Why play Dota 2?
Ranked is a project about understanding personal drive. When this project popped into my mind, I don't think I could do it without Dota.
I like Dota 2, and I’ve been playing it for almost a decade. I feel that if I want to do a project around examining competitive drive and mental health, I should explain why I’d want to include it.
"Dota" is short for "Defense of the Ancients"; Dota 1 was a modded map for Warcraft 3 that arguably outgrew the base game's popularity. It's currently published and developed by Valve Software.
But there's obviously more to it.
Explaining Dota 2
Dota 2 is hard to explain in the same way cricket or chess is: there's the external game you see, but your appreciation skyrockets when you actually know what’s going on.
Dota has 123 different characters. You only play one at a time, on a team, with four other players (for a total of five per side). Your goal is to destroy the enemy base, including their "Ancient" (a big building in the middle of their base). If your Ancient dies, you lose the game.
Along the way, you kill things in the pursuit of gold and experience. These let you buy items and improve your character. Each hero has a number of spells and abilities, and benefit differently from the game's 100+ items. Each hero finds peak effectiveness in a role, based on how you contribute to the team.
This leads to a stunning amount of variety to how you can play the game, and a stunning amount of variance to how each game plays out.
In short: pick a hero → perform your role → get stronger → take objectives → destroy the Ancient.
Why: Highest highs, lowest lows
You'll probably find a lot of people telling you to stay away from Dota 2, mostly because of its potential to “destroy your soul.” Below, I'm going to explain how that's both an exaggeration, and kind of accurate.
When you are doing well in Dota 2, you feel really good. When you pull off a comeback after an entirely garbage game, you feel like a literal god.
Dota matches can take anywhere between 15 minutes to over an hour, stretching to two. I think the longest game I've ever played was under two hours, but definitely over 90 minutes.
It requires such an... attention and purpose to that attention that your actions alone can contribute to your entire team's loss. One single action that you perform can be the reason that "sure thing" win eventually slips into a defeat.
This sounds extremely harrowing, but it's more just a symptom of the systems that are in play.
When you go to a pick-up soccer game, you reasonably can say you'll know what you're doing; kick the ball, don't pick it up with your hands, and try to get it in the opposing team's net.
However, imagine playing soccer/football, and knowing that each individual blade of grass was going to influence your play that day. Imagine that you could somehow know how each step was going to contribute to your win, and that could be optimized. Imagine if that was what you needed to be cognizant of, and apply.
Sure, you could bumble around to victory sometimes, but to truly understand how to improve and win, you need to master the grass.
That's Dota mechanics. Animations, interactions, stats… how long it takes your character to turn their bodies… all things that can either be integral or inconsequential. But knowing the right thing at the right time can lock in a victory, and resulting rush of knowing that your time spent earned that win is just indescribable.
Adding other people
But with that in mind, you're still only one of ten independent elements in each game; how your teammates and opponents act and think all contribute to a good or bad experience. return return return return. You can have wins that feel terrible, and losses that feel amazing.
You can be completely outclassed, be fine with that, and laugh your way to a quick, 20-minute "good game, go next". You can also have a teammate who decides that they're done trying after someone's tone in a chat message bothered him; you'll be stuck in-game, knowing you've lost, but not able to get out, for perhaps the next hour.
That latter scenario is what I mean by "lowest lows," or “soul destroying.” It's the steady grinding down of time, and simultaneously feeling like you're 100%, 20%, and 0% responsible for whether you win or lose.
At 100%, you were the reason that your team lost. Also, you might consider that your team will do nothing all game, or be incapable, so you need to essentially plan to beat the other team single-handedly.
At 20%, you're putting your trust in a functioning teammate that they're going to keep functioning, and that you can only do so much to enable them.
At 0%, you feel held hostage by people who are determined to make your experience as miserable as possible. Especially if the match feels lost straight out of the gate, and this happens repeatedly, it can feel that the game itself does not want you to win.
Taking it away from winning
The reason I'm including Dota 2 is because I enjoy the game. Full stop.
Even though I go through breaks, and even though sometimes it can make me feel like garbage about myself, I still enjoy what it’s brought into my life. I've made friends through it. I've made my career through it. It's probably the only esport I watch, without obligation being involved.
I figure that's a good enough reason, but here's a few more:
It has the depth, tactically, to have something new for me to work on every time I play.
It has both a precise and abstract measure of skill. The game assigns you a matchmaking rating (MMR) number, and a separate "medal and rank" system for progress.
It still has an active enough player base, even though North America is one of the weakest regions.
My friends play it, and I have access to higher-skilled players to talk with, coach me, and review my play. I also have reasonable access to intelligent, well-spoken people to interview in podcast form.
It has a robust data-tracking system with numerous resources for exporting and analyzing hard stats. This is essentially my Garmin data if I were to go running.
I think these things will make it easier to play the game and report back findings for Ranked.
I want to be able to communicate my relationship with the game without inundating readers with needing to know the minutia. If I do bring up a mechanic and spend 1000 words on it, I want it to be for a good reason. I think that at the end of the day, Dota creates good stories about the people playing it.
Difficulties
The main things I see being a problem with Dota are that it hits my mental game in the ways that I want to improve through the course of this project:
It's very easy for me to take on the entire loss, and make it personal. A good friend of mine (an amazing PT in esports) once explained that people can "externalize their victories, and internalize their defeats", and I tend to do this pretty hard. If we win, it's because of other people. If we lose, it's my fault.
The time requirement is very high, and if I'm not winning or feeling like I'm progressing, it can feel like I am "wasting my time." This also involves that feeling of "winning is the only measure of progress," which I'd like to get away from.
Because of that time requirement, it can be very easy for me to not feel like I have the energy to sit down and play, especially when I feel I need to progress in order for this project to succeed.
Also another itching feeling is that culturally, Dota does not have the cultural footprint of something like its competitor, League of Legends. If I were truly optimizing for this newsletter, I’d probably play that game, instead. There’s simply more places to post, more people familiar, and more to gain.
But I think part of Ranked is the idea of moving beyond that feeling of needing to optimize as much as possible. We can save that for elsewhere.
Where do I want to go?
I feel like goal-setting kind of defeats the purpose of these kind of things; until I can adequately remove the tendency to assign personal value to my progress, it doesn’t make sense to say “I want to hit this number, or this project will be considered a failure.”
Until I chip away at that, I think a modest (and I mean modest) goal is to try to play two well-intentioned matches a week, with one time-blocked session of practice.
That sounds incredibly minimal, but I think it fits the theme of this project, for now: I’m essentially writing about my beer league, weekend warrior experience. This is me training for my first 5K, having never ran before. This is more about learning something about myself, then learning about Dota.
And I want you to be along for the ride.
If I’m asking “where do I want to go?” my clearest answer is “forward. Anywhere. Even if it’s to know that I want to stop.”
If you have any questions, or suggestions, please let me know in the comments.
This was so good, Matt. Loved how you described the intricacies of Dota without ever bogging down the reader with details. Looking forward to future issues!