete thing with a small number of participants. It is common in other multiplayer games today to have people coming in and out during a "session". For instance in first person shooters, perhaps you join a 32 player server that is halfway through a map, you play for 15 minutes and then the server changes maps. New people join, some people leave. In LoL/Dota, a game lasts 30-60 minutes and you are stuck with the 5v5 team for that game. I think the extreme highs and lows are at least partially due to the above factors: the level of focus required, the intense team dependence, and the match structure.
> I'm getting the sense that the real cause of the issue is that for some reason people take Dota way too seriously. If you lose, what's the big deal? You still had fun right?
When you start getting better in such games, you need to be very concentrated, very nervous. It isn't all fun and casual gaming anymore. When this concentration pays off and you win, it feel amazing, when it doesn't and you lose, you feel miserable. Anyway, you can't get back to lower level casual gaming (make a new account, for example) since it becomes so easy that you could play blindfolded.
Of course you could somewhat alleviate the negative effect of losses by having good permanent teammates, also whole game becomes much more interesting if you coordinate with fellows you know. Still, blame shifting happens even in the friendliest of teams.
I've stopped playing MOBA (HoN is my poison of choice) when I understood how nervous and unpleasant I am after the game session.
what some people don't realise is that MOBAs - played at a high level- aren't a game anymore, they're an e-sport. They are played competitively, the only goal being to win. This applies to HON/DOTA/LOL, but also to Counter-strike, Starcraft, and, to a certain extent, Halo. Obviously also to Quake and UT, but those are to old to be relevant now.
An e-sport is taken as seriously as competitive sport in the USA. Any American will know how important winning is in sports. To understand the importance people attribute to winning in some video games, you have to see them as an e-sport.
League of Legends has a much more sophisticated system for dealing with jerks. It has skill-based matchmaking too (does HoN really not have it?), and you can actually be permabanned if you keep being a jerk and don't shape up. League of Legends also tries not to be infuriating as much as it can, so for example while killing somebody does reward the killer, it doesn't take gold from the person who got killed or prevent them from getting XP.
I'm fairly certain LoL also has these counter measures in place, alas, it's still full of trolls and toxic people (not to say that there aren't well behaved ppl, but compared to other games...)
The game is extremely addictive. When you start getting serious at this game, it means that you will be offended by many small things you wouldn't care about if you were just a casual gamer.
Let's say you play at a high level game. You do well at your top lane with your carry, you farmed well for 10 minutes, even got a kill and you're satisfied with how the game's going so far.
Meanwhile you have your mid lane getting crushed by the enemy. Your ally mid dies 5 times in 8 minutes and you soon get ganked by a level 12 middle hero when you're only level 6. You get run over as well as they're little you can do.
The rest of the game snowballs like this and because you can't give up in DotA 2, you have to play for 15-20 minutes defending or not defending your base against feeded (too strong) opponents. So yea, that's when the unfriendliness comes from
I think the solution is to prevent people from playing vs other players until they've won enough games vs bots. There's nothing more annoying than someone who is too lazy to learn the basics before ruining a half-hour game for 9 strangers. And then abusive, as though they're entitled to do so.
There's that. But most players don't have to deal with this thanks to the matchmaking system. I'm talking about how any veteran player can feed in a game and it ruins the game, inciting insults and frustrated remarks.
I think the big necessity for Dota 2 is to add a forfeit button. Too much time is wasted on finishing up games. Demolishing a base with low damage can take a very long time...
> ... and you soon get ganked by a level 12 middle hero when you're only level 6. You get run over as well as they're little you can do. The rest of the game snowballs like this and because you can't give up in DotA 2, you have to play for 15-20 minutes defending or not defending your base against feeded (too strong) opponents
This block of text here explains why I consider the entire genre to be fundamentally flawed.
At high skill level, these things don't happen. When you play pub games, who cares about winning or losing, its fun to lose anyway. If you are serious, you will have a team (and may be organized team tournaments), and it doesn't suck the way described above.
These players tend to stay in the low levels of matchmaking. In high and very high matchmaking, people are a lot more cooperative or criticize constructively. However, without playing ~500 games (~500 hours), you probably won't graduate from the low skill bracket.
Knowing that those people are out there, what you can do is be the moral leader. When the game starts, give the all-chat "good luck have fun" greeting, start discussing lane strategy, team strategy (push/turtlefarm/gank), etc. If you make a mistake, live up to it. The only time the trolls really ruin games is if everyone else is silent and lets the person continue ranting.
Learning to float above the trolls' guilt trips while still being able to admit your mistakes is an interesting emotional exercise.
I haven't run into many (I have about 300 hours played). There were only 2 or so that were unfriendly. I turned off voice chat a while ago though, that was due to me playing together with my brother and using mumble instead of the built-in chat. Although there was an idiot in mumble that was trying to mess with us while we were playing. I think it has to do more with he voice chat rather than the actual game.
Please please please please don't be That Guy. I encourage muting individuals who are annoying. But I use mic exclusively and how are we supposed to cooperate?
Because so many people are unhelpful. It's not that they are being rude or anything, but they whine and complain after the fact... That does nothing at all to help the current situation. If that person had given instructions, or given intelligence that could be acted upon in advance, then criticism would be accepted, but so many people are saying 'why didnt you x' or 'you should have y' or 'why did you buy that piece of junk it wont work'. It's not rude, but it's not helpful either. And most people are not like you. If you are a person who uses the mic and helps the team then yes, I will turn on voice chat if you ask nicely in the text chat.
I (unfortunately) think you'll find that this was due to it being in beta. Hopefully I'm wrong and the community stays relatively decent, but I'm not confident in it yet.
I seriously doubt that anyone who wanted to play the game a week ago couldn't find a beta key floating around somewhere to play (there are about a million key giveaways on reddit, etc). I think that Valve getting rid of the beta status is more about them being confident that it's polished than wanting to release to a broader audience.
I play dota2 and im pretty nice and always try to be friendly to people in game, ive not really ran into "horrible" people. Depends what level you play at but once you get into the "know your bad but can play the game" level then most people are fine.
It's true, and of all the clones, I've found Dota 2 to have the friendliest community by far and it's is constantly getting better. It's night and day from what I remember it being six months ago.
While this is true far too often in DOTA, LoL, and HoN, I think it's worth mentioning that there are nice players out there.
I play League of Legends, and while there's a decent chance that you'll run into a few toxic players every 3 or 4 games, most of the time if you set the tone at champion select or the start of a game with "gl hf" and, more impoartantly something like, "hey guys, how's it going?" or "let's have a good time" (as cheesy as it sounds) things end up going really smoothly. Silliness and joking helps too (such as, "Party at our nexus!" or "ey yo [champion name], what u doin later tonight?"). I've played 4 games over the past 2 days and only one person came close to raging.
The worst of the worst tend to have the lowest ratings, so if you're halfway decent (which is pretty easy to achieve) then you'll be alright, barring the occasional crazy person.
I agree with some of the others, Dota 2 really tries to work on this. I've met so many nice people in Dota 2 willing to help out, but of course, I've met scumbags aswell.
The best solution to enjoy your game when a scumbag is in your team (or the other):
1. Mute him/her. Both the chat and microphone will be muted.
2. Report.
3. Keep playing.
I've done this since day one, I've muted about 5 people during the last month. It's acceptable for me. And if you team up with friends in a party, you'll have so much more fun.
Please remember to commend the people helping you out. I love being commended, and that's why I'm trying to help out and staying friendly during all of my games no matter how it turns out.
I've been involved in competitive gaming since the early days. Asshatery is universal and found in other communities like counter strike, quake, unreal tournament, halo, et al..
Games typically last 30-40 minutes and are heavily team-based.
This scenario makes it very easy to get agitated when a person on your team screws up badly and ends up costing your team the game.
Dota 2 has recently introduced a robust muting system that has really done a good job changing the behavior of the more... voiceful members online - this has led to an overall much more pleasant in-game chat experience.
DOTA and LoL teeter-totter as to which one has the most unfriendly players. currently, LoL around level 20-28 doesn't seem very bad. i hear Ranked (level 30, organized/draft (both teams ban some champions and then choose them, elementary school sports style)) is a bit less friendly.
