It's been a dramatic week. The arrival of this year's Spring Cleaning update has been roundly overshadowed by the professional scene's most recent rosterpocalypse. If you were trying to figure out the optimal conditions for dramageddon ahead of the Manila Major, you could do worse than: Arteezy and Universe out of EG; Arteezy and Universe to Secret; w33haa and Misery teamless with days to go.

EG and Secret have been close to the centre of the western scene's drama and politicking for the last two years, and this week's news ensures that they'll stay that way through this year's International at least. As with any situation like this one, it can be hard to find the line between truth and narrative. What we have is certainly a concerted effort by Secret to build the squad they believe has the best chance of winning The International. It's tempting to additionally frame this as a nefarious plot by Puppey to dismantle a key opponent at a crucial juncture, but that's dramatising the facts.

These decisions don't get made overnight, after all, and nobody has been kidnapped. There are players, captains and managers who believe that upsets like this are necessary in order to safeguard their futures, and so upsets like this happen. Dota 2 is a high-stakes game, and tough decisions get made when there are millions on the line.

As David 'LD' Gorman pointed out on Twitter, the Major system was supposed to make the scene more stable. It clearly hasn't. I'm not sure that it's made the scene less stable, however—the impact of these roster lock periods seems to be to cram what would have otherwise been months of roster drift into a few dramatic days. The changes are more shocking thanks to a system that gives drama a deadline, but I'm not convinced that the system itself is responsible for those changes. The western Dota 2 scene was relatively stable until The International 2014, and then became incredibly unstable in its aftermath—a full year before the Major system was introduced. The aftershocks of that period are still being felt: after all, many of the same teams and players are involved.

It's not the same all over. OG have an air of that old-school Dota stability about them, and in the immediate aftermath of the Frankfurt Major n0tail explicitly credited their victory to the strength of the bond between all five players. If you're a spectator looking for a power-of-friendship narrative in modern Dota, you can find it there. You could also find it in Alliance, who have reformed the old guard after a few years of experimenting with abruptly dropping people.

The point isn't that these teams are doing it 'right' where Secret are doing it 'wrong': it's that there are multiple philosophies about how to build and manage a championship-winning team in modern Dota. Is this a bad thing? I'm not so sure. It's certainly the seed for a lot of great contests in the year to come. If Secret win this year's International, then the grand experiment will have worked—and you'll have, in Puppey and Universe, the world's first two-time champions. If they lose (particularly if they underperform like they did last year) then the apparent ruthlessness of this week's reshuffle will have laid the foundation for a tale of hubris and tragedy. It's a story to tell either way.

I wonder if, in some way, a lot of this drama stems from unreconciled disappointment with the death of 'classic' Dota 2 after TI4. There'll always be people who see Puppey as part of that original Na'Vi dynamic and who struggle to accept a new scene where he's heading up a machine built to win Internationals. There's been a loss of innocence, a shift from heart to brain. That's what happens when you put $18m on the table.

Short of a massive and unimaginable change, I don't think those days are coming back. Dota 2 isn't going to move to $1m prize pools and salaried season play. It's not going to become League of Legends, no matter how many range indicators Valve adds to the game. Dota 2 is now a game where stability exists alongside serious volatility, and where both of these approaches deliver results with enough frequency to ensure that neither of them goes away.

There are certainly improvements to be made. Even if I don't think the Major system has forced roster changes that wouldn't otherwise have happened, it has played a role in making those changes more painful for the players involved. If some of the best players are left stranded by a last-minute reshuffle prior to a hard deadline, then the entire scene suffers: including the lower-tier teams who should be benefiting from mobility among the top talent. In effect the opposite has happened—it seems more or less certain now that these sudden changes to Secret and EG have caused a power vacuum that has ripped Digital Chaos apart while w33ha and Misery remain teamless. These are issues of player welfare that require serious practical consideration.

Even so, I've spent much of this year being struck by the health of the international Dota 2 scene and this week's upsets haven't changed that. This is still a scene that allows fresh talent to transition from pubs and win championships. It's still a scene with meaningful regional diversity, and unless the rise of MVP presages total Korean dominance of the game, which it probably doesn't, then they are a perfect example of how dynamic Dota 2 can be from year to year.

The standard of play has never been higher, the stakes have never been higher, and the scene has retained these qualities regardless. That is a good reason to remain, or become, a fan. But a consequence of volatility is change, and change makes it hard to be a fan of just one specific thing. The more of the big picture you take in, however, the better everything looks.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

You either laugh or you cry. After the anger and drama of the Shanghai Major's opening days—and in spite of the genuinely excellent Dota that has happened and continues to happen—the event has consolidated itself as the world's first cringe comedy with a three million dollar prize pool.

We've been given a whole season in just a few days, starting with an incredible pilot episode that demonstrates a rare commitment to pushing a punchline until it stops being funny. Then: The One With The Starving Broadcast Director. The One With The Trapped Manager. The One With The Stranded Talent. The One With The Imprisoned Cosplayers. The One With The 'VIP' Room. The One With The Mystery X-Files Hell Noise. The One With The Missing Keyboard. The One With The Missing Audience.

Season-spanning running gags include massive delays, audio and video issues, unsoundproof soundproof booths that make you sick, and so on. And so on.

Good comedy twists the knife: the last Chinese team in contention was eliminated today. There are no hometown teams in the top eight, which is unprecedented for a region that at one point was considered to be the most competitive in the world. China’s star had fallen since, for sure, but I don’t think anybody expected a result this comprehensively poor. If you were wondering what the worst-case-scenario for the future of Dota as a spectator sport in China looked like, it looks like an 18,000-seater UFO full of mistakes.

The Shanghai Major has been a dis-AIII-ster, as TobiWan once put it, but for the most part its problems are true accidents. Asking 'why would they do this?' is as pointless in this context as it is in a game of Dota 2: if Valve or PerfectWorld had known it would be this way, they wouldn't have done it this way.

And there are plenty of people working tirelessly to make sure that it doesn't stay this way. The new production team, struggling to get an international broadcast on its feet with only a few days' notice. The commentary teams from every territory, pulling double or even triple shifts to keep the event alive. The players, who have continued to turn out top-tier performances, who have flirted with rebellion here and there but never committed to open revolt. As baffling and terrible as it has been at times, the show has gone on.

It may be too late to save the narrative, however. This will be remembered as the Major that went wrong, and it'll hopefully be the only one—you've got to believe that the team in Manila is playing their own game of How Do We Make Sure This Isn't Us right now.

Then there's the existing narrative that these problems play into: the notion that professional Dota 2 in China must necessarily always encounter issues on this scale, something that isn't the case for League of Legends (and hasn’t been for Dota in the past) but that has been on the rise since the disastrous World Cyber Arena in January. This is a complex situation that requires serious and informed consideration, but in the short term all it has done is inspired an ugly racist streak in Twitch chat (something that Twitch chat has not traditionally needed help with.)

Were it not for the quality of the matches it would be tempting to write the whole thing off as a fiasco and move on. There's not much to be taken away from the problems of the playoffs save 'well maybe let's not do this again'—I feel, vicariously, a bit like I did when I missed my plane home after the Frankfurt Major because I was drunk. Slow zoom in on an idiot's face. Music. Credits.

The lasting significance of the Shanghai Major isn’t in the issues with its production, however, but in the event’s relationship with comedy in general: in the firing of James ‘2GD’ Harding and the extraordinary manner in which Gabe Newell and Valve chose to do it. This community has been let down by tournament showrunners before. It is telling that most assumed, when Harding announced that he’d been fired, that PerfectWorld were responsible. Valve have been absent and uncommunicative in the past, but they have never before set themselves in opposition to their audience’s most vocal element as visibly or unapologetically as this. Valve-as-enemy (particularly Gabe Newell-as-enemy) is a new angle for most.

With regard to their customers Valve like to position themselves as an Aikido master in a forest of spears: never striking first, always reacting, responding, redirecting. Their role is to watch, first and foremost, and to only take the most subtle, efficient and direct action. The notion that they're a purely data-driven studio has symbolic as well as practical value, hedging against the uncomfortable consequences of being responsible for quite so many players and developers. They are protected by the implication that it's not us that has all of this power, it's you.

The frank and personal nature of Newell's reddit post dispels that mystique—it's like discovering that your Aikido master has a gun down the back of his pants. The Zen openness of Valve's management structure suddenly looks a whole lot more Confucian, top-down, political and preference-driven.

I fully believe that Newell means what he wrote. It seems likely that it was necessary to fire Harding in order to protect the event, Valve's relationship with their partners, and possibly Valve's own sense of what they'd like Dota 2 to represent. Yet it is precisely because his sentiment was genuine, so directly put, and so much in opposition to community demand, that this series of events is so surprising. They moved against the data.

I'm of the opinion that this doesn't matter much if the decision was the right one. In fact, there are plenty of other instances where I've wanted Valve to take a stronger line—player behaviour being the standout example. In Harding’s case I’m not sure that they could have made any other call: he dropped a c-bomb, he made a government censorship joke about porn in arguably the worst country in the world to do that in. Perhaps in other circumstances these would be grounds to issue a warning but give him a chance to get it right on the second day. That’s not that the call that was made. Fine. Sometimes things work out that way.

Yet the audience’s takeaway from this isn’t that c-bombs aren’t allowed: it’s that humour isn’t allowed, that esports should aspire to the mode and manner of traditional sport. This is likely not the response that Valve wanted, but the aggressive and arrogant-sounding way in which they went about handling the Harding situation has driven his fans to his version of events. You’re either for humour and with Harding or you’re with Valve and you want your esports with a side of golf tournament. The situation has been rendered binary and oppositional—'ass or them'.

This question of tone is a useful discussion to have, or at least it was. Harding himself has argued eloquently in the past that esports are best served with humour, most notably in this (long) interview from last year’s International (which he wasn’t invited to host.) Some of the things he did on the Shanghai stream were, I thought, genuinely great: the silly games to get analysts to come out of their shells, the willingness to challenge the ego of a pro player every now and then. What the stream didn’t need was the dick jokes and the swearing and the deliberate attempts to make people uncomfortable—not because these things should be banned, but because there are smarter and funnier ways to entertain your audience. Fourteen year old boys may constitute a substantial part of the esports viewership, but they do not levy a tax in forced edgyness by default. You have to choose to pander to them.

In coming at this one so publicly and aggressively, Valve have drawn an equivalent emotional response from the community. Harding’s case for himself is built on a defensive reflex: esports were built by edgy boys in bedrooms, not billionaires in boardrooms. It is attractive to frame this as an existential fight for the industry’s future: alienated vs. predator. In truth, however, it’s an argument over which outdated idea is going to inherit the business. You can either have ‘games are for teenagers’ or you can have ‘sports are businesses’, and those are your only options.

Valve were, I thought, getting closer and closer to what I would perceive as the ideal third way: that esports are not beholden to the history of either sports or games. That they are their own, new thing, and can adopt business models and modes of conduct that haven’t been thought of yet. That they can be dramatic and lucrative and also silly and entertaining—that they can own the fact that they are ultimately high octane god damn wizard sports. That you can take the irreverence and wit of esports past and professionalise them, bring them to a bigger audience, make them for everybody.

Instead the situation has devolved into name-calling. You don’t have a discussion about what an esports panel performance should be. You don’t even have a dry and data-driven decision to simply give the loudest people what they want. You have Gabe Newell calling somebody an ass on reddit and his audience laughing through their tears at the dramatic irony of the Major’s subsequent collapse.

The scene will recover, but it’ll also remember—and because this is an esports community, it will remember in the form of memes. The real tragedy of this event isn’t the production. It’s Valve handling a delicate situation so badly that they've turned their own power into a joke.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

They've finally done it. The maniacs, they've finally done it. Valve have launched a community Dota 2 event that really works. The Winter 2016 Battle Pass came out yesterday with no warning whatsoever and has, so far, avoided making almost all of the mistakes that Dota 2 events traditionally make. If you've not been playing for long, let's recap the traditional problems:

It's a separate game mode that doesn't really work half the time

eg. New Bloom 2014, New Bloom 2015, Diretide 2012, Diretide 2013

It changes the way people play regular Dota 2

eg. Nemesis Assassin

It's about abusing a system until you get free stuff

eg. New Bloom 2014, New Bloom 2015, Diretide 2012, Diretide 2013

It's fun but a grind

eg. Wraith Night

It's basically gambling with real money

eg. New Bloom 2015

It didn't happen

eg. Diretide 2014

Only one other event that I can think of dodges most of these pitfalls—the wonderful Greeviling, vanished never to return along with Valve's deep but fleeting obsession with dinosaur gremlin muppet creatures, alas.

The Winter 2016 Battle Pass is a lot of things in one. It's this year's replacement for New Bloom, which traditionally ran—as this will—through spring. To that end it introduces a new time-limited quest system, community-spanning meta-objectives, and a bunch of achievements and trophies and so on.

It also includes the compendium for the Shanghai Major, which encompasses the traditional esports tie-in booklet that somebody presumably reads along with a leveling system, temporary in-game rewards, and a lot of new chests and sets. With the exception of a new custom game mode—they've become the exclusive preserve of the 'Arcade' tab—the Battle Pass incorporates almost every idea that Valve have had over the last three and a bit years of running these things.

Except they all work in harmony with each other. And with the exception of a day one duping bug, nothing is terribly broken. And it's not terribly expensive. And it doesn't invite you to sink lots of money after your initial purchase. And it's more about engaging with the game than grinding for specific rewards. And the interface doesn't take thirty seconds to load for no discernable reason.

This provides a kind of compound relief. One, it's a substantial update in its own right, something that Dota badly needs given the long wait between patches and heroes. Two, it's a great use of the Reborn client that makes me glad that we got through that long, messy relaunch. Three, it's a live event that doesn't feel like a funfair being operated as a social experiment by a haywire AI. At least, not as much as usual.

I can list off my 'serious' problems with the update on the fingers of one hand:

• This Skywrath set shouldn’t be red I guess.
• They shouldn't have nerfed Skywrath's incredibly lengthy 'in the bag' line by making it less likely to play. From my high horse I can see to the ends of the world, and from this vantage point I declare with utter certainty that this is a terrible decision and the game is dead.
• If they're going to make Skywrath red, at least make him shout his 'in the bag' line over and over so that I know that Legion Commander and Beastmaster's hawk haven't had a baby or something.
• Pouring money into a compendium that doesn't increase the associated prize pool is still weird.

That's basically one problem and three lots of nonsense! Good job, Valve!

Through all of this, however—the well-implemented quest system and the daily challenges and the gambling and the new sets and the great terrain and the cool seasonal effects and so on and so on—there's one thing that really makes me happy: Valve are talking about player behaviour again.

Tucked away among the new additions is the 'conduct summary', a one-sheet review of your behaviour over the last 25 games that you've played. In the associated FAQ, Valve explain that they want to make the way the game keeps track of player conduct much more transparent. Your report is designed to let you know that, actually, 77% of players don't incur reports. That assholes are outliers. That a single match isn't enough to get you committed to the low priority queue, and that—through all the strife of matchmaking—a handful of people liked you enough to commend you.

This is a positive change in and of itself, but it's the increased communication that clinches it for me. When I spoke to Valve's Erik Johnson last year, he didn't regard player behaviour as a major issue for the game. This is likely because, if you have all of the data in front of you, the amount of players that cause enough trouble to be worth punishing is actually relatively small (the new conduct summary attests to that.) In the intervening time, however, it seems that Valve have realised that they need to open that data up to the community: it's not enough to say 'this isn't a priority' in private and leave people to get frustrated with what they perceive as a toxic player base.

The conduct summary FAQ puts to rest a bunch of urban myths regarding the report system: that you can be bullied into low prio by an ill-meaning party of players, or that the system is rendered ineffective by 'noise'—players filing reports for the wrong reasons. I don't know that the players who most need to read this FAQ will do so, and I suspect that the most serious offenders won't care when their conduct summary flashes up a run of red icons—but it's progress, and it speaks to increased openness on Valve's part.

I'm really pleased with the Battle Pass system, and it has me excited to try and complete all of the objectives before the event ends, but it's this single simple thing that has me hopeful for the future of the game. Valve's long run of experimental community events has finally borne fruit. If they go on to figure out how to encourage better behaviour from the average Dota player, and do so while writing more openly about their working, then I can’t think of a better start to 2016.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

"u play ur game"

Phantom Assassin isn't happy with me, because I have just told Phantom Assassin that they should buy a Black King Bar. This is a solo ranked game, and we're winning, but that can always change. The opposing team has Invoker and Shadow Shaman: both decent reasons for a PA to pick up a BKB. Another good reason is that it's a core item on a character whose chief vulnerability is crowd control spells and magic burst damage. That too.

At this point in the game, Phantom Assassin has Power Treads, a Basher, and a Battlefury. We're in that tentative late period that a lot of solo ranked games end up in, where we've comfortably taken over the map and we've killed Roshan but nobody really wants to go highground. We almost lose a teamfight in their jungle, and I can see which way the wind is blowing, and so I type it out: "PA should get a BKB". And PA—politely, I should add—tells me to shut up and play my own game.

When we win ten minutes later, Phantom Assassin leads the scoreboard with Power Treads, Basher, Battlefury, and two Moon Shards. In this instance, the glass cannon fired true and didn't shatter. On paper I'd still say that Phantom Assassin played it wrong, but the reality is that something clearly went right.

That thing may be luck. It may also be that the rest of PA's team played their asses off to make sure that Invoker and Shadow Shaman were dead before they got anywhere near our carry. It may simply be a reality of life in the mediocre middle of the Dota 2 player population that it doesn't really matter what you build as long as you don't do anything completely stupid.

I suspect the truth is a combination of all of these things. I still think we could have easily lost that game, and those MMR points, and that loss could have come down to PA's refusal to build a defensive item. But I've also played games, recently, where the opposite is true: you lock support and sacrifice all of your gold to maintain vision, dust, smokes, and so on, and it all goes to hell and you'd have been better off jungling a Legion Commander like everybody else. It's become apparent to me that the trick to solo queue is to neither be entirely greedy nor entirely selfless; to try, but never to try too hard. To care, but never, like, a lot.

The more I think about it, the more I consider "u play ur game" to be sound advice. After my attempt to wrestle a heartwarming Christmas tale out of Dota 2 totally misfired, I'd considered simply stepping away from the ladder. But one of the things I find compelling about this game is that struggle to climb, and the psychological barriers you have to negotiate as you rise and fall. I've realised recently that my desire to play 'properly' (and to see others do the same) in part covers for weaknesses in my play. If somebody can make up for a lack of knowledge with technical skill, then what I have to say to them doesn't really matter—at least not in the course of the game we're playing.

I've always played solo ranked like my job was to shore up the weaknesses in the draft that my random teammates chose: normally, as you'd expect, this means playing support. The good thing about this approach is that it teaches you to be versatile, but the weakness is that it prevents you from really digging into a particular role or character—and ultimately, that familiarity translates into game impact which translates into victories and positive MMR.

The problem with playing something you don't want to play because other people 'need' you to is that it prevents the game from ever really feeling like a team effort. You'll always feel like you're throwing yourself under the bus to help ungrateful people who get to stomp around with their jungle Legion Commanders while you pick up the bill. It leads to a sense that you're in opposition to your own team, which is something I've definitely felt—and written about, in this column, dozens of times.

If everybody simply picks what they want to play, then everybody is in it together. You might be truly screwed by your draft, but no one person will be to blame—and, in any case, it's surprisingly rare that solo ranked games punish greed. As much as I loathe this sentiment in the real world, the Dota 2 ladder is a closed system where greed can improve society. Pick what you want to play, try to make it work, and own the consequences. It's more fun, and easier on the mind, than an hour spent picking holes in other people's decisions.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

On the morning of Christmas Eve I played a game of Dota. I had an idea—actually, an idea that was supposed to form the basis of this post. It’s not so easy to spread gifts around the Dota community, these days, so I’d decided to spread the spirit of the season rather simply: I’d end everything I said in chat with ‘merry Christmas’.

I loaded into a game of solo ranked and picked Witch Doctor. I bought wards and the courier and gave a ward to Kunkka, who was headed to the offlane (because this was a solo ranked game). “gave u a ward, kunkka” I typed. “Merry Christmas.”

He said thank you. Somebody else typed “lol”. Then, our mid said something over voice that did not sound threatening or angry but was certainly not in English. It may have been Russian, I didn’t know or mind. Kunkka assumed it was Russian, and made his objections clear over voice chat.

“Fucking Russian mother ass fuck you” were his exact words. He continued along those lines for a little bit. They started shouting at each other. The zero-minute runes spawned.

The opening few minutes of the game went well. Omniknight, my fellow support, successfully stacked and pulled. We got first blood, and then another kill, and then I rotated mid and helped Pudge kill the other team’s mid Meepo. Then I did some more warding, then helped get a kill top. I felt pretty good. The yelling did not stop.

Meepo abandoned. Two members of the enemy team followed. They were left with Keeper of the Light and Earthshaker at ten minutes.

They managed to defend for twenty more.

I spent the rest of that Dota game listening to Kunkka scream at Pudge who screamed at Weaver, our safelane carry. Nobody wanted to work together for long enough to break base, or even take Roshan. It was miserable: Omniknight and I supported in silence while Weaver dove tier four towers and died, Pudge screamed at him, did the same, and so on. I didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, as we finally took down a lane of barracks and then a second, I realised that I’d have preferred it if the other team had won.

“Well defended guys” I typed. “You probably deserve to win this one. Merry Christmas.”

Earthshaker responded in Russian. Kunkka lost it, again.

We won the game, I got my +25 MMR, and I thought: man, why does anybody play this game.

The next game ended with a very salty Tiny throwing his own teammates (me) into the enemy team, forever, until the game ended. The one after that wasn’t any better. My hopes of a heartwarming Christmas Dota diary faded. Some communities are Christmas-proof, and I suspect that Dota is one of them.

So instead I’m going to write about why I do play this game.

I started playing Dota in 2012 because we needed somebody to write about Dota. I’d played StarCraft II for a year or so and PvP in various hotbar MMOs for longer. I’d just come off a long Star Wars: The Old Republic habit, and going from three 12-action quickbars to just four abilities per character felt quaint, easy even.

It didn’t take long for that impression to be proven staggeringly wrong. The first hero I played was Lion, in an easy bot game along with four friends. We won, but it took forever. We thought we’d wait a few weeks before braving actual matchmaking, but we lasted a few days. The first hero I played against other people was Gyrocopter. I bought an Aghanim’s Scepter, because global-range Call Down seemed like the most overpowered the thing in the game. It wasn’t. This game also took forever. We grouped up and used Treant Protector’s Nature’s Guise to attempt to sneak into the enemy base and destroy the ancient. It didn’t work, because that doesn’t work, and we lost. It was brilliant.

I had discovered a game that wasn’t a set of fixed strategies that had to be mastered and repeated, as most competitive games I’d played were. Dota 2 is a sandbox, an opportunity to be creative, and although there is a lot to learn, the purpose of that learning is to expand your options—not close them off. And when you start to apply that creativity, the solutions you come up with are solutions that you own. There are orthodoxies, yes—what role a hero plays, what items they should probably buy—but no rules, in the way that games traditionally enforce rules.

This was a game where you were really responsible for your ideas, your performance, your moments of success (and failure.) There’s something specifically compelling about that: the knowledge that the only thing stopping you from improving is your own willingness to improve, and that when you do get better your friends will watch it happen.

That was what prompted my deepest-ever investment in a competitive game, compounded by this sense that Dota is—no matter how toxic the community—unavoidably social. You need to work with others, and so you need to learn with others, and it’s hard not to make friends as you do that. This is a game that is essentially very human, from the professional scene down. It inspires jokes, arguments, friendships, rivalries, dumb songs, anxiety, tryharding, shitposting, unlike any other game I’ve played. It’s not just an ARTS, or a MOBA, or whatever: it’s a giant social sandbox, a stage for people to play on which uses strategy as the basis for a shared vocabulary.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some really shitty people playing Dota. There are a lot of shitty people playing Dota. And sometimes, like yesterday, it doesn’t really feel worth it. The lesson here is partly the same old: solo ranked is a disaster, play with a group. But it’s also helpful to remember why I’ve dumped so much time (and hat money) on this ridiculous game. Because Dota is unique. And there are a lot of games that try to be a bit like Dota, and they don’t succeed, because this is the only game in the world where a first-time player can try to use a talking tree’s tree magic to sneak an invisible helicopter into a fortress.

Merry Christmas, Dota. You’re weird.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

After weeks of community-wide hysteria, we have our patch notes. We have our test client update. We have our new hero, our anticipated map changes, our new items, our hero revamps, buffs, nerfs, and so on. We are entering the era of 6.86, and I’m definitely still struggling through the is this real life stage of patch absorption.

Clockwerk’s cogs form a circle. You can plant and eat ‘happy little trees’, an inclusion that I’d love to be able to take credit for but almost certainly can’t. Riki has a Riki version of Omnislash, Magnus has an absurd Aghanim’s Scepter upgrade, and boosting ability power with items has finished its fretful immigration process and is now a fully nationalised citizen of the kingdom of Dota 2.

There will be analysis to be done for a good while yet, and I wouldn’t expect the pro metagame to settle for months. The jungle changes alone will see to that: the offlane as we knew it is dead, with new pulling and farming options available to both Radiant and Dire. In the meantime, the rest of us are going to be living through the post-patch period where everybody wants to try the new hero and everybody wants to show off their new cosmetics. With that in mind, my survival guide for the early days of 6.86 boils down to five words:

Buy a Black King Bar

I know, I know. Nobody actually ever wants to buy a BKB. Everybody wants their damage items, their mobility, their lifesteal, their whatever. I have been telling people (including myself) to buy a BKB for as long as I have been playing Dota. BKB is the boring safe option, Dota’s equivalent of putting your Christmas bonus into a savings account. But I could buy a new PC is an equivalent train of thought to but I could buy a magical crossbow that explodes people. Both are tempting. Both are, probably, unwise. You need to bank that cash. You need to invest in the magic stick that makes you immune to wizards.

Reason one: we are going to see a lot of Arc Warden mid. Arc Warden is an agility hero, but nobody is going to build him as an auto-attacker in pub games. The potential to abuse his ultimate is simply too great, too appealing. Tempest Double allows him to create a temporary duplicate of himself that can use all of the main Arc Warden’s items with their cooldowns refreshed. This means, in the first instance, double Hand of Midas. And all of that double-gold is going to go on double Dagons. All of it.

No no no. I hear you saying that double Necronomicon is better, and that double Scythe of Vyse is better, and so on. I hear you. You’re probably right! But have you ever played a pub game of Dota 2? Have you ever played against Dagon Bounty Hunter, Dagon Riki? You are going to play against Dagon Arc Warden. A lot. Every game, probably, for a while.

Still don’t believe me? Fine. I’ll spell it out to you in terrible Photoshop.

This is Dota now. This is Dota for a while.

Who will Arc Warden face in mid? Zeus. He is going to face Zeus because Zeus has an Arcana now, and people are going to buy it, and they’re going to want to show it off. Zeus is also going to benefit from new itemisation options—Aether Lens making sure that no, you can’t run from heaven—and from Arcane Runes, which boost Lightning Bolt obnoxiousness by 30%-plus.

People are also going to figure out how fun and horrible core Venomancer is, with the buff to Venomous Gale. You’re going to get Gushed on from 1800 units by Tidehunter’s crazy Aghanim’s upgrade, or kidnapped by Kunkka’s new upgraded Ghost Ship. You are going to encounter Earth Spirit in Captain’s Mode, god help us. Bristleback will be sneezing on you and all of your friends in a 600 AoE. Disgusting magical nonsense is coming. It is already here.

There is a solution to this problem, as Gyrocopter or Sven or Phantom Assassin or whoever it is that you want to play, and it’s called buying a BKB. Seriously. You should have been building it previously, and you should definitely be building it now.

Supports: buy a Glimmer Cape and pray.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

A play isn't a play without somebody bellowing like a maniac. The best moments in the history of competitive Dota are remembered just as much for the noises they inspired as the skill involved in pulling them off. Ludicrous damage spikes and sudden carnage are fantastic for the spectator experience—and, similarly, a boon to shoutcasters.

Straightforward as it might seem at first, there is a subtle art to screaming at videogames. Each wayward vocalisation belongs to a metagame all of its own, adapting and evolving core principles that have existed since humans first got incredibly worked up about a 20-year old becoming a millionaire by pressing 'R'.

Let's explore the subtle art of yelling.

Method #1: THE ONE-WORD SPECIAL

"It's a disaaaAAAIIIIIster!"

- Toby 'TobiWan' Dawson

Nobody has done more to advance the number of vowels that are actually in the words 'hole' and 'disaster' than TobiWan. Universe's $6m Echo Slam at TI5 is one instance of a trend with a history as old as the game. By singling out a single word and stretching it to breaking point, the word and the moment associated with it are forever bound together. Nobody will ever call what happened to CDEC in that Rosh pit a 'catastrophe'. It will always be a DISAAAAAAIIIIISTERR. Pronounced exactly like that.

Method #2: ONE SENTENCE, NO AIR

"lightofheavenwithTHEHUGESTBLACKHOOOLEEEE"

- Toby 'TobiWan' Dawson, again

The key to taking a sentence and cramming it into a single word isn't just speaking quickly: it's escalation. That sentence has to have room to grow, even when you're casting punctuation aside. This lends the moment drama, and gives the audience the sense that they are going on a journey with the caster (the destination is 'yelling'). In the best examples, as above, the caster is already shouting when they start, meaning that their word-sentence ends up somewhere in 'wordless screaming' territory. A great non-gaming example of exactly this technique is demonstrated by Pierce Brosnan in the movie Taffin.

Method #3: THE PAUSE

"Oh! DD rune picked up. Ferrari. On the back foot. Puppey is doing it. Left right and centre. Making things happen. Ferrari. That's the phase shift. He's gotta use it soon. He will.

Woauow!"

- David 'LD' Gorman

That's a popular clip, and it'd be easy to assume that it's because of the way LD says 'wow'—or the fact that he says it about a moment that is otherwise completely pedestrian. I disagree. This is not a wonderful moment because of the 'wow', great as it is, because if it was it'd simply be a muted version of method #1. The magic of this clip is the pause right before LD says 'wow'. It's the moment when the commentary hangs slightly, nothing of note happens, and then LD says 'wow' anyway. This allows that magical 'wow' to stand in isolation, a glittering anticlimax. TobiWan would pack a dozen extra vowels into that 'wow' to make it stand out. LD doesn't do that. LD stops, collects himself, and states: no. Two 'o's, an 'a' and maybe a 'u' will do.

Method #4: THE WORD YOU KNEW IS GONE

"Oogh. Oogh. Hex on SoNNeikO DOOOORRRRRRGGGHH-HOOOOOIIII-HAHAHHHHHHHH."

- Owen 'ODPixel' Davies

Nobody will ever know what ODPixel's next word was going to be. It, like three fifths of OG, was obliterated in the moment that followed—lost to history, replaced by pure noise. This zero-to-sixty approach is notable because it involves no escalation whatsoever: there is talking, and then there is shouting. The moment between the two is too narrow to be observed, like the point when a nuclear bomb has started to go off but hasn't really gone off yet. Somehow, despite involving no actual words, this approach nonetheless manages to express what we were all thinking. I was thinking "HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOIIIIIAAAAARRGGHHAHAHHH".

Method #5: SHOUT FOR ONE HUNDRED MINUTES

I would like this to qualify as a method all of its own, but in reality only one instance of it exists: the Korean casting team's coverage of IG vs. DK game two at TI3. This game smothered Benaroya Hall like a heavy blanket in the hands of a sad murderer. People slept in their seats as absolutely nothing happened for more than an hour and a half. It was like watching competitive Farmville—in fact, it wasn't 'like' that. It was that. I saw part of the game from the hall itself and part from the Russian casting booth, where I had wandered in a bored stupor. The Russian casters sounded bored too. In that moment, only the Korean team had a solution. Their solution was to shout for fully a hundred minutes, seemingly without breathing, ignoring every principle—casting requires moments of escalation and quiet, sometimes human beings need to breathe—that professional commentary otherwise adheres to. I will always respect them for this. We will never see this game's like again, thank god.

The game has run long, as pub games tend to do. It's relatively even—maybe you're ahead a little, maybe they are, but the thing just won't seem to end. At this point, you probably have about a 50% chance of winning: and really is going to be up to chance, unless you ask yourself a simple series of questions.

Here is how you don't lose this Dota game.

Where are you going and why are you going there

You are going somewhere, because clicking on the ground is a pretty good idea in Dota 2. Where are you going, though? Are you going to your jungle? Are you going to the Roshan pit? Are you going to their jungle, or to lane? Regardless of the answer: why are you doing this?

Here are some bad answers to this question:

• There might be kills there and I'd like to get a kill. I want to be the 'kills guy', the guy who gets all the kills.
• I am going to punch creeps until I can buy the big item I want. The big item will ensure that I become 'kills guy'.
• I am going to place a ward because I would like my team to stop shouting at me.
• I do not have any wards but I am going to use my face as a ward. My face-ward will find the enemy team, wherever they may be. My face-ward is not responsible for what happens after that.

Here are some good answers:

• I am going to set up an ambush for the enemy split-pusher who has kept them in the game this far.
• I am going to place a ward on the highground around our base and jungle so that we can push out and farm.
• I am going to ensure that we have vision around the Roshan pit.
• I am going to farm in an area that is safe because of the number of wards that we have. I am extremely grateful for all of these wards.

Do your friends know where you are

It's all very good to make solid right-clicking-on-the-ground decisions, but these can still become bad decisions if you choose to horde all of that wisdom for yourself. Why not share your plan of action with the rest of your team? This is why we call them 'a team', and not 'four assholes'.

You may think that they're four assholes, but this is one of those rare instances where thinking it makes it so—and making it so will lose you this game of Dota 2. Sharing your plan will result in one of two outcomes:

• Your team will accompany you on your mission.
• Somebody will call you an asshole.

There's nothing you can do about that second one, but the first one is pretty important.

Why are you going by yourself

If you're going alone, then you've done something wrong. You've either forgotten to tell your team about where you're going, in which case go back a step, or you've told them and they've called you an asshole and you've decided to go anyway. This may make you feel like a strong free independent Dota player, but it is also probably going to get you killed and lose you the game.

It's dangerous to go alone. Take this. It's a teammate. Or an asshole. It doesn't matter. Just don't go anywhere you don't have really good vision without somebody else. This will either prevent a disaster, or at the very least mitigate the blame for a disaster.

Do you have a Town Portal Scroll

You really should definitely have a teleport scroll. You do not need a Town Portal Scroll if you have Boots of Travel. There are no other exceptions. Not even for you, Nature's Prophet. Not even for you.

Your gold isn't your gold now, surplus gold is your gold

Mouse over your gold counter on the right hand side of the screen, near the shop button. See all that stuff that pops up? One number is incredibly important: the green number (presuming that it's green. If it's not green, earn gold until it's green.)

This number tells you how much gold you have. You might think that you've got much more than this, but you don't. You see, all that other gold is reserved for the buyback that you definitely need. You need that buyback more than you need the item you're thinking of buying. You might think "I don't really need buyback". Don't have that thought. Eradicate that thought. That thought will make you lose this game.

You don't look convinced. You think that second Daedalus is going to ensure that, when the smoke clears, you emerge as the 'kills guy'. You're wrong. You should save for buyback.

You can buy things, but only using your surplus. If your gold count says '1898' but the green number reads '86', you may purchase items that cost less than 86 gold. May I suggest a Town Portal Scroll.

No seriously save for buyback

Do you know what's a pretty good item? Daedalus. It's worth 5520 gold. That's a lot of gold!

Do you know what's a really good item? All of your current items, plus your hero and all of their stats and abilties. That's worth every single piece of gold that you've spent in this entire game plus all of the experience that you've earned. Do you know why? Because all of these things are worth zero gold when you are dead, and only regain their value when you come back to life.

Buyback is the button that makes you come back to life. It's a very important button. Save for buyback.

Why doesn't anybody have buyback

YOU: I thought we just spoke about this! We have wiped and nobody has buyback.

TEAMMATE ONE: I thought it would be fine if I bought this item that I have just bought and now don't get to use because I am dead.

TEAMMATE TWO: I thought it would be fine if I bought this item that I have just bought and now don't get to use because I am dead.

TEAMMATE THREE: I thought it would be fine if I bought this item that I have just bought and now don't get to use because I am dead.

TEAMMATE FOUR: I thought it would be fine if I bought this item that I have just bought and now don't get to use because I am dead.

YOU: I should not have bought this extra Daedalus.

They won't skip barracks and go straight for the Ancient, it's fine

It's not fine.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Pretending to be Axe for an entire game of solo ranked Dota 2 turned out better than I’d expected. I got my +25 MMR, I enjoyed a long, dramatic game, and I got to shout in all caps the entire time. I left it feeling that I’d finally found the One Simple Trick that could make playing like this fun.

If the big important take is that taking solo ranked less seriously is a good way to combat MMR anxiety, then the smaller and subtler take is that adopting a completely different personality makes it easier to deal with the people that matchmaking clumps you together with. People can't get personal when they're not really yelling at you.

With that in mind, I wanted to continue experimenting with personalities. Axe represents one end of the spectrum—big, brash, aggressive—but what lies on the other end? What would it mean to play an entire Dota game as somebody calm, supportive, and encouraging? Somebody who once said this, regarding his military career?

"The job requires you to be a mean, tough person. And I was fed up with it."

What would it mean to play an entire game of Dota 2 as the hero the internet did not know it needed, Bob Ross?

The pieces fell into place very quickly. Bob Ross was a positive, calm and instructive man. He left a demanding and sometimes hostile job in order to make a publically-broadcast show intended to spread a love of art. He did the show for free, making money instead from art supplies. Bob Ross might not actually be a Dota hero, but I knew immediately which Dota hero he would be if he was: Bob Ross is Treant Protector. He's a big, happy, supportive tree.

I change my Steam avatar to Ross' iconic headshot and my Steam name to 'Bob Ross'. I get in the queue. This is what happens next.

I lock Treant Protector straight away and introduce both myself and the game. It's important to open positive, to lead with the end result and explain how anybody—yes, even you!—can get there. In this case: you might feel like MMR gains are beyond you, but Bob Ross is here to prove that they are not.

Immediately after I type this, somebody starts typing a lot in Russian. They lock Legion Commander and call the jungle. I assume they're asking if that's alright. "It's your jungle, Legion Commander!" I reply. "Just follow your dreams." The response is in Russian.

One player locks Weaver offlane and somebody else takes Huskar mid. This irritates Legion Commander, who switches to English in order to demand that everybody report Weaver. While this is happening, I'm encouraging the remaining player to take Anti-Mage to the safelane with me: after all, who am I to judge? It's their game of Dota. Nonetheless, my attempts to calm Legion Commander down do not appear to be working.

We roll into the game with Treant Protector, Anti-Mage, Legion Commander, Huskar and Weaver. We're up against Medusa, Dazzle, Queen of Pain, Silencer, and Magnus. Nobody's drafts make very much sense, but now—there's nothing wrong with that, is there.

It's an extremely passive start. Anti-Mage and I are up against a solo offlane Queen of Pain, who we zone out effectively. I am using Living Armor to sustain Weaver on our own offlane, but not much is happening anywhere. Eventually, Huskar gets first blood on Magnus mid.

In response, Magnus rotates top and goes for a three-man gank on Anti-Mage with Queen of Pain and Dazzle. They wait until he blinks in on Queen of Pain, then blow Skewer and Reverse Polarity. I manage to buy him the time to blink back out with Living Armour and Leech Seed.

I know it's out of character to slip into a Bob Ross meme rather than an actual Bob Ross quote, but it felt appropriate. Anti-Mage laughs and says "yes, saved!" over in-game voice. He is farming well, and has made good progress towards his Battlefury. I declare my intent to place some happy little wards elsewhere, and leave the lane.

There's an engagement mid but it's inconclusive. The teams are even on kills, but only because our angry Legion Commander has failed two duels already. Everybody else is doing pretty well. I get us vision around Roshan as well as in their jungle and wander back to base to get my mana back.

As the laning phase breaks down we take one or two bad fights: they're grouping up heavily around Magnus, while we're still roaming in twos and threes. The game enters that uncertain phase where nobody is snowballing yet but somebody might be about to.

Weaver gets caught in their jungle but slips away, dragging the entire enemy team towards the Rosh pit. I think he'd survive without Living Armour, but applying it gets him back into fighting condition quickly. Myself, Legion Commander and Huskar charge in. LC dies almost immediately, ceding another burst of bonus damage to the Dazzle he decided to duel. There's some angry pinging and a little chat rage—but the fight isn't over yet.

I throw down Overgrowth, Leech Seed, and stick Living Armour on Huskar who goes on to pick up a triple kill while Anti-Mage split pushes top. It's a tipping point for the game.

By twenty minutes Anti-Mage has Battlefury and has almost finished his Manta Style. We sneak Roshan while Huskar harasses them elsewhere, and extend our lead. Legion Commander still hasn't killed anybody.

I'm enjoying being relentlessly positive about everything, and somehow this absurd act of roleplay is making me more supportive in other ways. I'm playing a hard position five Treant—Arcane Boots at twenty minutes feels like a luxury—and I'm enjoying it. When Anti-Mage drops his Poor Man's Shield to grab the Aegis of the Immortal I get the courier to come and get it. My only deaths occur during teamfights, when I throw myself into the melee to distract the enemy from my more-valuable teammates. I don't feel resentful about it all.

I don't think any of the people I'm playing with have actually heard of Bob Ross, and they don't necessarily find my positivity infectious. But—and I didn't see this coming—I think pretending to be Bob Ross has actually made me nicer.

Anti-Mage's Manta Style in hand, it's time to fight—and what follows is one of the most crushing single fights I've seen. They're grouped up where the Radiant tier one mid tower used to be. I sneak around behind them using Nature's Guise, and as Huskar jumps in I emerge and cast Overgrowth. I can't do much during the Global Silence, and Legion Commander dies, but I'm able to Leech Seed the Dazzle and Living Armor Anti-Mage as soon as it times out. Anti-Mage, Weaver and Huskar clean house while I cheer on from the sidelines.

They don't have buybacks, and we're able to take both barracks in mid and one in bottom lane before the first defenders appear. They wander in one by one, and we have sustain for days. We take bottom lane, and rotate top. I've not seen a solo ranked team successfully go for mega creeps at 23 minutes before, especially not off the back of a teamfight in the river—but this is our Dota game.

The enemy team are all alive by the time we hit their top barracks. They group up and move to push us off, leading with Medusa's Stone Gaze. My team backs away, but I decide that it's time to make a big dramatic choice. This scene needs a huge tree in the middle of it. I walk straight at Medusa and turn to stone halfway through the cast animation of Overgrowth.

RUINED.

Their entire team focuses fire on me, but my team gets the hint. Anti-Mage blinks, Huskar jumps, and Weaver weaves. Legion Commander wins a duel! They can't kill me before Stone Gaze wears off, but I'm incredibly low. I hammer R. The entire surviving enemy team is wrapped in thick, happy vegetation. I fall, but so do they. I watch as their top barracks are destroyed, then their tier four towers.

SAVED!

While I wait to respawn, my team backs off. Weaver buys a Divine Rapier, for some reason, which he will subsequently lose inside the enemy fountain to no great consequence. Legion Commander wins another duel, somewhere. When I spawn I pick up an Aghanim's Scepter, and while wandering to the final fight I use it to apply some dazzling highlights to a nearby tree.

Anti-Mage and I push into their base, pick up another couple of kills, and start on the Ancient. I use another Overgrowth to lock them in the fountain and start happily punching away. What a rare and exciting game this was: fast but only one-sided at the very end, greedy in the draft but ultimately successful and mutually complementary. 25 MMR for everybody! I step back, happy with the result.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

I’ve written a lot about how to talk and how to behave to get the most out of Dota 2—or, at the very least, to get through your solo ranked games with your dignity and maybe your MMR intact. I don’t think there’s anything left for me to say about staying positive, giving clear instructions, and shrugging off the bad attitudes of other players. With that in mind, then, I decided to find out what happens when you ignore all of that and just decide to pretend to be Axe for a game.

I’ve got this theory, see: Axe probably has the perfect mentality for solo ranked. He’s confident, aggressive, but he is also fundamentally having a good time. He is unlikely to respect defeatist talk and when you’re a one-man army there’s no reason to complain about what anybody else is doing. In fact, he’d probably be delighted by it. Has an ally gone in too deep? AXE APPROVES! Has an ally died, but left one or two enemies low on health? AXE APPROVES! Has an ally failed to arrive in time to defend a tower, giving Axe no choice but to dive in solo against their entire team and the creep wave? AXE APPROVES!

The following is a social experiment designed to prove, totally scientifically, that being Axe is a surefire way to raise your MMR. Not just playing as him, but becoming him: speaking in all caps, referring to yourself in the third person, taking stupid risks.

I change my Steam avatar to a picture of Axe’s face and change my Steam name to ‘AXE’. I boot Dota 2, queue for solo ranked. This is what happens next.

I’m able to lock Axe immediately and indicate that I’d like to go to the offlane. It’s funny: normally I’d be more cautious about insta-picking a hero, but my obvious commitment to a high concept somehow justifies it—at least to me. One of my allies (name removed, obviously) suggests we go aggressive. It’s pretty rare, in my experience, that lane strats start getting discussed this early. AXE APPROVES!

The discussion then turns to what hero should accompany me to the offlane. Myself and another person suggest Omniknight or Dazzle, but the ally that suggested pushing early doesn’t want to play a support. After draining a bit of gold by waiting too long, he locks Leshrac. I’m not 100% on this but it’s not a terrible pairing. What’s more, Leshrac starts bellowing Axe lines back at me: not only is he willing to cooperate, but he’s getting in on the joke too. I’ve got a really good feeling about this game.

Our final draft is Lich and Anti-Mage (safe lane), Kunkka (mid), and Leshrac and Axe (offlane.) We are up against Invoker (mid), Gyrocopter and Necrophos (safe lane), Queen of Pain and Puck (offlane). It is a solo ranked game of Dota 2, all right.

I buy a ward for the offlane, but so does Leshrac. Cooperation! ‘LICH! AXE WILL GIVE YOU THIS SPARE WARD’ I bellow, and Lich replies by also yelling in the third person, which I am delighted by. The horn hasn’t sounded yet, and currently more than half of the team are pretending to be Axe. This isn’t quite what I’d expected, but it’s more fun than 95% of the solo ranked games I’ve played.

Leshrac and I contest the bottom rune and get the enemy safelane pair—Gyrocopter and Necrophos—low but don’t kill anybody. Then, we manage to cancel some salves on the way to lane. This is a pretty confident start.

Our first proper kill attempt is a success and we get first blood on the Necrophos. I back up a little to regen and Leshrac decides to go all the way back to base. At this point, warning signs start to show. I am level two, with one point in Berserker's Call and one in Counter-Helix—nothing unusual there. Leshrac starts to complain that I don’t have two points in Counter-Helix, and doesn’t seem to understand that I’m not level 3. This argument lasts until I hit level 3.

We go deep for another kill and get one, but on the way out I’m hit by a Sunstrike from their midlane Invoker and a right-click from Necrophos finishes me off. I’m okay with this: Axe for Gyrocopter is worth it. Leshrac is not okay with it.

For the next couple of minutes, our relationship steadily collapses. I don’t really know what he wants from me. We continue to get kills and trade favourably against their safelane, but either it isn’t clean enough or we’re not getting enough out of it for Leshrac to be happy. I go a little too deep to kill the Necrophos, but Puck emerges from the jungle with a double damage rune and she and Gyrocopter kill me. The inevitable happens.

What was once the beginning of a beautiful friendship is now the middle-stage of a terrible marriage. Leshrac has turned on me and I don’t really know why: I am doing offlane Axe things, we are suppressing their safelane, and it’s going reasonably well—I think. Then, I take a look at Leshrac’s build and figure out why he might be so angry. He’s completely ignored Lightning Storm in favour of alternating Split Earth and Diabolic Edict. This makes him much less able to harass and, to my eyes, ruins his potential synergy with Axe—but it does make him more effective at pushing early. He’s sad because he thinks we aren’t pushing hard enough, I realise.

Our fractious relationship enters a new, passive-aggressive phase. I don’t think it’s out of character for Axe to be passive-aggressive: after all, his most damaging ability is a passive. I cut the wave a little bit, but have to back out to fight in the toplane. Our teams are even on kills and Anti-Mage is farming but it starts to look like the other guys are simply better: they’ve drafted far too greedily, but they’re making it work. Invoker is good, and is reliably Sunstriking me during Berserker's Call—making big plays a risk.

The pace of the game slows right down. We lose all of our outer towers, but I manage to take their safelane by cutting the wave and get my Blink Dagger in the process. We’re steadily getting pushed back, but we’re fighting four vs. five while Anti-Mage farms, which means I’m still fairly confident. I’m dying a bit too much, because every blink initiation I make is followed up by Gyrocopter and Queen of Pain ults, Death Pulses, Reaper’s Scythes and so on. It’s rough, but we’re hanging on.

Kunkka and Anti-Mage are quiet and relatively focused. Lich is decent and talkative. At this point, Leshrac starts to rage at anybody who makes a mistake, calls ‘gg’ after a bad teamfight, and is seemingly messing with the courier whenever somebody else calls it. I have to force it to drop some Sentry Wards because he moves it away whenever I call it to deliver them: later, we find out that he’s delayed the delivery of Kunkka’s Crystalis by a couple of minutes. Despite that promising start, then, pretending to be Axe hasn’t really done anything to improve this guy’s attitude.

At twenty minutes, Leshrac has brown boots, Drums of Endurance, and hasn’t put a single point into Lightning Storm. I disagree with this decision and let him know, which I wouldn’t normally do but screw it—I’m Axe. Weirdly, his next skill point goes into Lightning Storm. Now, it could simply be that he’d maxed his other two abilities and there was nowhere else he could go other than stats: but I like to think that Axe’s even-handed, all-caps approach to backseat Dota sank in in a way that actual person-to-person advice wouldn’t.

The enemy are fighting as five, now, pressuring our top lane tier 2 tower. I’m ready to jump on Queen of Pain when they pause—Puck has disconnected. We wait, but Puck never comes back. The fight that follows is a complete rout for the other team, as you’d expect, although one of them is micromanaging the Puck the entire time. This is the fight that the game turns on, both because they lost a player and because, having farmed very well, Anti-Mage arrives to clean up. Afterwards, Leshrac gloats in global chat.

Buoyed by my apparent success at advising Leshrac earlier, I try to police the tone of the game a little. Axe is a violent man, but he’s not a dick. They lost a key initiator: the least we can do is stay humble about winning the fight that followed. Leshrac promptly informs me in no uncertain terms that no, there are plenty of reasons to be a dick about it.

A couple of minutes later we hit a massive setback: we attempt to do Rosh, they spot it, and we get annihilated. The Puck has abandoned the game but one of them is using him as a one-shot initiator, which is enough to keep them in the match because basically they’re better at this than we are. Leshrac calls ‘gg’, again. I decide to remind the team that we’re still in a very good position: “WE HAVE AN ANTI-MAGE”.

Then, Leshrac escalates our rivalry in an unexpected way: he attempts to spell check me. “A anti-mage” he replies. “Not an”. Lich steps in. “No, you mean an”. The grammar war has begun.

This is approximately half an hour into the game. We could push and possibly win, at this point, but almost everybody seems content to farm. We take enough bad fights against a big fat Gyrocopter to make us very cautious about pressing the advantage, even though the game is now four vs. five. It’s hard to find much to say in character while clearing camps and building my remaining items.

There’s a lot of fighting, and it’s going reasonably well, and we’re inching closer and closer to taking barracks on all three lanes. By forty minutes, we’ve successfully taken Roshan and knocked down their tier 3 tower on the bottom lane. I die in the engagement, but Kunkka sticks around and takes their ranged barracks. He lingers too long, however, just as Gyrocopter respawns.

I ask them to be careful but it doesn’t work—it’s a teamwipe for us this time, one that prolongs the game by another half an hour. Leshrac points the finger at me: I’m 11/11/something at this point, far from ideal but I don’t feel too cut up about it. He’s 5/9 with plenty of assists, but then again he has two buttons that give him assists in a massive AoE.

It’s hard to maintain character very much at this point, so I go quiet for a while. We come back from that bad fight but once again it prompts an extended round of farming and split-pushing. Leshrac is getting more and more irritated, particularly at Anti-Mage who he accuses of inefficiently using his Abyssal Blade. I don’t really get it: we are almost certainly going to win this game. The odds are simply in our favour.

I will say this, though—even though the Axe impersonation hasn’t keep the mood particularly high into the lategame, the team is much more talkative than I’m used to. Anti-Mage has become more communicative, Kunkka and Lich both seem like nice guys, and there’s no reluctance to share plans or discuss where to ward. Even if it simply acted as an ice breaker, the plan seems to have worked.

At 65 minutes—more than half an hour since Puck abandoned—Leshrac catches out Gyrocopter with Split Earth as he’s returning to base. I’m nearby and blink-Call, our old laning partnership briefly returning. We’re able to kill him, the pair of us, and he’s dead for two minutes without buyback. This is the opening we were waiting for. We finish off their bottom barracks, take mid as well, take another fight. I die, buy back, Boots of Travel to the bottom lane, kill Queen of Pain, and help Anti-Mage secure Mega Creeps. We have definitely, definitely won now.

Leshrac calls everybody noobs, for some reason.

I may never know. What I do know is that pretending to be Axe can indeed net you +25 MMR—but it was far from the easiest +25 MMR of my life. Solo ranked is still a lottery, and doing an impression of a giant happy red murderer isn’t necessarily going to reform every single asshole within a radius. That said, this is the most fun I’ve had in solo ranked—possibly ever. I don’t think I’m going to go back to being ‘me’ in this context. Silliness takes the edge of what is normally a fraught and stressful experience, and while I won’t commit to saying that typing in the third person in all caps kept me from tilting it definitely didn’t hurt, either.

AXE CAUTIOUSLY APPROVES!

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

I've written a whole lot about playing support over the years. It's one of the most interesting and challenging ways to play Dota 2 and, traditionally, the least appreciated. "Nobody likes to play support, yet everybody likes to win" is the pertinent Bastion announcer pack quote here (there's one of those for every occasion, it seems.)

Appreciation of (and eagerness for) support play increases with the engagement level of the Dota fan, I find. This is a community that valorises difficulty in almost all of its forms, and playing support is difficult—particularly in pub games, where you have a whole bunch of other social stresses to deal with too. Professional supports are often seen as underdogs, and appreciating their performance is something that tends to come after a viewer has learned to follow, say, a professional carry.

Both of these things make it appealing to cheer for, and to be seen to cheer for, supports. Universe's $6m Echo Slam was a rallying cry for cash-strapped position four Earthshakers everywhere, a moment when the underdog got to suddenly and dramatically become the overdog. I could go on about how great fy is again, but I probably don't need to at this point. fy is the best.

It's here that you bump into one of the Dota community's defining contradictions: read Reddit or Twitter or watch streams for long enough and you'll see a lot of appreciation for excellent support play. Play actual Dota for long enough and you'll come to see the person who willingly picks support as a precious golden angel: an island of sense and magnanimity in a sea of people who are going to play mid or carry or jungle and that's the end of it. Everybody likes to cheer for supports, yet only a handful volunteer to play them.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately in the context of a different game: Overwatch, which entered closed beta on Tuesday. I'd played the game before at Road to Blizzcon in Prague, but this week has been the first chance I've had to see it in the wild—to assess it in the unforgiving light of actual online matchmaking. There's a lot I love about Overwatch (and I plan to write a bunch more about it) but I think it fails support players. In thinking about the reasons why, I've identified something that Dota does particularly well.

First, let's do the disclosure dance.

• Overwatch is in beta! It's not finished yet. Things will likely change!
• Overwatch is in beta! The current playerbase is small and self-selecting. Things will likely change!
• Overwatch is in beta! The current playerbase is new to the game. Things will likely change!

I don't think the problems I have with Overwatch's support characters are mitigated by the second two points on that list, incidentally—but we'll see. These are first impressions, after all.

As a hybrid of FPS and MOBA, Overwatch's characters inherit design ideas from both. They get movement powers and guns from the former, special abilities and ultimates from the latter. At its best, the two enhance each other: you get to enjoy both FPS finesse and MOBA drama, the satisfaction of landing a headshot matched with the satisfaction of deploying a clutch ult.

The majority of characters blend these two. Pharah plays like a rocket-flinging Quake 3 character with a jetpack most of the time, but her channeled ult feels like dropping the Death Ward of your life when you get it right. Zarya is a tank with the ability to shield herself and others, but she matches that relatively passive power with a gratifying energy grenade launcher and an ult that is basically Overwatch's version of Black Hole.

In this context, Overwatch's support design feels rather flat. Mercy is designed to attach to another character and either heal them or enhance their damage with a beam of energy. Her movement power is interesting—she can fly to any ally she can see—but it only serves to reinforce the idea that her job is simply to glue herself to a friendly and not die. This Mercy 'play of the match' is currently glued to the top of Overwatch reddit as an example of how anticlimactic it can be to play this way. She's a bit like TF2's Medic, but she doesn't have an 'Ubercharge' moment: there's no point where she crosses a threshold and becomes the most important person on the map, even with an ally's help. Her ultimate revives every currently-dead teammate: very useful, certainly, and sometimes clutch, but it’s about recovering from a disaster rather than spectacularly bringing one about for the other team.

Lucio is similar, as much as I want to like him. He has an aura that he can toggle between speed and healing, and he can activate a power to boost the aura for a time. His sonic weapon is rubbish compared to what everyone else gets to play with (except maybe Mercy's pathetic pistol) and his ult grants a shield to everybody in an AoE around him. Again, useful—but only insofar as it allows your allies to get more done.

Zeynatta and Symmetra both have higher skill ceilings and are slightly more diverse in their roles. Symmetra is good at locking down an area but is ineffective if the enemy goes a different way, and Zeynatta has good damage potential but drops quickly if he draws attention. Again, both ultimates feel rather passive: Symmetra builds a TF2-style teleporter, Zeynatta becomes invulnerable, loses his ability to attack, and heals allies in an AoE. That said, I like them a lot more: they offer room for greater successes and deeper failures than Lucio or Mercy.

I'm confident that, given time, players will find creative, impactful and effective ways to use Zeynatta and Symmetra. I'm less confident about Mercy and Lucio, yet it's notable how one-sided the game becomes as soon as they arrive. The healing they put out is a huge advantage to the team that has it, often ending games outright: yet it's a boring way to play, with few opportunities to be a playmaker in your own right. Overwatch's shooter heritage manifests as a tendency for players to pick snipers and assassins over every other type of character. Often, winning is a case of being the only person willing to play the babysitter role. You end up in this strange hinterland: useful to your team, but limited to going through the motions. You know how sometimes people get their newbie friends to pick Crystal Maiden, max her aura, and just hang around giving everybody mana regeneration? It feels a bit like that.

Dota 2 taught me that being a babysitter doesn't also need to be boring. Often, the characters who are asked to take the most on in terms of supporting their team are also given powerful, teamfight-turning ultimates to balance it out. Warlock is a slow, rather passive-feeling character in some ways: he has a heal-over-time, a big slow, can force enemies to share damage. But he's also a playmaker. Chaotic Offering, when it lands, is a big moment. You have to buy wards and the courier, more than likely, but you also get to bring the hammer down every now and then.

Imagine Warlock if his ultimate was just a souped-up Crimson Guard. You heal, you shield, you cast your debuffs, you try not to die and hope your team wins. That's how it feels to play support in Overwatch a lot of the time. You simply aren't given access to the big toys.

What it comes down to is this: in Dota, I think the people who sneer at playing support are wrong. I think there is a vast amount of evidence, from the pro scene down, that shows that support play is just as gratifying and just as big a demonstration of skill as any other way of playing the game. Crystal Maiden is a support, but also a playmaker. So is Earthshaker, Warlock, Io, and so on. You're not just a robot that dispenses healing, mana or damage mitigation: you get power spikes too.

I sigh whenever another Overwatch draft rolls out as Hanzo, Reaper, Widowmaker, Bastion, Bastion, Soldier 76—but I also get it. These characters are where the clutch snipes and unstoppable killing sprees come from. They are the ones that, more likely than not, you are going to see in the end-of-game highlights reel. They get rockets and grenades and grappling hooks and magic dragons and one of them can turn into a tank. It makes complete sense to me that, given the choice, you'd choose this over holding RMB and LMB over an ally for fifteen minutes.

To return to that disclosure: this is a game in beta. It's also a very promising game. This is the one area where I want to see a major change, where I want to look back in a year or so and say "man, remember Mercy's ult in beta? That was so boring, I'm glad they changed it." All of that is possible. But I'd like Overwatch, and any other role-based team game, to learn this lesson from Dota 2: nobody likes to play support, so give them big, powerful reasons to try it.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

I'm the sort of person who orders games into to-do lists. For a long time I acted on the misguided notion that arranging my Steam backlog into neat categories would eventually somehow lead to me playing and finishing the dozens of games I've picked up and never touched. I instinctively believed that clearing my backlog held value regardless of whether I liked the games themselves: I regarded it as a lower-order sort of chore, something that I might not enjoy a huge amount but that I'd be glad I did later, like doing the vacuuming.

I don't think I'm alone in that. Turning games into chores is a consequence of taking them more seriously, which applies to trying to acquire a comprehensive knowledge of every game that has ever been £2 in a Steam sale just as it applies to attempting to get better at Dota. Don't get me wrong: I still valourise the process of slow improvement that competitive games offer. I still want to become a better Dota player. But lately I've realised how I've managed to turn doing so into a chore.

Solo ranked is something that needs to get done, because solo MMR is something that needs to get raised. Certain heroes need practicing, others need checking off lists: compendium challenges, A-Z challenges, and so on. These things have their place, but as I get back into Dota in the aftermath of Reborn I’m conscious of how much air they can suck out of the room. Over on Game Is Hard we frequently answer questions about MMR and solo queue woes with ‘if you’re not enjoying solo queue, don’t play solo queue’. I’ve realised that I need to start applying some of that logic to myself.

Way back during my last holiday from trying too hard I found myself playing a lot of All Random, and that’s where I find myself again. Of all of the unpopular ways to play Dota, this is among the most unpopular. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy it so much, and why I recommend it to anybody who sometimes wishing that they could just play Dota without all of these attendant issues and expectations.

It is typical of Dota to turn expectations upside down, and All Random is an example of that. On paper, it is the game’s riskiest mode: you have no say in which hero you play and are expected to cope with it. Roles, strategies and lanes have to be assembled on the fly, and you have to trust that the strangers that you’re matched with (assuming that you’re playing solo) will be up for that. Yet somehow, this makes it more accessible. Everybody is out of their comfort zones.

I’ve found All Random to be friendlier and more cooperative than other modes, and I suspect that it’s because it represents a self-selecting group of people. Although you do get the odd person who checked every mode because they wanted to play right now, for the most part you find people who get that not every player/character combination is going to work. There’s less fighting over specific roles, most of the time, and less finger-pointing when a draft goes south.

Similarly, it works because the results of the game are to a large part up to chance. Sometimes, you get screwed in the draft. There’s no way around it. You got Lone Druid on a guy who can’t play Lone Druid and four other hard carries with no disables. You get rolled by Tusk and Nightstalker in twenty minutes. It happens, you got unlucky, and you move on. Because here’s the thing: when you and everybody on your team has fallen foul of the random number generator on that scale, there’s not much to learn from it—and nobody, really, to blame. You just got to play some Dota, and it didn’t go so well, and maybe you learned something, maybe you didn’t. To quote hot take headlines the world over, "...and that's okay."

I find this really refreshing: All Random is a way to encounter the game outside of a pattern of play and improvement that can start feeling like an exercise regimen. If you worry about your winrate or Dotabuff stats or that Reborn skill hexagon thing then you probably shouldn’t play All Random, but I suspect that most players could benefit from caring about those things a little less.

All Random is an example of Dota 2 stepping briefly into a design space occupied by less stressful games. Luck plays a much bigger factor in accessible competitive games: the new Battlefront, for example, hands killstreak-empowering power-ups out like candy. It is a dispenser that you plug into for a few hours, mine for enjoyment, and then move on from for a while. All Random, for me, allows a Dota match to become something similar: a roll of the dice, an excuse to just play without reading too much into it. That won’t be necessary for everybody who plays, but it’s been a huge relief for me.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Dota 2 Reborn is now a little over a month old. If it was a real baby it would at this point still be busily shitting itself, and it would remain entirely dependent on its parents. You can probably tell where I am going with this. A one month old baby, according to this website about babies that I just Googled, is starting to discover that it has arms and legs but can't yet really do anything with them. It can reach for things, but it can't grasp them.

This analogy is only useful up to a certain point.

It's been a shitty start, for sure. Reborn was not ready to be launched on September 9th and doing so seems to have been a deliberate move on Valve's part to expand their pool of beta testers and accelerate its development. Certainly, they've been quick to patch up serious problems as they have emerged. A few steps have been taken to restore lost functionality—teams, guilds and so on, as lamented once already—and they've been receptive to the idea that players would rather see their friends list on the homepage rather than a six-inch-square panel telling them to buy a hat.

Launching Reborn as and when they did is one of the coldest decisions I've seen Valve make. The community was asked to replace a game they loved with a substantially more broken alternative and offered no sweetening incentive for them to do so. This is the exact kind of disruptive but necessary update that could have had its disruptiveness ameliorated with some capital-C Content: a hero or two, those missing International 2015 Compendium items, a special event. Instead, the last month has felt a bit like the aftermath of a medical procedure. Dota 2 is on the road to recovery, now, and it'll likely be better of for it all in the long run, but Valve's bedside manner leaves something to be desired.

Anecdotally, I've played far less Dota 2 in the aftermath of Reborn than I normally would. Lag and a sluggish, confusing UI have a cumulative deadening effect on enthusiasm. As disappointed as I am to see the death of team ranked ladder play, it's these constant little reminders that the game isn't working right that sap the will to play. A lot of friends report something similar: even if the game is playable, which for many in the UK it reportedly is not, then something of the crisp feel of proper Dota has been lost for the last couple of weeks. Complaining about Reborn has now become unfashionable, at least on Reddit, as opinions on anything tend to become after this amount of time. But I still associate the update with a sense of disappointment, and I doubt that'll ever fully go away.

The upside: this week I completely uninstalled Dota 2, finally doing as a legion of unironic pubmatch assholes have demanded I do over the course of the last three years. Immediately, however, I downloaded it all again, and this seems to have smoothed out my remaining technical problems with the Reborn client. It runs much more quickly, now, and I'm less aware of errors in game. Clearly Valve's ongoing work to fix bugs has a role in this, but I'd still recommend a fresh install to anybody still struggling.

It's time to start rebuilding my relationship with the game. What strikes me is how weird some of the game's new features are. Guilds are gone, but in their place is a regional chat channel that nobody asked for. At home I'm placed in Bristol by default, and at work I'm placed in London despite being only about a mile and a half further east. Neither are places I would choose to hang out. A friend's custom Dota 2 status message reads simply, "regional chat is the most racist and misogynistic thing I have ever seen." I wonder if Valve are playing some kind of long game, here: if nothing else, discovering that the toxic assholes you discover in every game are not in some far-off country but are in fact on your doorstep is a useful counterpoint to the assumptions people tend to make.

The Fall Compendium is a strange animal, also. Ostensibly associated with the Fall Major in Frankfurt, it really has very little to do with competitive Dota. For the first time, sales of a Compendium have no impact on the prize pool of the event in question: Frankfurt is capped at a cool $3m. Inside the book there's almost no information about the tournament, the brackets, the teams or so on. Instead, there's a lot about Compendium level rewards, gambling with coins, spending coins on chests for a chance at exclusive items, collecting lower-level items and crafting them into better items or consuming them for levels in order to get rewards to get coins to get items and so on and so on and so on.

This is all optional and innocuous and only harmful insofar as it's potentially addictive, but it's still a little sad to see the Compendium complete its journey from esports companion to hat directory. I'm more aware than ever that my guilt at spending quite so much on my International 2015 Compendium was ameliorated by the fact that I was putting at least a little money into player's pockets. Lacking that, there's no way I'll end up with a Level 1000 Fall Compendium.

No matter how much I want that golden Rubick cape.

A month after launch, I'm very happy that Dota 2 feels fully playable again. I should stress that. This is, after all, the best game in the world. I've missed it, and missed wanting to play it. It's a lifestyle and nothing will ultimately get in its way for too long, much as years of instability and confusing versioning and arcane lobby systems did not get in the way of the original mod.

Yet I cannot shake the feeling that the game we have now isn't quite the game I used to know. I don't log in for the same reasons, can't do some of the things I used to like to do the most. In the last Game Is Hard, our Dota 2 Q&A column, PyrionFlax mentioned that community features like guilds were removed because only a tiny percentage of players used them.

This is the heart of it, I think, or at least the heart of my disagreement with Valve's current approach. Dota 2 is a game about tiny percentages. It is about intuiting microscopic changes in circumstance, leveraging edge-case mathematics, knowing when to push and withdraw and how to manipulate the complex and exception-laden array of variables at work in every single moment in every single match. The top percent-of-a-percent of players are where they are because they operate at this level. Alliance's historic comeback against NiP earlier in the week is a spectacular macroscale upset resulting from a million microscale transactions. What looks like one big ogre with a little man on top beating sixteen shades of shit out of a volcano is in fact the violent culmination of a complex algorithm. Competitive Dota 2 is the lovechild of boxing and stock market manipulation.

It takes tremendous long-term engagement and talent in order to play at this level. I certainly don't. But engagement is a quality that doesn't always run hand-in-hand with popularity or importance: the way that the top 1% of players play is not popular but it is important. Similarly, the way that small percentages of highly engaged people choose to play Dota is, to me, worth protecting. If the only people using guilds were streamers and their communities, that is still important, I think.

Reborn thinks otherwise. Reborn is all about the bigger pool, the notion that you are more likely to connect with a few hundred assholes in the same city than you are with the small group of people that, however unlikely it may be, have decided to engage with the game more deeply than the average. The Fall Compendium is about how esports are a niche but hats are not, so a digital book about esports should in fact simply be a book about hats.

This approach may be led by player behaviour but it doesn't feel like a service to the community. Reborn has made me realise that these may well be different, and sometimes opposed, ideas. To return to that website about babies: one-month old aren't expected to do much other than react. After a year, however, you would want them to start making their own choices.

Editor's note: the original version of this article called out teams as a piece of functionality that was still missing, but it has in fact been restored in a patch. I missed it because, honestly, it's pretty well buried—but it's nonetheless a mistake to have missed it. I have reworded the article appropriately, and softened my criticism of Reborn as a result.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Click here for his DeviantArt page

Last week I wrote about the attitudes that can hold people back from improving their Dota 2 game. This week I want to return to the topic of communication from a different angle. When you're playing solo, trying to build a rapport with your team is one of the most difficult things to do but also the most important. It's hard, in part, because it's easy to ignore: to believe that if you just keep your head down, stay quiet and play then nothing bad can happen. This is an understandable approach, but not the ideal one. Team chat is there for a reason.

Actually talk

This is the first step, and something I have to keep reminding myself. Taking the first step and being active in team chat makes it easier for other reasonable players to step forward. Everybody's been burned in Dota at one point or another, and everybody considers staying silent just to avoid the flames. In my experience, you're far more likely to be matchmade with other reticent chatters than you are with genuine assholes. As soon as you establish that you're not a dick, you'll find out that lots of the people on your team aren't dicks either.

Something simple like "which lane do you want?" during hero selection makes it clear that (a) you're willing to cooperate and (b) you're invested enough in the game to start strategising. This promotes good behaviour in other people, and—if at least a few of your teammates feel like you've got their back—shields you against rage from the minority later on.

I find that the positive impact of being vocal increases if you're willing to use in-game voice, but it's completely reasonable to avoid it. If you worry that you'll have a bad experience if other players hear your voice, use text: it's still a huge benefit, and there's no reason to make yourself uncomfortable.

Give compliments

'Well played!' is one of the most useful commands you can place on your chat wheel. If somebody does well, say so. If somebody does really well, call them out specifically—"gj tusk". This makes people feel respected and, as a consequence, they're more likely to regard you positively. A few players are arrogant enough to respond to "wp" with "yep", but they're in the minority. If you manage to achieve a reciprocal "wp"—where they compliment you as you compliment them—congratulations! You've made a friend and, if things get rough later on, your team is less likely to tilt and throw.

As somebody who plays a lot of position five in ranked, my favourite approach is to congratulate our midlaner every time a mid gank goes well. It doesn't matter if they played particularly well or not: if the kill happened, it's an opportunity to form a bond. That bond will be extremely helpful later on, as blame tends to fall on either the midlaner or support when things go south. If you're willing to back each other up, it can hold the team together.

Explain, but never get personal

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to respond to insults. Anybody who says 'noob' without irony isn't worth responding to: it can be fun to simply send a '

It gets more complicated if a player is actively accusing you of doing something you didn't do. For example: in my last solo ranked game, a rough midgame left me underlevelled. As a position five Rubick against Silencer, I was struggling to survive the opening moments of each teamfight and as a result I wasn't picking up enough XP. This is definitely my error and something that fell to me to fix.

As the enemy was knocking on our tier three towers, however, our carry decided to blame me—claiming that I'd ruined his game by hanging around in lane soaking XP and become underleveled as a result. This was flat-out untrue, but our offlaner decided to agree with him anyway. Rather than get personal about it, I pointed out that I'd ganked mid twice, stacked our jungle, and pulled—that time in-lane accounted for a very small part of my early game. Because I'd established a decent relationship with our midlaner (see above), he backed me up. The carry didn't press the point any further, I got a handle on my dying-too-much problem, we turned the game around and won.

Always suggest actions

It's a very good idea to frame everything you say as a suggestion. "We need wards" is bad; "I'm going to ward" is good, as is "come with me so you can place wards safely." Similarly, "Lina invis" is okay: "Lina invis bot, get back" is better. If you express yourself in a way that is both detailed and clearly communicates the action that needs to happen, that action is more likely to happen. As a bonus, it becomes harder for bad-attitude teammates to complain that they weren't give enough warning about an incoming gank, too.

The exact opposite of this approach is context-free pinging. Pinging is, a lot of the time, meaningless—or it's exactly as meaningful as Lassie barking. You might figure out that little Timmy has fallen down the well eventually, but Timmy would probably be better of if Lassie could, you know, talk. Much as "Timmy down well help" is more quickly understood than "WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF", "Tusk shadow blade DD rune mid" is better than PING PING PING PING PING PING PING.

Suggesting action is also a good way to start turning a game around when the team has started to tilt. Staying calm and useful means saying "defend together" rather than "just back pls"; "lets go deward rosh" beats pinging the Roshan pit helplessly.

When other people suggest action, and those actions are a good idea, don't just silently comply: if you let people know that you're on your way, or that your teleport scroll is on cooldown for another 10 seconds, you create better understanding and a stronger sense of cooperation. This, again, makes people feel like their suggestions are being respected. It's respect, at the end of the day, that holds teams together and wins matches.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

When we launched PC Gamer Pro last week, I started a couple of new regular Dota 2 features. Game Is Hard, which runs every Tuesday, is an advice column where I round up emails from readers and put the questions they ask to a personality from the scene, like PyrionFlax.

It takes effort to write an email and I'm grateful for every one that I receive, but in this week's column I want to discuss a theme I've seen repeated across dozens of emails in the last week: blame, and the dispensing thereof. This is a problem that exists in every type of competitive game.

It's impossible to play Dota for any amount of time and not experience finger-pointing: whether that means being blamed for something or feeling the urge to yell at somebody else. Dota places you in a stressful, complex and codependent relationship your teammates, who will often be strangers—it's inevitable that people will sometimes lash out to make themselves feel better. It's irrational, and it makes you a worse player overall, but as a knee-jerk emotional response it makes sense in the heat of the moment. I know I've done it.

The urge to blame others becomes a more serious problem, I think, when it becomes a part of your thinking outside of the game itself. In order to account for a run of losses or an overall dissatisfaction with their matchmaking rating, players spin worldviews for themselves that place all of the blame somewhere else: in Russia, commonly, or South America, or South East Asia. This is, in all cases, wrongheaded, self-deceptive, and unhelpful, and it reveals the need to recalibrate how you approach the game.

Over the last week I've had stranger conspiracies arrive in my inbox. There are people who believe that account-boosting is so rife that there's one in every game, others who claim that Valve seed real matches with bots posing as players: all to explain away a loss, all to suggest that a 50%-ish winrate isn't 'really' a sign that they're at the right MMR. The question they ask is 'how do I improve when everybody else is an idiot', but the question they should be asking is 'how do I break out of this dumb mindset'.

It's hard to say that to somebody who is so willing to shield themselves from criticism. Besides: I completely understand where this attitude comes from. The hardest thing to change in any given game of Dota is your own level of play: other people, flawed and foreign and possibly robots as they may be, make softer targets. Under stress, people follow the path of least resistance—it's human.

There's a more practical way to go about changing your competitive mindset. Rather than try to prove or disprove that it's really the Other Guy who is spoiling all of your games, consider how useless that information would actually be.

If every loss is somebody else's fault and you are playing flawlessly, you are the unluckiest human being in the world. You have broken mathematics. There is nothing you can do, and you should certainly never play any game that involves rolling a dice. If this is true, for you—like really, I-can-prove-it true—then you're screwed, aren't you? You are so unlucky that there is no point in trying to get better.

If some of the blame rests with you, if your play is not perfect, then there is something you can change. You actually have power, in this scenario, because while it is very easy to complain about other players it is very hard to make them play differently. However, it is easier than you think to make you play differently. When you die because you wandered into the enemy jungle with no vision, who is at fault? The support who spent their last 75 gold warding somewhere else, or you for going in anway? Hint: it's your fault as much theirs, they're not a robot, their nationality has no bearing on their ability, and the only useful thing you can do in that scenario is learn from your mistake.

It is incredibly empowering to learn that you're not very good at something, because that means that you are not yet as good as you can be. In-game flaming is a huge waste of energy, the construction of elaborate excuses for failure even more so. Dota 2 doesn't offer much in terms of feedback for the vast majority of players, and what it does provide can be a long time coming. You have a choice: work for that slow improvement on the assumption that you always have something to learn, or be satisfied that the result of your time with the game will be the same old story about how everything was always everybody else's fault. You can improve, or you can be blameless, but you can never be both.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Last week’s column was a little negative, and not without reason. Dota 2 is still working through a bunch of issues associated with the launch of Reborn—balance-wrecking bugs, instability, missing features, and so on. The patches are arriving at a pace, but my own rate of play has slowed while I wait for things to stabilise. Launching a pro gaming channel didn’t do much good for my Dota schedule, either.

This week, then, I want to talk about something positive—a hero that I’ve always loved, but who hasn’t had much love from me in this column. At least, not as much as Axe—and yes, I love them both equally, please don’t make me choose.

Rubick is one of the most distinct, disruptive and entertaining characters in Dota. He’s proof that Dota 2 thrives on chaos in a way that other games, even other MOBAs, don’t. He should be completely broken. In some cases, he is completely broken. That he works at all, let alone as well as he does, is a testament to the uniquely graceful way in which Dota makes weirdness work.

Modern MOBA design values characters that have ‘kits’ of abilities that slot together in specific ways, that form combos that can be executed with varying degrees of skill to fulfill a specific role. Lots of Dota heroes fit this pattern too. Rubick, however, is a character built around a single ability: Spell Steal. Ability theft is his reason to be, the reason you pick him, and the reason he’s special. Look at the rest of his skills: a reliable (though unusual) disable; a nuke and debuff; a moderately helpful aura. Prior to level 6, he’s most of the way to being an unremarkable support. Slap any other ult on him and you’re the rest of the way there.

But Rubick’s ult isn’t just ‘any other ult’. It’s not even ‘Spell Steal’, really, though that’s what you invest your skill points into. Rubick’s ult is every other spell in the game.

This is an idea that is very difficult to implement when characters are designed with lots of internal synergy. Instead it requires an environment, like Dota’s, where spells can be taken out of context and still function—more or less. There are great steals and terrible steals, even game-breaking steals: as in the case of that poor Rubick who stole Morphling’s Morph, turned all of his strength into agility, lost the ability to change it back, and had to spend half of the game with 170hp. In the fountain. Dying to Sunstrike. (Warning: old. Also: MLG as shit.)

Dota 2 walks a very fine line between being weird and being broken, and while Reborn might have tilted the scale towards the latter I love that stuff like this is possible. I love that the possibility for strangeness is valued just as highly as the need for a game that is reliable or balanced. The irony here is that in a genre where character ideas are traded and stolen back and forth all of the time, Rubick—a character about stealing—is one of the few to remain unique to his game of origin. Only Dota 2 is janky and complicated enough to support him.

Janky and complicated though he may be, though, he’s not a novelty or joke character. Despite—no, because of his distinctiveness—Rubick offers a huge amount at every level of the game. He’s unreliable, technically, but his unreliability can be overcome with raw skill and good judgement. If Dota 2 drafting often comes down to a debate between dependable power and knife-edge bravado, Rubick is one of the few support characters to fall into the latter category. He’s the support that gives support players a chance to show off, to surprise their enemy, their team, and anybody watching. He’s the support that lets fy-god be fy-god.

Rubick is a wildcard character, and I mean that in a literal sense. He’s an asterisk, the * you include in a command when you want to leave space for a random variable. You could, if you liked, reduce another support’s contribution to the game down to a run of keywords: Lion might end up as ‘STUN/HEX/MANA DRAIN/NUKE’. You can’t do that with Rubick, really. You’ve always got to leave some room at the end for chance, for chaos, for the unexpected. He represents a willingness to risk disaster in pursuit of something crazier, something more exciting. When it comes down to it, that’s what I love so much about this game.

PC Gamer Pro is a new channel dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Dota 2 just underwent the most substantial update that it has received since the game entered closed beta. Suddenly and without fanfare, the Reborn beta test came to an end and the new game client took over. Custom games are there to try, the UI and new player experience have been completely refreshed, and the world has its first officially-released Source 2 engine game.

I think everybody was expecting more spectacle. The launch of Reborn hasn't been accompanied by a balance patch, a new hero, or even a new section on the website. Relative to comparatively unimportant updates, Valve have put almost no weight behind this moment. Perhaps that's deliberate: maybe they want this to feel like just another day in the history of the game, to play down the hype so that any problems—and there will be problems—emerge against a backdrop of relative calm. Nonetheless, it's a surprise that Reborn has been launched so quickly and so quietly—like returning home to find out that somebody has updated the operating system on your PC without asking, with a lot of the same attendant concerns.

When I spoke to Erik Johnson from Valve at the International, I was surprised by how confident he was that Reborn would launch shortly after the event. My experience with the beta to that point hadn't been fantastic: stuttering on my PC at home, inputs sometimes failing to register on my PC in the office. Admittedly I'd mostly played the beta to try out custom games, where Dota 2 is at its most unstable, but my experience was of a litany of problems with lobbies, match stability, the interface, and so on.

It has improved a lot since then, and playing today I've experienced no significant performance problems—but there are bugs and absences, lots of them, and I can't help but feel that Dota 2 has been less reborn and more restarted. There are undoubtedly many updates to come, and this new client gives Valve more power and freedom when it comes to creating them, but that's not quite where we're at yet. This feels less like Reborn leaving beta and more like Dota 2 as a whole heading back.

It's the stuff that's missing that most concerns me—and I'm not just talking about that silly item-building quiz that you used to be able to do while queuing. Formal team functionality has vanished overnight. As far as I can tell you can no longer create your own teams, set custom graphics for banners and base logos, or queue specifically to be matched against another stack. I can't find my team MMR anywhere on my profile, although my 'pro info' (their words, not mine) is still there. My team still exists, I think, but there's no obvious way to access that information.

Valve haven't done much with the team ranked ladder over the last year, and given how buggy it used to be I get the impression that it was never a priority. Yet it was an important part of the game for me and for others: a way to bridge the gap between ranked pub games and in-houses, a convenient source of organised opponents to practice against. Setting custom team logos was a fun addition to the amateur tournaments I've played, and it no longer appears to be possible. There could well be a brilliant replacement for these old features coming down the line, but there's been no guarantees and no communication to that effect.

Although I like the new interface for cosmetics—particularly the new shuffling system—I understand why traders are upset about it, particularly the sorting systems that have been lost. You can also no longer manipulate or reset stat-tracking gems. It feels like whatever form your hobby took before, something is quite likely to have suffered in the transition to Reborn. Team matchmaking is my gripe, but every player will encounter something they miss. That's understandable, given the magnitude of the task that Valve have taken on, but it distracts from the genuine good that this update promises.

Custom games, as I've written before, could represent an epochal shift for Dota 2. The new engine runs faster on better hardware and supports a much improved spectator experience. It looks and feels more modern, and with this change Valve free themselves up to focus on the really exciting stuff: new heroes, new events, and so on. I'm trying to focus on all of these genuine benefits even as I encounter small gripe after small gripe.

What it comes down to, I think, is that the communication surrounding this week's changes simply hasn't been good enough. Valve have said that they'll be iterating based on feedback and that there are features to come, but they haven't said what or when. I think the community deserves better than that, particularly when functionality is being refactored or removed. There needs to be an acknowledgement of what Dota is losing along with what it has gained, ideally with a sense of which features are due to make a return—and if they're not coming back, some reasoning why. Otherwise you have a situation where Dota 2 is ready for Reborn, but the Dota 2 community isn't. That's what we're seeing now. Reborn doesn't need marketing, perhaps, but it does need transparency—even if the most honest thing to say at this point is "relax, guys, we're back in beta."

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

I had one of those Techies games yesterday. You know the one: you're the only support in your pub game, the other team locked Techies late, and now you're going to spend fifty minutes to an hour of your precious human lifespan buying and placing sentry wards. Remember playing Dota with items other than arcane boots and a magic wand? Me neither.

I got lucky in this instance. My random teammates were friendly and understanding, albeit not to the extent of buying wards themselves. Our mid Bloodseeker snowballed hard (this was a pub game, remember). We were too far ahead to be stopped after thirty minutes. The game lasted another twenty-five minutes after that, because Techies, but we won in the end. I even got a couple of commendations! Far from the worst experience I've had in a Techies game.

Yet that 55 minute period amounted to my entire lunchbreak, and in this case my only game of the day. The experience was dominated by the need to counter the Techies pick: I didn't plan to play a game of Minesweeper when I joined the queue, but that's what I got. Somebody else's hero decision entirely changed the type of game I could play.

The fact that a single hero can have this sort of impact on the shape of a match is one of the things I love about Dota. This is a game of crazy power differentials and wild divergence in strategies: it'd die without them. Players should be forcing each other to react with their hero picks. But I don't think I'm alone in feeling that, at the moment, the Techies has a disproportionate impact on the game—just ask CDEC.

The hero raises a number of interesting questions about the way Dota 2 is balanced. Techies are disruptive in every game, but they're much easier to deal with if your entire team is coordinated enough to properly assign roles and use voice chat. In other words, encountering Techies as a full stack is very different to encountering them as a solo player or while queuing as a pair or trio. The hero is more disruptive in the latter case, particularly in pub games, because this type of Dota already has a shortage of supports—particularly those willing to sacrifice their own item progression to buy all of the sentries, all of the time.

This is one of the fascinating things about how each hero's power curve works: as much as we talk about characters reaching their peak at different points in the game, they also hit different power peaks according to the experience level of the players involved. In my first fifty hours of Dota, Riki was The Enemy. His presence required constant vigilance, an entirely different style of play, perpetual tension and fear—similar to playing against a good Techies two thousand hours later. Riki, for his flaws, still occupies that space at lower levels: he's the great big 'off' switch for any fun a new player might be having, an otherwise-rubbish hero whose power curve peaks at 'making people quit forever after ten games.'

In other contexts this might look like a problem to be solved: if a hero pick has a disproportionate impact on a particular portion of the playerbase, something should be done. Dota 2 is balanced for high-end play, however. There isn't going to be a patch to fix the experience of people playing 3k MMR pub games, nor—in principle—should there be. Picking Techies in a pub game is a shittier thing to do to somebody else's lunchbreak in this bracket than it would be otherwise, but there's not much that can be done about that save trying to get into a better bracket. That's Dota.

Yet it's notable to me that Riki is considered a doghouse-tier hero and Techies is first pick/ban material in International grand final matches: two pubstompers alike in impact but not in dignity. It's this that makes me more confident saying that some kind of change is needed: not to bail out beleaguered pub supports, but because out of all of Dota's invisible bullshit heroes, Techies' invisible bullshit is the most, well, bullshit.

Consider Broodmother, who I think is in a pretty good place right now. She's situational at best but incredibly disruptive in the right circumstances and with the right player behind her. She demands a response from the enemy team, but there are a few ways to go about it and the situations she thrives in don't come about every single time—you can't first-pick her and be guaranteed a good time.

A lot of this comes down to information, map control, and the expense of securing both of these—something that applies to both Broodmother, Techies, and Riki to a lesser extent. In Broodmother's case, the area she's most dangerous in—her web—is visible to both teams. The area you might be expected to cover with sentries is obvious, and Broodmother either has to counter-ward or switch lanes and both are costly. There's a really good risk-reward system in play there.

You might have no idea where Riki is if he goes missing, but you can counter most of the things he might try to do with sentry wards protecting lone heroes and a refusal to wander off solo. You're not in massive danger unless you ignore common sense, which is why the hero falls off so sharply as players get better.

Consider Techies. Land Mines last forever and can be placed anywhere. While there are obvious places to check for them, a good Techies won't use them. A good Techies will always get something done, because it's impossible to check every single space somebody might eventually wander. That psychological pressure adds up. Unlike Broodmother the potential danger is everywhere, and ward coverage must be much more substantial as a result. Unlike Riki there's no simple solution like 'group up'—in fact, that risks playing right into the Techies player's hands.

What is needed, I think, is a change that gives the enemy team some control over a Techies' operational area: to localise the hero's power to certain parts of the map, a la Broodmother, without giving up the potential for an explosive upset every now and then. To that end, how about this: when Techies plants mines, they only gain invisibility if the enemy has no vision of them when they are planted. If you see a Techies planting mines, you can always see them when you return to that area.

This way, observer wards would become a cheap way to deny parts of the map to Techies—they couldn't be used to find mines that were already invisible, but they would counter any mines planted under their field of view. Techies wouldn't be told if their mines were invisible to the enemy or not, so they wouldn't be able to use mines to scout for observers—but they may, in fact, find themselves doing more dewarding to make sure that their latest stack isn't being laid in full view of the enemy.

This would encourage more mining of juke spots and rarely-warded areas while providing defensive options that don't totally bankrupt supports. The Rosh pit would still be fair game, as would tier 3 towers, but players wouldn't need to fear the open pathways of their own jungle to quite the same degree as long as they were prepared enough.

I'd rather see this sort of change than, say, a mana pool reduction or a damage nerf—I still want those crazy Techies moments. The change I'd like to see is about relieving, not removing, the pressure you feel when you're up against a map full of invisible bombs. Making deathtraps less deadly spoils the fun: the key, to me, is making it easier to manage the potential area you have to disarm. I still want to wander into a stack of mines from time to time, but I'd also like that lunchtime back.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

I first watched competitive Dota during the second International. I'd been playing for a few months, and didn't understand enough to follow the tournament properly. My abiding memory of those first experiences was watching the draft: particularly the moment when a team would select a hero, the portrait would flash up on the screen, and a crowd of people on the other side of the planet would go wild. It was baffling, almost off-puttingly so, but I wanted to understand it.

Competitive games always develop their own secret languages—it's not something unique to Dota 2 or even this genre. But drafting sits aside from even these. Learning to parse the drama of a character selection phase is something that comes after picking up basic understanding of the game itself. It requires a knowledge of every character, their strengths, the strategies they fit into and the players they're associated with. It requires knowledge of past results, the current metagame, the history of the competitive scene, and so on. Not all of that knowledge needs to be perfect, but as with any language the more fluent you are the more you understand.

A little over three years later, the pick-ban process has become one of my favourite things about Dota. I'm not sure how unusual that is: it's the precursor to a much more involved and complex game, a phase that you're likely to fast-forward through if you're catching up on a replay. Only a small portion of the playerbase opt to play Captain's Mode regularly. For me it's become its own game, antecedent to Dota proper but interesting, and strangely playable, in its own right.

Drafting feels a bit like a competitive card game from the future. It's the part of Dota that hews closest to Calvinball—and this is game that has an awful lot of Calvinball in its DNA.

For example. EG remove Bounty Hunter and Tusk; CDEC remove Leshrac and Techies. EG first pick Gyrocopter and CDEC take Clockwerk and Lina. EG get Naga Siren, then remove Ember Spirit. CDEC get rid of Dark Seer. EG get rid of Visage. CDEC ban Shadow Fiend then take Winter Wyvern. Storm Spirit to EG, then Phantom Lancer to CDEC, then Earthshaker to EG. CDEC remove Crystal Maiden; EG remove Dazzle. Down to the final two: Dragon Knight for CDEC, Ancient Apparition to EG.

This is either complete nonsense or the dramatic opening moments of the final game of the International 2015. It's probably a little bit of both. Over time however, and exposure, you see the stories contained in every choice. The way EG's Bounty Hunter ban reflects their growing respect for the hero, the way it upset them in the upper bracket final, its gradual ascendance over the course of the event. CDEC's Techies ban, which echoes with the sound of Aui_2000's explosive performance in the group stages (and KuroKy's back at ESL One, arguably.)

The respect shown to Universe with the Dark Seer ban and, likely, the Clockwerk first-pick; similarly, EG's respect for Q's Visage. The confidence in SumaiL expressed by that third-pick Storm Spirit, the shore-up-the-defenses mindset expressed by Phantom Lancer and Dragon Knight. The reason people cheer at hero selections is because they express personality, emotion, and strategy: the thing you see, when you learn to read between the lines, is people, which is a good way to explain the popularity of esports as a whole.

What strikes me is that even spectating a draft phase is, to some degree, participatory. It's fun to apply your own understanding to the draft happening on the screen, to anticipate decisions, share that anticipation, and so on. This is a part of the game that is fundamentally about pattern recognition, but rare in that the patterns you trace go beyond game mechanics and strategy. You consider social, personal, historical patterns too: you are using the part of your brain that might in a different life be forecasting financial trends, or branding, or fashion. Whatever life decisions led you apply these faculties to internet wizards don't matter: you are, at least, using them.

It's the satisfaction of applying years of knowledge knowledge and intuition in combination, simply and keenly expressed—something few games outside of the competitive world manage. For all that gets said about esports being inaccessible, I suspect that the complexity of a hero draft is emblematic of why they're becoming so popular. It's common to assume that a viewer will encounter something they don't understand and turn away: those cheers during the draft are evidence that the opposite is often true. Secret languages are attractive—they draw people in, make them want to learn, and reward them for learning. I can't think of a better demonstration of that than thousands of people screaming at a character select screen.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Dota 2 matchmaking is a strange place to be in the aftermath of an International. There are a lot of new players, a lot of returning players, and a lot of people trying to imitate what they've just seen play out on the world stage. I'm fascinated by the way these influences interact with the existing habits of the Dota population.

International grand finals have an impact on Dota matchmaking equivalent to the release of a new Arcana or Immortal cosmetic, which is telling because one of those is a million-dollar tournament featuring the best players in the world and the other is a special hat. Regardless, this impact is shaped by the kinds of things the average Dota player is already interested in: i.e, playing core heroes, usually a midlaner or a farming carry. Of the heroes that really shone at the International, supports like Rubick and Bounty Hunter have actually been picked less since the tournament ended; meanwhile, Storm Spirit, Gyrocopter, Leshrac, Phantom Lancer and other cores have all seen growth (massive growth, in Storm's case.) The best place to observe these shifts is on Dotabuff's hero trends page.

Dota was ever thus. That pubstomping heroes are popular is one of the game's fundamental patterns, like blaming other people or spamming '> We need wards' when anything goes even slightly wrong. Your average player just wants to build the big items and make the big plays. Everybody else works around it. That's how things are, and how they'll always be.

There's a single, massive, totem-swinging exception to this rule, and it's Earthshaker. He's the only support in the top 10, and only Storm Spirit has seen a bigger spike in popularity. The inference is clear: the Dota community just watched Universe land a $6,000,000-dollar Echo Slam in the TI5 grand final, and that's been enough to rocket a support hero up the popularity food chain.

To put it another way: Universe slammed CDEC so hard he altered the nature of reality.

I'm really happy about this. I love that this play is being interpreted as the moment the International was won, because it's a moment orchestrated entirely by a gold-starved support and a utility-focused offlaner. In a metagame that often revolves around on aggressive carries and snowballing midlaners, that it was PPD and Universe who pulled off such a massive upset is a timely reminder that Dota is a team game and that every role offers opportunities for glory.

CDEC's Roshan attempt began with a well-coordinated kill on SumaiL's Storm Spirit, and the assumption from both the casters and (presumably) the players is that this opened up Roshan for an uncontested kill. The logic is that without their supremely talented midlaner, EG would have to either concede the Aegis of the Immortal or try to drag the encounter out long enough for SumaiL to respawn.

PPD and Universe proved that assessment disastrously wrong, and didn't need the rest of their team to do it. Fear threw a Call Down into the pit after the fact, but it wasn't necessary: four members of CDEC were dead after Universe cast his follow-up Fissure, with only agressif surviving on half health. It was a perfect play, entirely conducted by the bottom third of the farm priority pyramid (Aui's Naga Siren can be safely considered to have moved up somewhere beyond position 3 by this point, as often happens when EG run the hero.)

They're not the only players to do something like this, of course. Zai was the Dark Seer that Secret needed in their darkest hour; DDC's Winter Wyvern was the hero that sent Secret to the lower bracket. fy's Rubick remains, for many, the single best hero-and-player combo of the entire event. Supports matter. Supports win games. Everybody who takes Dota seriously knows this, in one sense or another, even though it can often be hard to parse from Dotabuff's metrics or from the average pub game.

This truth is rarely expressed visibly enough to influence the people playing Dota 2 every day, but that's what has happened here. That this moment occurred in such an important match in front of so many people is brilliant for the community. If only 3% more players are deciding to play support as a result of it, that's still more than were volunteering for the role before the tournament.

The dream is that the trend sticks: that this dunk-to-end-all-dunks was somehow so impactful that the people you solo queue with will be falling over themselves to play position 4 Earthshaker. Honestly? I'm not hopeful on that front. The sudden rise of Storm Spirit demonstrates that the majority of eyes are still on mid, on SumaiL, on the starpower connotated by a tough 1 vs. 1 and the snowballing power that follows. Pudge will ever be on the rise, seemingly in step with the growing popularity of the game as a whole. But there's no better reminder that skill and playmaking impact is available to everybody on a Dota team. It might have been a disaster (read: 'diiiiisaaaaaaasterrr') for CDEC, but it was a triumph for everybody else.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Aside from last week's journey into low prio, my recent experience of Dota has been divided between two extremes. I've been playing solo ranked every day, eking out MMR points in a land where actual cooperation is a precious commodity, warred over by very angry young men who will scream, betray and trample one another if it means not being the last person to call somebody else a dickhead. It's solo Dota. You know what you're getting into.

Over the last two weekends I've also being playing in The Rektreational 2. It's a games industry Dota tournament run by a bunch of guys on the west coast of the USA. My team, Uptown Dunk, comprises people from various UK games media outlets. Others represent specific developers, websites, and so on. It's friendly and a lot of fun, like a golf invitational. It's an excuse to talk about Dota with colleagues. If you'd like to watch the main bracket this weekend, the first game is at midnight PDT Friday/8am GMT Saturday.

The Rektreational is also, for the people who organise it, a huge amount of work. Making a tournament happen means weaving together Google docs, email threads, Challonge brackets, and so on. It means finding times when seventy-plus people can play. The first Rektreational ended in February after almost six months of working around this stuff. The second has been run over two weeks—with a much more unforgiving bracket—in order to simply remain practical.

This needn't be the case. As good as the external tools for arranging tournaments are, making them work together is a job that requires a lot of commitment from a team of human administrators. This is true of any tournament in almost any game, amateur or otherwise. Yet much of this effort goes into solving problems that computers are, by their nature, very good at handling. Much of the effort required to run an amateur bracket could be negated—or at the very least, simplified—if the functionality for running brackets was incorporated into the game itself. Hell, Dota even has a 'manage tournaments' button on the community page—greyed out, for the majority of players, since time immemorial.

Structured team play is a really rewarding way to experience Dota, and it's unfortunately downplayed by a game itself. Team matchmaking has been a mess for a while, buggy and detached—fine if all you want is a five-stack to practise against, but that's about it. It doesn't give you access to any of the really rewarding stuff.

Namely: getting to know a manageably small circle of opponents. Getting to prepare. Getting to tailor specific strategies, rather than the catch-all generalism that traditional matchmaking encourages. Getting to experience winning when it matters, even if it only matters to the sixteen teams in contention. All of this stuff scales with skill level: you don't need to be a pro to get something out of taking Dota a little more seriously than you otherwise might. There is such a thing as 3K MMR tournament meta—you just don't see it because very few people can be bothered to go through the hassle of organising something at that level.

Valve haven't expressed much interest in running Dota 'seasons' at an amateur level—they leave that to the community, to groups like JoinDota—but they have expressed an interest in providing the community with tools. There's even precedent for players organising their own structured competition with their friends within the game—it just takes the form of a fantasy leagues, rather than actual Dota.

Imagine this, then: a toolset whereby players could configure ladders, brackets, and so on, and invite premade teams to participate. The game client would handle results, progression, and so on. You could even open tournaments up to the public and apply entry criteria—a nationality, an MMR range, and so on. Add some kind of system for voting on match times and handling forfeits and you've got a framework for amateur tournaments that would make running them vastly more appealing to admins, and therefore more widespread, and therefore more accessible.

Streaming or spectating games makes things more complicated, and that's something to enter into at the organiser's discretion. As is prizes, sponsorship and so on—but they're not the point. The point is giving more of Dota 2's playerbase access to one of the most satisfying ways to play, and providing alternate progression paths that sit comfortably alongside the MMR system.

As Dota grows, being able to compete like this gets harder—and, arguably, more necessary. Amateur tournaments make the game feel smaller, and, in turn, more meaningful. Tournaments for the top 1% are, by their nature, exclusive. I want the tools to run brackets for the rest of us: trench thunderdomes that encourage lasting rivalries and, dare I suggest, a sense of community.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Prior to this week, I'd played only a single game in Dota 2's low priority queue. It was about a year and a half ago, and EU server weirdness resulted in a friend and I getting booted from a game-in-progress with an instant abandon. We were condemned to low prio for a single match, and I don't remember it being particularly eventful. Perhaps a lot of people were unexpectedly finding themselves there that week. It felt much like any other game of pub Dota, which is to say that it was a bit of a shitshow.

A friend recently got themselves stuck with a longer sentence—five or possibly ten games, I'm not sure. Said friend is a member of my regular team, and the rules of low prio means that she can't play with the rest of us until those games are played. And that, reader, is how I ended up spending a couple of hours in the trench at the bottom of Dota 2's trench. Double Trench, ostensibly a punishment mechanic designed to improve the community, actually a bizarre parallel Dota where nothing matters and almost nobody who actually should be there understands why they are there.

Have you ever heard the allegory of the long spoons? I first heard it in school during my teens, and for some reason, unlike the majority of things I heard in school during my teens, I've remembered it. It feels pertinent here: the allegory goes that when you die you find yourself in a long banquet hall with a heaped table of food in front of you. A problem: the cutlery is incredibly long, and for the purposes of this analogy you're not allowed to use your hands. Maybe they're tied to the spoons, or they are the spoons, or something.

In hell, where people are selfish assholes, everybody attempts to feed themselves and as a result nobody gets to eat. In heaven, however, everybody figures out that if they feed each other then the length of the spoon doesn't matter. The point, or one of them, is that the circumstances by which people are sent to these places makes them a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Send assholes to hell and it becomes a terrible place to be; stick all of the nice people in the same room and, guess what, it's nice.

The low prio system is intended, I think, to confront people with something similar. Flame, grief and abandon games and you'll be forced to play with people who flame, grief, and abandon games. The flaw in this line of thinking is that it assumes that badly-behaved players will, upon encountering other badly-behaved players, see themselves reflected and experience a Scrooge-type personal revelation. Guess what: this doesn't seem to actually happen. Here is a brief history of the last three games I played.

Game one: entire Radiant team feeds mid constantly in order to end the match faster. Our mid Warlock gets most of the kills, has an Aghanim's Scepter and Refresher Orb within ten minutes. One enemy player, Tinker, becomes outraged that myself and another member of our team are not pushing mid as fast as he would like. I suggest that he might be missing a valuable life lesson of some kind, and he threatens to report me.

Game two: I random Visage (all low prio games are All Random) and have a reasonably good time. We lose terribly, and at the end the enemy Wraith King types 'ez' over and over again until I disconnect. It is not entirely unlike regular Dota.

Game three: myself and my friend attempt a Clockwerk/Morphling dual offlane. For some reason, it works. Our mid Necrophos handily outlanes Pudge. On our safelane, however, Disruptor/Sniper loses to Pugna/Ogre Magi. As the long game goes on, Disruptor becomes angrier and angrier at Sniper, calls Pudge a 'fat fuck', and so on. I ask him if he knows why he's in low prio. 'BECAUSE I AM ALWAYS PLAY WITH FUCKS LIKE SNIPER', he replies.

Here's the thing: these games were actually kind of fun. They came after a weekend of going full tryhard in the Rektreational. Playing All Random made for a relaxing break. The terrible behaviour and worse strategies compounded the sense that nothing had any consequence whatsoever; it was a bit like playing Team Fortress 2. I went bottle-first on a support Lina because nobody gave a shit. None of it threatened my MMR. I had quite a nice time.

That's the first reason why I don't think low prio works as a punishment. The second is that by surrounding ragers and quitters with ragers and quitters, the act of raging and quitting is normalised. There's nothing in the low prio environment that suggests that these things are wrong. In fact, raging and quitting (expressed by feeding constantly) is the fastest way to dodge the punishment. This is a bit like telling a convicted thief that if they can successfully steal the keys to their jail cell then they can go home early.

Rather than being a corrective punishment where players learn that they must consider others and be willing to share if they want to thrive—as in the long spoon allegory—low prio is simply an alternative form of Dota where the rules are taken less seriously. At its most punitive it's an inconvenience, an annoyance that restricts you to playing All Random for a set amount of time. Beyond that the punishment is so light that I suspect many of the players who belong in low prio don't see the difference at all.

While it makes sense to preserve the experience of well-behaved players by exiling the worst element to their own dimension, I suspect that this is the worst way to actually resolve the problem. The lessons that need to be learned by these players are best learned by example, and that example can only be provided by players who don't act the same way. The solution to the trench isn't more trench, it's more exposure to the community.

God help us.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Every time I load into a game of Dota 2, I worry. That feeling has nothing to do with the match itself—I've become a little less wary of people who random, for what it's worth—and everything to do with the way your Compendium level pops up at the start to indicate the amount of money you've pumped into the International prize pool.

I get it. It's a way of advertising the Compendium. A way of showing off, even, at a certain level. Here's the thing, though, reader: I have an absurd Compendium. In a world where the average player is somewhere between level zero and level fifty, mine is level 744. Seven hundred and forty four.

I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I wanted to get an ultra-rare Faceless Rex courier as a gift for my girlfriend. These items weren't available on the Steam Marketplace until a week after they came out. I didn't want to wait that long. I figured they'd sell for a chunk of change anyway, so it made sense to gamble on opening Collector's Cache chests until one dropped. There's a 1-in-250 chance of that happening, but it'd happen, I thought. I'd get one soon enough. I've always been pretty lucky.

I opened over 250 Collector's Caches without receiving a Faceless Rex. I did some very unhealthy things to my credit card in pursuit of a gift that I thought was always just around the corner. It was a very strange afternoon. I still feel a bit weird about the whole thing. I've never been much into gambling.

A week later, I bought a Faceless Rex on the Steam Marketplace. My girlfriend got her present in the end.

And I, somewhere along the way, ended up with a very impressively high-level magical internet wizard sport book. Every time I load into a match, I watch the number '744' ping into place and wait for somebody to say something. Normally, they don't. Sometimes, they do. I may as well be wearing a sign saying 'gigantic tryhard' (previously, it was my Phantom Assassin arcana that confirmed this). I've considered changing my Steam username to 'please don't ask about my Compendium level'. I even told all of my friends privately to preempt their collective giggling.

This experience has got me thinking about the staggering amount of money that I and other people have spent on this videogame over the years. I've poured more money into Dota 2, a completely free game that puts almost none of its content behind a paywall, than I have with any other game series I have ever loved. I adored Mass Effect and bought every collector's edition—there's a model Normandy on my desk right now—but it doesn't come close to a fraction of the value of my collection of wizard hats. I've even written about why hats don't matter. Yet here I am with my big dumb Compendium, my collection of hats—and curiously few regrets.

Nothing about my career or lifestyle suggests that I'm to be taken seriously as a human adult, but if I were I'd struggle to justify this aspect of my hobby. Yet I don't feel I need to. As the games industry—and the commentary community attached to it—has adapted to the various consequences of free to play, 'people just like to spend sometimes' has always been a downplayed aspect of the discussion.

We talk about exploitative business models, pay to win, and so on, but rarely about the simple satisfaction transmitted by paid participation. It's nice to gather things. It's nice to buy gifts for other people. It's nice to earn the gold borders and the badges and the levels, because all of it basically translates to 'I care about this thing and I'd like to show that'. My trepidation about my Compendium stems partly from the knowledge that it's uncool to care, particularly in the Dota community, but that is the least of my concerns.

Valve profit enormously from this acquisitive reflex, and they're far from the only company that does. Whatever vestigial synaptic tick it is that makes it satisfying to consume, collect, and display is arguably unnecessary for us personally—a behavioural appendix, waiting to be cut out—but vital to the particular economy we wallow around in.

I regard my Compendium level with mild horror because I suspect secretly that one day it is going to spur a great and righteous takedown by one of my matchmade allies or opponents. It is the most absurd testament to the comfortable position I find myself in, the historic ludicrousness of my resources and desires, signifying a world so out of balance that a not particularly well-remunerated Western man can afford to tip money into an internet computer game prize pool in pursuit of a purple dinosaur that doesn't even have a face. I am horrified by the possibility, however vastly unlikely it is, that I will one day be matched into a Dota 2 game with Slavoj Žižek. Perhaps he'd be into it; I have no idea, really. I just never imagined that if we met it'd be me making the case for the absurd inevitability of capitalism.

On the other hand, that number signifies a deep individual investment in something shared with others; an engagement with a sport, a part of culture, albeit a silly one; a mad and misdirected generous streak. It's a bit romantic, even. All of these things are natural, very human, and I suspect that this is why we are probably, completely, collectively, globally, fucked.

The point is: even fair free to play systems spur people to strange excess. Developers, the traditional target of these types of discussion, bear only part of the responsibility; people, both individually and in the abstract, play a key role in allowing this way of things to be. The best response I can give to anybody who points and laughs at my Compendium level is 'I don't fucking know either'. In a world (or at least a country) where the public teeters ever further over the edge into the private, where ownership is taken to be the sacred right of people who own things, there is something appealing about owning a shitload of expensive pretend digital things that I don't even really own. The notion that this might amount to some form of dirty protest is as close as any of this gets to valour. A frivolous little personal rebellion against what is, like believing in auras. Just as unconvincing, but the particle effects are better.

Last night, Valve announced that anybody with a Compendium level over 1000 would receive a replica of the Aegis of Champions trophy. A physical replica! A piece of metal I don't need. An additional expense.

"In for a penny" I thought, staring at the gap between 744 and 1000.

"Maybe I'll get my own Faceless Rex this time."

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

The most significant difference between the majority of Dota 2's traditional game modes lies in the way you pick your character. Drafting is an essential part of the game, and opting in to different methods of drafting is a way of determining what kind of experience you want to have. I've written before about there being different Dotas for different players, and this is the most obvious way this manifests. If you play a lot of Single or Random Draft then your experience is fundamentally different to somebody who plays a lot of Captain's Mode—and so on.

Over time, Valve and Icefrog have made multiple tweaks to the way that All Pick works. They've adjusted the amount of time for picks and the amount of gold you lose if you fail to choose. When 6.82 launched last September, Valve acknowledged that ranked All Pick should work differently to unranked: they added a 'strategy period' to the beginning, enforced an alternating pick system, and increased the punishment for idling. Since then, the two variants of All Pick have amounted to (very subtly) different game modes.

I'd argue that these changes didn't go quite far enough. I've been playing a bunch of solo ranked again recently, and I'm struggling to come up with a reason why players should have the option to random their hero.

It's a fine idea in principle, and it works in regular All Pick (and in team ranked, for that matter—what I have to say really applies to solo games.) Randoming is a form of gambling that adds a degree of luck and chance to the drafting process—it can go well or disastrously and responding to your fortunes one way or another is an interesting strategic challenge.

This is fine if everybody involved agrees to it, but I don't think I've ever seen somebody say 'do you guys mind if I random' in solo ranked. Ever. It doesn't happen—what does happen is that someone loads in, immediately randoms, and then the five strangers they're matched with try to work around it. Or they don't try to work around it, and you end up with double mids or no support or no carries and the next forty minutes becomes an exercise in defying the mathematical likelihood that the game was lost before you started.

There's a lot of ways that solo players can make selfish decisions in the draft that screw their teammates—locking mid without any discussion, and so on. That stuff's unavoidable. In those cases, however, it usually stems from a player wanting to do something that will ultimately favour them in the match. Maybe they're insta-picking Queen of Pain because they're great with her. Even if they're wrong, the decision comes from a position of 'I want to win this game' and that's ultimately positive.

Randoming exposes players to huge risk—that they'll get a terrible hero, or a hero that they're terrible with, or a hero that requires somebody else to pick something to accompany it that they might not be happy to play (random Io being a good example of this.) Randoming doesn't express the desire to win the game—it expresses the desire to leave it substantially up to chance.

This is really bad for a competitive team game. The last thing Dota 2 needs is a 'screw everybody else on my team' button, and often that's what the random option amounts to. It's different in a one vs. one game—StarCraft comes to mind—because the time and energy that the player is gambling with is there own. Being able to random in solo ranked amounts to gambling with four other people's time too. I'd argue that Valve should do everything they can to reduce the amount that individual players can ruin games for other people. With this in mind, I don't think the random option has a place in solo ranked games.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

A few days ago, in an article about ESL One Frankfurt, I made a point of praising Team Secret's decision making. This comes up a lot in my thinking about Dota. Something that applies to this game and many other things besides is the way that professionals 'make it look easy'. This is particularly apparent in esports, where the game the pros are playing is exactly the same as the one you play at home. Watching them pull off perfect rotation after perfect rotation, perfect counter-initiation after perfect counter-initiation, it's easy to sit back and think: I could do that.

I can't, though, because while I can imitate the visible aspect of their performance I can't replicate the thought processes that make it happen. The best players make (and don't make) decisions very quickly, drawing on a massive amount of prior experience to do so. I've written before about how, ultimately, there's no substitute for raw time investment when it comes to getting good. There are, however, a few approaches that I've found helpful while trying to become a better player—particularly with regards to decision making.

Always be running through scenarios in your head

This started, for me, with trying to get an intuitive grasp of blink dagger's maximum range. Rather than wait for a teamfight to discover that I didn't quite have it down, I'd think about it as I was running around and practice when things were quiet. If I was playing support and had blink, for example, I'd practice while warding. This isn't advisable in serious competitive games but in pubs I think it's a good way of getting your eye in.

The same applies to skill rotations and other items. If you're always thinking about what your next move might look like then it's far less likely that you'll panic, rush, or screw it up. That might mean something like 'I'm going to blink, hex, stun somebody else, force staff myself out and look for a finger of death opportunity'. Once you've figured that out, check which inventory slots your blink dagger and force staff are in. This is about as basic as advice gets, but the speed at which you make a decision doesn't matter at all if you haven't done the basic groundwork that makes sure you don't fat-finger your dust and force staff yourself in the wrong direction.

Say what you're about to do, but don't let that stop you

I've spent a lot of time over the last year writing about communication—particularly about the importance of being clear and vocal with your ideas. The flipside to this is that in an idea world you shouldn't need to wait for a reply once you've explained what you're going to do.

There's another word for this, and it's 'trust'. If you trust that the people you're playing with have your back, then saying 'I'm going to blink-echo slam with the next wave' and then doing it is fine. If it's what you need to do to break their base then it's what you need to do, and it's on them to follow you up. I've seen a lot of teams fall apart due to hesitancy resulting from a committee-ish need to make sure that everybody agrees with the plan before anybody pushes the button.

If you don't trust the people that you're playing with, arguably you should go for it anyway. They might surprise you: you're just another pub random to them too, after all.

Act

I mentioned hesitancy above. It is, I find, something that intermediate teams really struggle with. This indicates lag in the decision making process—it's everything to do with thought and communication and very little to do with reactions. Although there are certainly times when rushing in ruins it for everybody, I increasingly believe that you learn more about the game if you're willing to make a move without hesitation.

Don't get me wrong: this is how many, many matches get thrown away. Ultimately, however, you only learn to make better decisions by making decisions. If you wait for the perfect play, you probably won't make one. If you make no plays, you won't learn—all that time running through scenarios doesn't mean much if you don't take that knowledge into the wild. This taps into a broader truth—if you're going to learn, be willing to lose—but it is specifically relevant here. If you need to blow a long cooldown ult to make sure a kill happens, do it. If you think you can outplay an isolated enemy, try it.

This might sound a little dumb, but acting more confidently when making a play is the wrong idea helped make me more confident when it was the right idea. It also helped me learn the myriad ways in which an idea can be a bad one. There's no substitute for time, after all, and you cannot learn to make better choices by not choosing.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

It's been ten months since Valve released the Source 2 toolkit for Dota 2 custom game mode developers. It's been seven months since they confirmed that something big would be arriving in 2015, a project that accounted for the lack of Diretide and Frostivus and the ever-slowing rate at which new heroes arrive. Despite the warnings, however, I'm taken aback by just how important Dota 2 Reborn feels. This isn't simply a major update: it's practically a new game. Valve's mysterious alt-text writer might have joked that we're back in beta, but we really are. Two years into the life of Dota 2, we're at the cusp of a change that they could probably get away with calling 'Dota 3'.

In detailing what I think the major changes to the hobby are going to be, I'm going to gloss most of the serious connection and technical issues that are an undeniable problem with the current beta. Let's assume that, given a few months, Dota Reborn works the vast majority of the time.

Even so, Dota 2 is going to gain a scrappy new identity. That stunning new UI disguises a fundamental change in the type of game that it is. At present, your experience is curated by Valve. Old Dota 2 demonstrates the developer's commitment to the original mod, with every menu, mode and system trending towards more Dota, more of the time. Lots of people want this, and for them the game doesn't need to be any more than that. You play Dota 2 because you want to play Dota. That makes sense.

With Reborn, Dota 2 is becoming a game development platform. Classic Dota dominates three quarters of the UI, but that 'Custom Game' tab will ultimately represent an offering far, far bigger than it. The notion that you play Dota 2 because you want to play Dota will become a thing of the past: you might play Dota 2 because you want to play Bomberman. You might play Dota 2 because you want to play a kart racer, or a survival game, or solve a puzzle. Although the majority of custom games will be derived from Dota's basic systems, they're not committed to that: the potential for divergent experiences is huge.

Similarly, the potential for negative experiences is huge. Most custom game modes will be bad. Lots of them won't work. The ones that work well will still be impacted by the lack of skill-based matchmaking and the ready availability of the abandon button: there's no way they can be seriously competitive as Dota is without a bit of curation from the community. This isn't a problem, in and of itself. It means the return of low stakes Dota, of negotiating lobbies, of rough placeholder models and design experiments that go nowhere. The return, in short, of the golden age of modding—with all the inconsistency and homebrew jank that this entails.

This is a huge tonal change for a game defined by its singular focus and high production values. In becoming a game design sandbox, Dota 2 doesn't just gain a whole bunch of new ways to play—it becomes messier, easier, more inviting to more people. If you ever wondered how the game could get bigger, this is it. Right now, despite this being an opt-in beta that doesn't work half the time, the player population for Skillshot Wars is equal to that of the Marvel Heroes MMO. Pudge Wars has more than double Evolve's player base. Overthrow's playerbase would be enough to put it in the top 30 games on all of Steam.

Dota 2 custom games are going to be utterly massive. You will have friends who play them and don't touch Dota itself. The ideas expressed within this game over the next few years are going to spin out into full games in their own right; possibly even genres. It's happened before.

I've been thinking about the effect this is going to have on the community—aside from it simply getting larger. I suspect we'll see a lot of anger about AFK lobby hosts, quitters and so on. In that sense, Reborn might give an already fractious group of people new reasons to shout at each other.

As a counterpoint, however, today I had one of the nicest interactions with a Dota 2 stranger I've ever had. I loaded into an Overthrow match, on the map that divides players into teams of two. During hero selection, my randomly-assigned teammate admitted that they'd never played it before and had no idea what to pick. I said that I was in the same position. We talked back and forth about combos we might try, settled one, and played. We lost but it didn't feel like a big deal. It was fun, and, more importantly, it wasn't taboo to say that you didn't know the best way to play.

The Dota 2 community is enormously elitist—a sign of weakness is tantamount to blood in the water. Nobody wants to admit their mistakes, everybody wants to blame somebody else. This is a community with a widespread working knowledge of the Dunning-Kruger effect, for heaven's sake.

Custom game modes disarm that by creating a scenario where everybody is new again. Because it doesn't 'matter' in the same way that traditional Dota is seen to, it's okay to ask questions. It's okay to clown around. Even if this is only the case for a handful of popular modes, it's enormously healthy for the community as a whole. Will it lead to nicer Dota players? Too early to tell. But it does make playing with assholes optional, and that's a quality-of-life improvement on par with anything else Valve are doing with this update.

This time next year, Dota 2's going to be unrecognisable. Hell, the genre is going to be unrecognisable. Imagine being the developer of another me-too MOBA right now, watching a Dota 2 custom mode blitz past your concurrent player records in a single day. You'd just stop, wouldn't you?

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Heroes of the Storm is a bit like a game of Dota 2 where you don't get any items, your abilities don't carry much power, and you spend most of your time rushing from one end of the map to another trying to secure some kind of strategic advantage before your enemy does.

Heroes of the Storm, then, is either deeply unlike Dota or exactly like playing solo ranked as a support.

That's a joke, but I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between the two games over the last week. Reviewing Heroes meant playing a lot of it, but I haven't stopped playing simply because that process is now over. I enjoy it, both as a way to play with friends who would never otherwise touch a game like this and as a competitive challenge in its own right. It's less challenging than Dota 2, to be sure—and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that this was part of its appeal—but Heroes of the Storm is not without a few lessons to impart.

In particular, I think it does a very good job of emphasising the importance of strategic movement. In a lot of Dota 2 matches, the lanes are 'sticky'. Players really don't want to leave them behind to secure something else. Lanes are where gold and experience come from. It's where the enemies you've come to expect reside. Everything else can seem dangerous, unpredictable, inefficient. The attitude most common to Dota 2 pub players is 'let me get some farm and then I'll help'; this goes hand in hand with 'I'd love it if this laning phase lasted forty minutes, thanks.'

Heroes of the Storm matches begin at around the same point that the laning phase normally starts to break down. Power-wise, it feels like controlling a level 4 or 5 hero: you have all of your abilities, and but none of them are operating at the top level yet. There are also things you need to achieve beyond farming creeps and you should be making a plan to achieve them right away.

The sense that the lanes don't matter is sometimes misinterpreted as 'the game doesn't matter' and I suspect that this is related to a Dota player's tendency to over value their time in lane. Unless you're a hard carry, you should be moving. You should be the ones changing it up, not allowing your opponent to drag you around the map on their terms. Even if you are playing a hard carry, knowing where to be to maximise your gold-per-minute is your most important skill: and the answer isn't always 'tucked away on the safelane.'

Heroes of the Storm is a refreshing way to shake yourself out of that mindset. Not only does it feel guiltily liberating to be able to teamfight from the first minute of the game, it also encourages you to return to Dota 2 with a more open mind about where you can make plays and when. This is particularly true for support players, where the difference between 'competent' and 'good' is pretty much 'do they have an impact beyond the lane we put them in.'

Put it this way: there's no better way to boost morale in a solo ranked Dota 2 match as a support than by successfully smoke-ganking mid. The moment their mid is calling you a tryhard is the moment you have done your job. At its best, Heroes of the Storm is pretty much 'ganking mid, the game': a series of dramatic rotations enabled by smaller maps and an increased emphasis on securing map objectives.

This has got me thinking about the relationship that other post-Dota games have with the original. It says something about the genre, I think, that the quality of life for support players tends to be either a little or a lot higher in other games. This first occurred to me in Smite, where the supports I enjoy are beefy front-line initiators as well as the guys who stick down the wards—a vision of a parallel universe where Magnus was a viable position five. In Heroes, it struck me the moment I realised I didn't need to babysit anybody.

The support role is a good example of Dota's organic, community-driven growth. The role sits outside of most of the systems that are used to measure success in the game. Neither kills, items, gold or experience mark out a good support performance from a bad one (although they help.) Supports triumph or fail based on their ability to engineer an overall victory, often sacrificing their own personal gains so that somebody else can get ahead. The characters that can fill this role are the ones that need less gold, experience and so on. Therefore, they're the ones that engage less with the basic economics of a Dota match. The techniques that support players learn are often strange and unintuitive for exactly this reason: in a game that is basically about creating the most powerful character over time, they actively avoid doing so.

Other games bring the support role more in line with the themes and goals of the game as a whole. They're able to do this because of simpler and more proscriptive overall designs, and this in turn reduces the potential for the community to invent something truly new—to reinvent what support means on their own terms. It's this potential for creativity that enshrines Dota 2 at the top of the genre, for me, but I've come to appreciate the way that playing newer games can enhance your understanding when you return to the motherland. Rather than write off Heroes as a 'lesser Dota', then, see it as 'single-focus Dota': a way to quickly encounter specific strategic concepts that will benefit you in the long run.

That it's also a lot easier is a welcome bonus.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

One of my favourite memories of The International 2013 was the phenomenon of the hidden Valve developer. Back then, the company seemed to regard the event as a cross between a holiday and a giant hobby project. Aside from the staff of Benaroya Hall itself—most of whom looked by turns delighted and baffled by what their concert venue was being used for—there were very few contractors involved in the running of the show. Valve employees swarmed in from Bellevue and picked up any jobs that weren't covered by venue staff or the external team of casters and analysts.

This was also the last year that there was a voice actor signing booth. It was popular, and I knew that a couple of the guys organising the queue worked at Valve. It's not the kind of thing you'd notice if you weren't already aware: just a group of dudes making sure that nobody skipped to the front of the line. Fans came up, got their stuff signed, and had their pass scanned for a chance at special in-game items. Nobody looked twice at the person holding the scanner, even though he happened to be the guy who wrote Half-Life.

I bring this up chiefly to highlight the way that the International has changed. 2014 was different—KeyArena, unlike Benaroya Hall, is designed to ferry large numbers of people from arena to food hall to merchandise stand and back to the arena without much external intervention. Venue staff picked up the rest. The Valve guys I recognised were either watching the show in one of the upper booths or working on the Secret Shop. It was a larger, more professional operation, as I imagine this year's will be.

I've been thinking about this in the wake of the rumour—via this Daily Dot article from Richard Lewis—that Valve plan to run the three Dota 2 Majors by itself. If you're unaware, the Majors were announced last month. They're seasonal tournaments designed to stabilise the professional Dota scene by providing players and spectators with milestone events to look forward to throughout the year, culminating in the International. The existence of the Majors suggests that Valve are interested in taking a more direct hand in steering Dota 2 as an esport. This is particularly visible in the introduction of 'trade periods', which will prevent dramatic last-minute roster shakeups for participating teams. This is better for spectators and showrunners but worse for teams, and therefore it's the kind of thing that only Valve have the power to enforce.

In the initial announcement, however, Valve made it clear that the Majors would be held around the world by third party showrunners operating on Valve's behalf—and given that Counter-Strike GO works this way, there's already precedent for this. Yet Lewis' article suggests that something has changed, and that Valve intends to move the entire thing in-house.

As Lewis notes, this could have significant consequences for independent tournament operators. It also, however, signifies a substantial philosophical shift on Valve's part.

It's not that Valve couldn't afford to run tournaments around the world—of course they could—but that previously, they wouldn't. The company's structure heavily discourages hiring people for a specific job or whose skills are not broadly related to game development. This is how that 'wheely-desk' thing is made to operate: everybody at Valve can, ostensibly, wheel their desk over to a different project and arrive with enough skills and experience to make themselves useful. It's not a system that easily accepts the addition of a whole new discipline or skillset, which is why the company's approach to support and community management has always been so spotty—hiring a dedicated crew for one or the other goes against this basic philosophy.

The reason Dota 2's writing team was looking after a queue at TI3 was partly because it was fun, but also because that's the only way that role can be filled within Valve's current structure. It seems unlikely that said team is now planning to spend their time running esports events around the world.

This means that Valve are either planning to outsource the running of the Majors (in which case it'd make sense to contract a third party that already does so, and Lewis' sources are wrong) or they're hiring an events management team. Unless they find a bunch of event managers who are also programmers and concept artists, this seems like a big leap for them to take.

For that reason, I'm taking the rumour with a pinch of salt. I'm not even particularly sure that it's necessary for Valve to run the Majors in order for them to have the desired effect: the professional Dota community will fall in line around the new events regardless of who is taking tickets on the door on the day. Nobody is going to opt-out of the new roster formation system if it means losing a shot at the International. If Valve really are running the show themselves from now on, then, it's a change driven by something other than practical necessity—one that implies that the company's perception of itself is changing. That, in and of itself, is just as exciting as a new set of Dota events. What's next? A Riot-style community management team?

Wait, never mind. That'll never happen.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Last weekend I spent almost exactly two and a half hours in the International Open Qualifiers. I wrote beforehand that I'd have been delighted to get through the first round, and technically that's what happened. Technically. As it happened, our first round opponent didn't show up and we waited, waited, waited for the game that'd determine our next match to finish. It started late and ran long, meaning that we were sat on Skype for almost two hours building KSP rockets and tinkering with Invisible, Inc. Eventually, we got to play. Then, soundly outmatched, we lost in under half an hour.

I'd hoped to be able to roll into this week's column with a better story than that, but that's more or less the extent of it. We didn't acquit ourselves terribly, but it turns out that if you lose all three lanes and they have a draft that can teamfight early and push then it's pretty hard to fight your way back into the game.

We were disappointed but neither particularly surprised nor particularly disheartened. We had some very specific shot-calling and strategic problems to solve, but we understood them and they seemed solvable. A similarly positive line of thought was this: that we'd lost but understood why, knew that our opponents had much more experience of the game than us but could also see the road from where we are to where they are. And so on. There's comfort in seeing your failure in these granular terms, in picking out the little things that went well and appreciating the skill it took to make other things go so badly.

That's the note we ended on. Since then, I've been thinking about a lot. I've started to suspect that, in reality, that sense of a linear course between you and a superior opponent is actually pretty misleading.

For one thing, your ability to parse why an opponent has been successful is very much grounded in your own experience of the game—in the sorts of things you value, and therefore in your own conception of how you win. When you watch somebody play well and think 'I could do that', you're probably focusing on the aspects of their play that you already understand—i.e, exactly the stuff you don't need to learn.

That's a pretty disheartening thing to realise, particularly because it means that raw practice isn't a catch-all solution to an experience deficit. It's not enough to dump time into the game: you have to learn to invest that time into the right places. With that in mind, then, it's useful to identify the way in which the nature of skill changes as players become more experienced. Not 'improved'—changed.

I found this chart, by Redditor Ave-Nar, pretty interesting. Here's the original thread. It illustrates the changes in hero win rates both across different patches and across multiple skill levels—normal, high and very high in this case. There are some really interesting patterns, and these patterns tell us not just about the heroes themselves but how they relate to player skill.

Take, for example, Necrophos in 6.82 and Omniknight in 6.84. Both show a high winrate that declines linearly as you progress from normal to very high—a downwards diagonal slant. Although they are played in different positions, both heroes also have a similar impact on the game (tremendous teamfight sustain and laning presence) and are, crucially, straightforward to play. An Omniknight only needs to press R at the right time to completely tip a pub-level teamfight where half of the players have locked physical damage carries. A sub-par Necrophos can get away with spamming Q and using R to steal everybody's kills—the fact that he is also healing his allies and extending enemy respawn times as he does it is a bonus that the normal skill-level player doesn't really need to think about too much.

As a result, winrate declines with skill—because better players know how to work or counterpick both of these heroes, and neither of them have very many options when they've been outmaneuvered or outplayed. That linear decline demonstrates something basic: that as players get better, they get better at denying the enemy an easy way to win.

Contrast with Undying in 6.84. His pattern is similar to Troll Warlord in 6.83—lowest winrate in normal skill, highest in high skill and then a dip down again in very high skill. This inverted 'check' shape is really interesting. Undying in particular is a hero that requires a bit of expertise to use properly. You need to know how to gauge the impact of stolen strength on an enemy. You need to understand how to position a tombstone, and particularly how the many recent changes interact with his skillset—I still encounter people trying to counterpick Undying with Bristleback who look surprised when the quills do nothing to the zombies. In short, you don't need to be a great player to use Undying effectively but you need a fundamental understanding of how Dota works and how it has changed over time.

You also need to understand drafting, to a degree. You need to be able to both pick a partner for Undying and know where to lane him to do the most damage to the enemy's laning phase. All of this is what signifies a high skill player—and explains why Undying's winrate takes a huge leap between the two brackets.

Then, in very high, he falls off. With good reason—the best players can do all of the above and understand that their opponent is also doing all of the above. If an Undying pick is likely, a very good player will have planned for it. The process of getting better at Dota—as with other competitive games—is one of gradually transitioning from a focus on you to a focus on them.

Put it another way: as skill increases, player aspirations change. This is a generalisation, but the trend is for lower-level players to enter a game with a plan that they intend to execute. Land a lot of Pudge hooks. Play Void—whatever it is. They understand this plan in and of itself, they understand the hero and the items they need, but the plan doesn't take into account the enemy. Thing is, the enemy isn't thinking about them either. Two self-focused plans smack into one another and 50% of the time yours comes out on top.

Then comes outdrafting, whether by directly countering picks or simply by playing the meta. This involves a better understanding of the game and some sense of what the enemy's strategy might be, but it's still ultimately a series of decisions that are focused on the self. The composition of most pub drafts is, I think, the product of these two forces acting against each other: someone vanity picks, so somebody does an obvious counter-pick, and so on, where actual team-wide synergy is a rarity.

Improvement, then, is a matter of moving steadily away from understanding what you want to do—or what you might be able to do—and towards what your opponent wants to do. Towards figuring out what their dream looks like, and breaking it. It's never that simple, of course—if I understood everything that went into making that work, I wouldn't be shit at Dota. But thinking along these lines is useful because it gives you the shape of a solution if not the steps to get there: getting there is, after all, is a matter of time. It's not enough to look at an opponent and think 'that could be me'. When you have that extra experience, you don't want to want to be them. You want to look at the way they play and see all of the holes.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

You know who's fun at the moment? Beastmaster. Back when I started to take five-man Dota seriously I played him a lot—he was one of my first dedicated solo offlaners. The pushing power. The free ward. The versatile ult. The way he sometimes says 'who's stool is this?' while moving, suggesting that at least one Dota hero spends a certain amount of time shitting in the woods (looking at you, Ursa.)

I fondly refer to him as 'Beefmaster', and he is one of two heroes—the other being Axe—that I have ever committed to fully roleplaying during a solo ranked game of Dota. 'WHO KILLED MY PIG', I'd bellow in all-chat. 'I'M COMING FOR YOU.'

He's great in 6.84, one of my favourite characters to play in the era of level one bounty rune fights. His buffed base damage isn't as absurdly high as Treant Protector, but he's faster and I've found that most players haven't quite internalised just how hard he hits. Encounter a lone enemy moving to secure a bounty rune and you've probably just got first blood. Get the rune too and there's your level 2, your brown boots, and an Orb of Venom. After that, the offlane is a party.

I bring this up because Beastmaster, like Axe and Rubick, is one of my silly heroes. Which isn't to say that these aren't impactful characters, but that I'm noisier when I'm playing them than at any other time. After two thousand hours I'm still amused by the fact that Beastmaster's ult amounts to yelling really loud, and I remain incapable of doing it without trying to reflect some of that bravado. I mean, come on. The guy yells so loud it stuns couriers.

I blink, I ult, and I rely on the fact that I've just bellowed 'BOO' or 'NO' or 'OI' over Skype to let my teammates know that, er, I've probably started a teamfight. This is fine, I think, in the context of a pub game with friends. One important aspect of Dota, something that sits aside from its competitive nature, is the sense in which it is a performance you put on for your friends. It's not just about stomping noobs, or at least it shouldn't be. Dota is also entertainment and a lot of that entertainment is provided by the people you play with.

Not everybody plays that way, of course, but I suspect everybody knows somebody who does. This isn't just limited to the trench: old-Na'Vi were as well known for their sense of style as their ability to win games. There is a whole strata of pro players—Dendi, SingSing, N0tail, AdmiralBulldog, among others—who are entertaining showmen as well as skilled players. They enter into the spirit of the game when it's appropriate.

Yelling along with Beastmaster was something I started doing without really thinking about it—I was having fun, and expressed that in the way I acted. Thinking about it recently, however, I realised that this drive to put on a show affected the way I played in more substantial ways.

I realised that there are certain types of play that I'd avoid declaring to my team before I did them: flashy initiations and silly gambits that I'd launch into without warning to avoid spoiling the surprise. I played not only to win, but for the gratification of delivering a first blood or a multi-kill that nobody else on my side expected. I'd attempt to secretly build Dagons during matches that we were already winning. Sometimes, the instinct to say 'hey guys—watch this' would lose games that we were already winning.

It sounds like the dumbest thing in the world, and it probably is—but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I wasn't alone. This attitude is fairly common in Dota. It determines a lot about which heroes are popular. Everybody wants to be seen landing the star Pudge hooks. Everybody wants to be the Faceless Void that gets the perfect five-man Chronosphere and subsequent rampage. Being seen to succeed is as important, for many, as succeeding.

In identifying this, I identified a gap in the way my team communicated with each other. I've always taken communication a lot more seriously when playing 'properly'—by which I mean team ranked matchmaking, a little JoinDota League, and the forthcoming TI5 Open Qualifiers (we're doomed)—but I'd not really solved the problem of the 'surprise play'. It was a behaviour pattern that both myself, our midlaner and our carry shared. We'd communicate openly until it became more fun not to.

Not intentionally, of course. This is just another unexamined instinct, something you pick up during the thousands of hours it takes to get semi-competent at Dota and that, if you don't face it down directly, can ultimately hold you back.

The solution was to introduce a really simple rule for communication in games that matter: talk constantly about the match. Offer as close to a running commentary as you can. Talk about how your farm is going. Talk about what the enemy supports are doing, how their midlaner is doing. When you see an opening for a play, say something—even if it ruins the 'surprise'.

I've found it helpful to temper this by asking teammates to avoid talking about non-match-related topics (including Dota more broadly) until the game is over. This also means no more Beastmaster-yelling—but we've got random pub matches for that. Organised Dota is about teamwork, and teamwork means communicating continually and openly about your experience of the game.

It also means being selfless. This is an angle I keep coming back to, it seems: that learning to play Dota better often means learning to dial back your own selfish instincts. Anybody who has ever stood on a stage knows that it takes a certain amount of ego to get there, even if the point of that ego is the performance you subsequently deliver to others. Dota 2 is a stage, too, sometimes, but your teammates aren't your audience. They're up there with you. They're not the people you need to impress. And if you're about to do something brave or stupid they should probably know.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Every International Compendium has been more about hats than the one that preceded it. When the concept made its debut in 2013, it was called the Interactive Compendium. It was specifically designed to allow fans of the competitive scene to involve themselves more actively in the International tournament. Exclusive cosmetics were, I suspect, intended as a bonus feature rather than the main selling point.

That's not the way they were received, of course. This was the peak of online trading and resale of Dota items, and the random distribution of rewards from the original Compendium caused a lot of community unrest. If you were unlucky and got the Abaddon mace, your Compendium purchase was worth less than that of somebody who got the Pudge hook or Kunkka sword. This might not have mattered so much if the majority of players had seen the Compendium's match prediction and sticker collection minigames as the main reason to invest in one, but that wasn't so. 2013 was the year we (and Valve) learned that cosmetics trump every other incentive to spend money on Dota, every time. You can draw a direct line from that learning to the concerns about the influence of cosmetics on the pro scene raised earlier this year.

I'm not convinced that the ascendancy of the special hat is a terrible thing for Dota. I think it simply 'is'. It's easy to point out all of the ways that spending money on internet hats is irrational, but that irrationality is now the norm. 2014's Compendium introduced many more Immortals, with direct incentives to spend to collect 'em all. It also allowed players to vote on aspects of the game completely detached from the tournament it supports, like voice packs and future Arcana items. Valve's second pass at the Compendium ditched the 'interactive' label and confirmed that it had become a community event for Dota as a whole, not just a companion to the International.

I'm enjoying the new Compendium on that basis. I think it's the best magical internet hat book that Valve have produced to date. The challenge system is a far smarter integration of optional objectives into regular Dota than Manifold Paradox was. The new Immortals are all great, and I'm excited for sets two and three. The rapid delivery of stretch goals so far suggests that Valve have been busy getting all of this stuff done in advance, which is exactly what they should have done last year. They've learned a lot of good lessons from 2014.

Yet I have no idea how this Compendium will tie in to the International, beyond the prediction minigames that have been a factor in every Compendium to date. Should we expect another round of player trading cards? How about Compendium matches—remember when you queue for games that challenged you to win with a draft that had been used in the pro scene that week? Has interest waned in item sets and reward systems that directly benefit professional players? Do Valve now trust that 'Compendium as item store' will trump 'Compendium as esports event' when it comes to inflating the International's prize pool?

Getting more people to tune into pro games clearly isn't the goal, here: selling more Compendiums is. Once, those two ideas weren't so separate. They now are, and I suspect the reason—ironically—is to ensure that the International prize pool gets bigger every year. If a bigger prize pool means a higher profile tournament and more eyes on competitive Dota, then it's all for the good—right?

According to the data on Cyborgmatt's prize tracker, this year's prize pool is about a million dollars ahead of where it was this time last year. Almost all of that difference occurred on the first day of sale, when all you got for your money was a friendly armadillo and the promise of more treasures to come (a sentence, incidentally, that I never thought I'd write.) On day two, the first Immortals were released, which helped 2015 to maintain its huge sales lead a little longer than it might otherwise have done—but not enough to prevent it from dipping below 2014 on day four.

It looks like a safe bet that this year's prize pool will top last year's $11m, but I expect that it'll be a far more incremental increase than the one from 2013 to 2014. Growth will spike when the next sets of Immortals come out (which is, I suspect, why there are three sets) and then return to 2014 levels. In 2014, the release of the Immortal items on day 22 caused sales to jump by around $600k. Similar spikes are possible this year, but, I'd argue, less likely: if you're not going to put down cash for the hats that are already on the table, I doubt you'll put down cash for the next set to come (another sentence I never thought I'd write.)

In this regard, the level 175 Enigma item makes for an interesting case. It came out six days into the 2015 Compendium drive, accompanied by a comic—the sort of thing Valve normally reserves for new heroes or Immortals. Yet its impact on sales has been, so far, muted— arresting the huge drop-off in daily revenue, but not causing it to spike in any immediate way. Given that getting a Compendium to level 175 currently involves spending upwards of $77 ($27 for the level 50 bundle plus five lots of 24-level booster packs at $10 each), it's highly possible that this exceeds the upper limit of what people are willing to spend for a cosmetic. The suggestion is that there's a saturation point for interest in Dota hats, and that we might finally have found it. And if there's only so much that the average player is willing to shell out, then there's only so much the International can grow when the thrust of the fundraising effort is hats.

What the 2015 Compendium needs, right now, is a more diverse offering. If nothing else, it needs a way to level up without spending cash—even if it's slow. With the Challenge system tied to a separate economy (coins, which are traded for items), there's no way to think of the Compendium as anything other than a money sink with uncertain rewards. Ironically, I think its old form—that of an interactive companion to an esports tournament—can help here. A Compendium that encourages players to check out professional Dota is a Compendium that increases the sense of Dota's worth as a whole—and that sense of worth will translate into more eager investment in the Compendium itself.

There's obviously only so much that Valve can do at this stage. It's May—the qualifiers are a way off, the International itself even more so. Yet they had the option to foreground esports in the initial pitch for this year's Compendium and chose not to do so. I'd argue that no matter the fundraising potential of the hats themselves, encouraging players to care about the tournament they're funding is just as important.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

I've been playing Dota 2 for just under three years. In that time, I've seen a few dozen new heroes. I've seen multiple patches turn the meta upside down and force me to reconsider my (ever-fledgling) understanding of this vastly complicated game.

Even so, I've started to anticipate certain kinds of change. Hero rebalances and redesigns are expected, when you play a game like this. Even the addition of crazy new Aghanim's Scepter upgrades has become familiar—a theme of the last few patches, something that is exciting every time it happens but not, at this point, a surprise.

It doesn't take much for a Dota 2 patch to feel like a big deal—new heroes reliably achieve that. It does, however, take something really different for a patch to feel like the start of a new era. Every now and then, Icefrog does something to the game that makes people say 'is this even Dota'. That's how I felt when 6.82 dared to change the map. I didn't expect 6.84 to meet—or even exceed—change of that magnitude, and yet it has.

A lot of this is down to the new items. It's funny—new heroes form the most obvious milestones in the game's history, but items are far less common and a far bigger deal. A new character squeezes into the roster, upsetting some strategies and galvanizing others. New items—let alone nine of them, with substantial changes to existing ones—affect every character and every player. Learning a new hero, no matter how different, is a known quantity. Incorporating new concepts into every single hero you play is something else entirely.

The Dota community is currently dealing with the ramifications of the Lotus Orb, an item that allows you to reflect single-target spells back at their caster. This adds a new dimension to what could be described as Dota 2's substantial 'crazy shit' component: a million new ways for already-complex abilities to interact with one another. Here, via the Dota 2 subreddit, is Tiny's Toss being reflected. Here, also, is Doom dooming Doom. Here are five Snipers sending off 6.83 in the best way possible.

This is highly visible Crazy Shit; it makes for good gifs. Less visible are 6.84's fundamental changes to core Dota 2 concepts. In the era of midgame items that can be 'consumed' to gain a permanent buff reflecting some of their benefits, being 'six slotted' doesn't mean what it used to. This is also the era of farm being given to a character—Alchemist—so he can produce Aghanim's Scepters for other players, a substantial expansion of what it might mean to be a support in a Dota match.

On top of that, you've got the introduction of magical lifesteal and cooldown reduction, concepts that have never been part of Dota despite featuring in more or less every MOBA to follow after it. Figuring out the long-term ramifications of these changes will take months or more: we should expect surprising ideas to fall out of 6.84 for a long time to come.

I've seen some cynicism, in comments and on Reddit. 'We League now'. 'Is this even Dota'. That kind of thing—it happens every time, and its intensity this week simply mirrors the unusual number of new ideas in this patch.

I want to argue that this very much is Dota. In my mind, the process that is about to begin in earnest—a massive, community-wide adaptation to new ideas, new situations and new interactions—is the exact thing that defines the game. Other games might aim for a stable set of game mechanics that sustain entertaining competition in perpetuity, but not this one. Dota isn't stability. Dota isn't balance. Dota is chaos.

Back in January, I wrote an article about why I don't see Dota as a MOBA. In it, I argued that business models have a substantial effect on the type of experience that a game offers. I still believe this: your time with a game isn't just defined by what happens in a match. It's defined by the structure that surrounds that match, what you're asked to pay for and what you aspire to achieve with every game.

In that regard, Dota and League (and all of the games that imitated League) are very different. Consider how important account progression is in the latter: a high-level Summoner account represent months or years of effort, collection, and progression. It's equivalent to a high-level set of MMO characters, and includes a lot of the same ideas: a long-term commitment represented by cooler stuff and fatter, healthier XP bars.

Dota doesn't work like that. At all. You might collect cosmetics, I suppose, but your account level is one of the game's most meaningless numbers. Your time with the game is vaguely represented by your MMR, but that's hardly consistent from player to player. Dota has no MMO-style progression system, and as such it's a vastly different proposition. It's not a MOBA; it's Dota. This doesn't mean that either type of game is better than the other. It means that they offer very different things, and have different obligations to their players. Which one you prefer is a matter of taste.

That's what I argued back in January. The comments were a mixed bunch. A lot of people—hilariously—sent me the Wikipedia list of MOBAs, as if the terminology we use was determined by Wikipedia and not the other way around. Some people simply don't believe that business models influence game design: I'm more sympathetic to that view, even if I disagree with it.

Here's the thing, though: to me, Dota 2 is defined by its ability to undergo vast, sometimes fundamental changes. A Dota 2 match might only last an hour, but the (meta)game of Dota takes years and its most dramatic moments come when Icefrog does something totally game-changing. This isn't just a concern for pro teams. Everybody experiences it. It's what it means to be a Dota player.

Dota is never more Dota than when one complicated and probably broken game mechanic combines with another complicated and probably broken game mechanic to create a totally unexpected outcome. And it's Dota's business model—first free and community-curated, as a mod, then totally free as a professionally-developed game—that allows it to continue to be this way. It requires a development philosophy that values unexpected combinations of game mechanics, and a business model that keeps player investment and game design separate.

Chaos is the soul of Dota, but chaos is undesirable when your game is also a service. XP bars and microtransactions represent an investment of player time and money, and players expect that investment to be protected by a game's developers. MOBAs need to be balanced and fair and reliable as a courtesy to their long-term players.

Dota doesn't.

That's why there's nothing like it, and the 6.84 update symbolises that perfectly. The reward for your years-long involvement with this game isn't measured in progression bars or an expanding roster of characters: it's measured in the number of times you've looked at the patch notes and thought 'this changes everything.' Dota isn't just three lanes and ten players. Dota is crazy shit.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

I just played a sixty-minute solo ranked game of Dota 2. We were winning for a long time. Then, as happens often, we stopped winning—they had Sniper, Veno, and Techies, and fighting uphill was a pain in the ass. Around the fifty-minute mark, we killed Roshan with the intention of giving the Aegis to our Slark. Then, our Axe took it. Then, Axe destroyed the sentry wards that Necrophos had dropped so that I could carry them. Then, Axe blinked blind into their base, died to mines, came back to life, and died again without buyback. They pushed. We couldn't defend. The game ended.

Axe threw, I think, because he was bored and kind of a dick. The latter is a tough fix; the former indicates a problem worth exploring.

Bored players are a bigger problem in this patch than they have been before. This is the era of game-prolonging comeback mechanics, Sniper, and pub teams that can't fight uphill. It won't last forever. There will come a time—hopefully soon—when regular Dota gets faster and snappier. I imagine Valve and IceFrog are looking towards the fifth International with a view to ensuring that matches don't run long and cause the whole thing to overrun (while also, y'know, putting the idea of an eight minute victory to rest.)

Regardless, regular Dota will always be a long, demanding game. I've internalised that side of it, as have most players. When you play, you are committing to a game that is likely to last between thirty and ninety minutes and that you're not allowed to quit. Back when I taught the rest of the PCG team to play, this was one of those things that I had to learn to see from their perspective: the notion of a game that you're not allowed to stop playing is totally alien to most people.

I also play a decent amount of Smite and lately I've been playing Infinite Crisis for review. Both of these games—as with the majority of MOBAs that followed the League model—provide surrender options and a variety of game modes, including those that result in shorter matches (single lane variants, and so on.)

For the majority of new players, the length of a Dota match in is an obstacle in the way of enjoyment. Developers of new MOBAs treat it as a problem to be solved.

For the majority of Dota players, however, it isn't a problem. It's part of what makes Dota what it is. That the game is demanding and that it asks a lot from you is a bridge you cross over on the way to getting more out of it than you'll get out of other games—and a lot of players are happy to make that journey. Its complex mechanics require room to breathe, and that 'room' is provided by having long matches. As a player, you're asked to respect that. If you don't respect that, you move on to something else.

The issue with this approach is that it divides players up along binary lines. The reality isn't really like that. Everybody who plays the game—even those who play it a lot—has a different amount of time and patience. Some are more willing to commit energy in the lategame than others. Some will play until it starts to get boring or hard, then throw or abandon in order to move onto the next one. This might be the wrong attitude, but it's sustainable for the players who engage in it. That they are sacrificing the enjoyment of nine other people in order to get their way is only a problem if they agree that it's a problem, and from their perspective it probably isn't (see also: 'dicks'.)

The issue with a purist approach to Dota, then, is that it doesn't account for people who play but don't care about spoiling the experience of others if it suits them. In an ideal world, people who didn't like playing Dota 'properly' would get bored with the game and stop playing: in reality, they show up as that guy who costs you a handful of MMR points every now and then. Even if most players never do this, even if some players only do it once and then quit the game forever, enough people play that it will reliably crop up as a problem for those that stick around.

With that in mind, then, I've started to see the value of 'shortform' modes. They don't really exist in Dota at present—1v1 Solo Mid takes less time, sure, but it changes so many of the game's basic systems and victory conditions that its relationship to regular Dota is limited to a few very specific areas. All Random Deathmatch is more lightweight, but can still take a substantial amount of time.

When official custom game modes finally make their debut, I hope that they'll play a role in offering alternatives that help to draw the throw-happy player away from regular matchmaking. Valve could do this themselves, of course—a 2v2 or 3v3 mode on a single lane would be interesting—but it's far more likely that they'll leave it to the community to build. And, honestly, I think it'd be a success for Dota as a whole if somebody does.

While there are many things about the regular MOBA model that I hope stay far away from Dota 2, the provision of more accessible ways to play is a proven good. It's a rare example of a community-dividing design decision that actually divides the community in the right way: not between serious and casual, but between 'willing to play for twenty minutes' and 'willing to play to the end'. I'd rather players declare the limits of their attention span when they choose a game mode, not when they throw at the end of a long match.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

The very first thing I wrote about Dota 2 was this article, originally posted to a blog and then republished on the Tumblr that preceded this column (before being republished, again, about a year ago. It's been around the houses.) In it, I describe the thing that drew me into Dota 2 in the first place: what I saw then as a 'performance-style structure' that recreated in an online game the kinds of experiences that I valued when I did a lot of live comedy. Dota was special to me from the start because I felt like each match—each 'performance'—taught me something about myself and the people I was playing with.

My perspective on the game has changed since then. What you're reading now, as it happens, is the 52nd weekly column I've written about Dota—a year of writing, representing almost three years of thinking too hard about wizards. Temporal neatness is as good a reason as any to explain the way that thinking has shifted.

If I started out thinking of Dota 2 as a complicated videogame and moved on to thinking of it as a form of performance, I now think of it almost exclusively as a sport. Much of what I used to understand as creative or social challenges—getting five people to work in harmony with one another, experimenting with the opportunities afforded by the hero pool—I now think of in terms of organised competition and self-improvement. Dota 2 isn't a toybox any more: it's a test. It's a wall to be climbed, an encounter with a system that demands respect and doesn't owe you anything.

There's something valuable about this transition, I think. The vast majority of games, even multiplayer games, promise the same sorts of experience: here is a challenge designed to be overcome. Here is how you level up; here is your reward for doing so. Here is entertainment, functionally: here is entertainment that, one way or another, is designed to make you feel good. Even when I started to perceive Dota in terms of performance I was still thinking about it as an entertainment product, albeit one where the players were collectively responsible for creating that entertainment for themselves.

While playing the game is entertaining, that's no longer the reason I do it. I play Dota to get better at Dota: to learn something, alone or with my friends, and to apply that understanding over and over again in a dozen different configurations. Play is practice, and practice is both gratifying and utterly, mood-crushingly frustrating. It's a fundamentally different approach to games than what is considered to be 'mainstream' or 'normal'. It's not even 'hardcore', because that as often as not translates to 'person who plays every game that comes out'. This is different: 'person that plays a game even when it isn't fun because they're getting something else out of it'.

I was thinking about this in a different sense, a couple of weeks ago, shortly after the release of Bloodborne on the PS4 (a crying shame that it's not coming to PC.) The backlash to the widespread acclaim for the game concerned its inaccessibility, challenging the ease with which critics praised Bloodborne for being punishing, repetitive, and occasionally unfair. Some of these arguments centred on the notion of the 'average' gamer, alienated from their hobby by a hardcore contingent who encouraged the creation of games that were too hard for others to enjoy. 'It's all well and good that you enjoy this', these arguments ran. 'But what about the guy on the street?'

I was the guy on the street when I started playing Dota 2—somebody whose critical interest in games was based on late-noughties singleplayer experiences with lofty cinematic or literary ambitions (BioShock, Mass Effect, GTA IV) and whose highest competitive achievements amounted to bronze-level StarCraft II and being terrible at Street Fighter. I was completely and abidingly average, and then I encountered Dota, and Dota taught me that committing myself to a single, very difficult game could teach me things—and deliver a sense of satisfaction—that I could only get by treating the game as a sport, a challenge to be personally overcome. There is a direct line from that change in mindset to my subsequent enthusiasm for Bloodborne. Dota opened up pathways in my brain.

The sting in the tail is that I am still completely and abidingly average, and not just in the sense that I'm a bit shit at Dota. Hundreds of thousands of people value challenge in just the same way that I now do. Many of them are playing League or Dota right now. The journey won't be the same one, in each case, but the pattern remains: the 'average' player of games values challenge, values being asked to get better at something, values having to work for something. This is true regardless of age, gender, or level of experience: these are the most popular videogames in the world for a reason.

There's a lot about my time with Dota that has made me question my place in the gaming community. It's a toxic environment, often, and there have been points where it really does feel just like being a rat fighting other rats for a go on the 'treat' button. Despite this the mass appeal of serious competition—of games as sports, collectively-owned hobbies that you engage in because they test you—gives me faith in gaming as a whole.

Wanting to get better at something is a very basic and very human drive, one that is diminished whenever somebody argues that the 'average' player just wants to be entertained. The great thing about taking a game seriously is that it proves that attitude wrong: not just in terms of what it says about the games industry, but in terms of what it says about people. People, it turns out, are very good at learning and working hard and, from time to time, at cooperating. Dota is no longer important to me because it represents a performance of personal traits: it's important to me because it represents a performance of these universal ones.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Last night marked the end of a long run of pretty bad Dota. I'd felt my enthusiasm ebb before, but never this substantially, and this is was the first time in the history of my almost-three-year-old hobby that I've considered taking an extended break. The main problems were thus: I wasn't winning very much, I didn't like how long games seemed to always run, and I felt like I was being more of a dick than usual.

The latter is the biggest problem. I don't valorise extreme 'saltiness'—I think it's a weakness, as I've written a bunch of times before—but I can't deny that I get frustrated with myself and with others. A little salt, I think, is fine. It's actually a pretty good analogy, as these things go—salt provides both flavour and, when things are icy, necessary friction. Aggression does the same thing. But too much of the former will kill you, and too much of the latter will kill your enthusiasm for the game—and your friends' enthusiasm for you, potentially.

Facing rising frustration in Dota, it was easy for me to commit more time to games I find less stressful—Destiny, Pillars of Eternity, Bloodborne, Smite. Eventually, that time commitment looked like it might threaten Dota's place in my favourites list. I then realised what I always tend to realise, in these moments: that when you're falling out of love with the game, you need to actively make a change. You need to figure out a way to make Dota fun again. You can't just wait for the salt to go away: you need to think about it.

Here's what I thought about.

Don't just play because you think you have to

Most of my Dota games start with someone asking me if I want to play Dota, which leads to playing when (a) I'd rather be doing something else and (b) I'm basically unready to do anything competitive. I play regardless because of the feeling that time not spent playing Dota is time that I'm secretly wasting. Does everybody feel that way about Dota? I assume so.

Rather than resisting the urge to say yes—and consequently playing fewer games—I find it helps to be the person pulling the stack together. If I'm choosing to play, it generally means that I feel ready to do so. What 'ready' means will change from person to person. For me, it's a case of having eaten and maybe gotten some sleep and generally feeling focused and like I might actually win this time. Emphasis on 'might'.

Actively choosing to play also means that I'm more accepting of the notion that the game might not go well. I know what I'm getting myself into, and one of my priorities is to feel good about the game afterwards: while that hopefully means winning the game, it definitely means not being a prick to people. If you go in with the right attitude, I find it's easier to come out with that attitude intact.

Resist the spiral of sadness (and saltiness)

Learning to pick up and try again after a loss is important when you play a lot of best-of-threes, but that's not the case for the majority of people who play Dota. Learning to recognise when you're on a losing streak and quit is important too: continuing to tilt is only going to make you feel worse. The perfect time to find something else to do is when playing more Dota is going to make you like Dota less.

This goes the other way. Last night, when I felt like I'd finally broken out of this kind of downward spiral, I only played a single game. I went 28/6/12 with an offlane Windranger: 'that'll do', I thought afterwards. 'That'll do for tonight'. I spent the rest of the evening clearing out a dungeon in Pillars of Eternity and killing a boss in Bloodborne. Because I ended on a high, my positive Dota experience retained its integrity for a little longer.

This isn't viable all of the time. You need to play more to get good, so bailing after your first match of the night isn't going to work in the long run. But it can be great for your salt levels: I finished that match feeling pretty good about the game, about myself, and about the people I was playing with, and that feeling hasn't abated yet.

Determine whether you need to change things up, or double down

One of my worst habits is that I rarely play the same hero twice even if I'm doing well. I know players who are the opposite: who will keep banging their head against the same wall even if it's never going to yield. Both approaches have problems, particularly when the game is becoming more intensely frustrating. I find myself playing characters and roles that I'm unfamiliar with, getting angry at myself for underperforming and second-guessing my teammates who find themselves dropping into the role I'd usually occupy. Similarly, getting counter-picked for the Nth time in a row because you only want to play Storm Spirit is going to make you angry.

In my case, I've found it helpful to pick a handful of characters and stick to them: a mixture of flavours of the month and old favourites that I reliably enjoy. By suspending the drive to 'learn' a new hero by leaping from one to another with every game, I'm playing a lot better. Playing a lot better, on the whole, is less stressful and leads to a more positive outlook.

The solution may go the other way for others: there are times when clicking the 'random' button opens up doorways and makes the game fresh again. Take a look at your situation, your skill level, and what it is that is making you angry about the game—then either mix things up or commit as appropriate.

Don't over-analyse

If there's a theme emerging here, it's this: that you can functionally take a 'break' from Dota by giving yourself a break from the most competitive parts of Dota. The people I know who have the biggest salt problems—myself included—are those who take their performance (too) seriously, and who are inclined to fix every problem they encounter by picking it apart, watching the replays, coming up with plans and data and formulae.

There's a time when that's appropriate, but I'm starting to learn that not every pub game warrants a post-game debriefing. We often think of 'salt' in terms of the frustration that manifests in-game—flaming, excuses, and so on. It's equally evident in the way you assess your own play, and that of others. It's here that the really insidious stuff creeps in, the micro-aggression that makes the game less fun for everybody. I'd be happy if I never again begin a sentence with "we just need to..." or "I was just trying to..." during yet another post-match breakdown. There are times where this works, where it makes you better. There are also plenty of times where it drags everybody's enjoyment of the game through the dirt.

It's a question of balance. Dota is distinct among competitive games for the way that it can be both extremely silly and extremely serious at even the highest levels of play: 'saltiness' and frustration arrive, I think, when you end up trending too much towards the latter half of that equation. My solution is to remind myself that it's okay to simply play for fun. That I seem to win more often when I play that way is a weird, but welcome, bonus.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

A month or so back PC Gamer took on Rock Paper Shotgun in a single Dota 2 showmatch. We lost. It was awful. The shame of it hangs over the UK office still, a historic disappointment. The story of that shame ended up as a feature in issue 277 of the UK magazine: I've been thinking back to that process, this week, following the recent update to Purge's classic Dota 2 guide.

Purge's 'Welcome To Dota, You Suck' was my introduction to the game, as it was for thousands of other players. I imagine the new version will perform the same role for the next generation. Purge is unusually good at breaking down the component parts of Dota into a format that new players have a chance of understanding. Having tried to teach the PC Gamer team from scratch, I've seen how difficult that can be.

Trying to teach somebody to play Dota (or even understand Dota) is a surefire way to learn just how much of your own knowledge you take for granted. There's a point where you simply have to accept that the only way to learn everything you need to know is to play thousands of hours of the game. This means, as a teacher, that you've got to do more than just impart knowledge: you've got to impart the will to continue playing.

You can't just help them win. You've got to help them enjoy it. You do this, I've found, by explaining Dota in a way that suits the way they already play games. Some of these explanations are more popular than others.

It's a game about not dying

This is probably the single most important thing that newcomers need to understand, but it's also the least appealing—emblematic of a broader problem with Dota's accessibility. In most competitive games, your goal and the methods you use to get there are deeply linked. In a capture-the-flag shooter, you need to shoot the guys and capture the flags to win. There's nuance beyond that, but this basic interpretation is always going to be true.

In a traditional RTS, you try to destroy the enemy base by making smart strategic decisions at both the macro- and microscale, and these decisions are usually represented by easy military analogies: tank columns, factories, mineral extractors and so on.

In Dota, your goal is to destroy the other team's base—but your method for getting there entails manipulating a complex set of economic systems. Often, the very worst thing you can do is actually try to attack their base. Hence the deep truth of 'DON'T FEED' and why 'this is a game about not feeding' is unattractive to a new player: it's counter-intuitive, it's about stuff not happening, and most people start their Dota careers getting yelled at for doing what would follow naturally in most other types of game.

While you've got to stress this idea to your newcomer friends, it can't be all you get them to do. Telling them to stay safe while you handle the game for them will leave them bored; expect them to understand the strategic nuance that goes into not fighting and they'll switch off. You've got to do better.

It's a game about plays

This is better. Where Dota clicks, it often clicks here. People like landing stuns, nukes and hooks—particularly hooks. Abilities are fun to use, teamfights are fun to win. It's fun to get kills. If your newbies start to get kills and enjoy using their abilities, they'll play more and enjoy it more.

Overindulging in this direction is how you end up with the attitude that defines pub play—kills are everything, mid is everything, Pudge is everything—but it's useful in small quantities. It's also why I believe that the best 'chaperone' characters for new players are those that allow the newbies to get the kills.

Hypothetical scenario: you're playing mid while keeping an eye on new players learning to lane in pairs in the other lanes. Against bots, probably. If you want to show off, take Storm Spirit or Shadow Fiend or whoever and show up on their lanes to get a load of kills and demonstrate what experienced Dota play looks like.

If you actually want them to keep playing, however, pick Magnus. Magnus is an awesome babysitter. As long as you can land your Reverse Polarities and Skewers, you'll be in a great position to deliver plays into the hands of the people you're trying to teach. Get them to play Sven, or Crystal Maiden, or Witch Doctor, tell them where to be, and tell them to go nuts when you give the signal. Hand them the triple kill you might have taken for yourself and you're far more likely to make Dota players out of them.

It's a game about numbers

Another great thing about the Purge guide is the way it repeatedly links individual Dota mechanics back to the game's most important theme: resource management. Plays are cool, but having bigger numbers than the other guy is how the vast majority of games are actually won.

Not all players approach games the same way and not everybody is going to be excited by Dota 2's more abstract concepts—map control, farm efficiency, that kind of thing. But there are players that are, and they are usually those that are coming to Dota from a background in strategy gaming. Emphasising these things—explaining roles in terms of farm priority rather than 'support' and 'carry', explaining game phases and so on—is how you convince these people that Dota isn't just a game about mashing out spells until one team falls over.

I'd say this is the rarer sort of newcomer, but arguably the type with the most promise. They're the ones who will more rapidly grasp that the game is as much about why you fight as how you fight.

It's a game about details, rules and exceptions, and those details, rules and exceptions are going to screw you

My mistake, when I was teaching the rest of the PCG team, was ultimately that I thought that the above would be enough to get them through a match. I figured that if they understood staying safe, momentum, game phases, farm and when to push then they'd get away with not understanding how every individual character or item works.

That isn't the case. You need to understand these things, and that takes time. An example: the PCG vs. RPS match was the first time my guys had ever encountered Shadow Shaman. Serpent Wards aren't even that complicated, as abilities go, but they immediately contradict a bunch of things that players think they know. Whether or not you should disengage from a fight when the wards go down or simply destroy them is a judgement call that requires you to understand a dozen other things that are going on in the game at that moment—and that lack of understanding can be paralyzing. Your newcomers will encounter things they don't know how to deal with, constantly, and they will be undone by them.

I enjoyed this process, when I started out—I liked that every match seemed to contain some skill interaction I'd never seen before. If I didn't enjoy that, I don't think I'd still be playing. That said, I think it's a little misleading to say 'understand the basic principles and learn as you go'—while this is practically true, it undersells just how many times you're going to lose because of something you simply hadn't encountered before.

The final and most difficult thing to do, then, is to get your newbies to enjoy losing. I fucked this up, honestly, and I am pretty sure it's the one thing that even experienced Dota players devalue. Whether people come to the game to make flashy plays or they come to it to execute game-wide strategies, there are going to be a lot of instances where that isn't enough. This can either dampen or temper enthusiasm for the game, and it's the job of would-be tutors to push that needle towards 'temper'. Otherwise your enjoyment of the game will be entirely predicated on whether or not things go well, and when things go wrong you'll be exposed to the negative feelings that lead to blaming, flaming, rage quits, and so on.

Not that there's years upon years of precedent for that, or anything.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

League of Legends has one. StarCraft II has one. Hearthstone has one. Smite has one. Seasonal ladders are a standard component of most modern competitive games, and lately I've been wondering why Dota 2 is absent from that list—particularly as Valve continue to tweak the MMR system.

I'm no fan of the way the MMR system has been implemented, nor do like the effect it's had, over time, on the Dota community. Valve's approach has always been inconsistent—or at least, they've not been transparent about their reasoning. Way back when, your matchmaking rating was hidden, the thought being that a visible rating would just lead players to obsess over it (that thought was correct). Later it was made visible and now the average MMR of each team is displayed at the start of the match, with the highest-rated players indicated in each case. Valve's slow U-turn is finally reaching its end.

I imagine we'll see the obvious problems that this has introduced shake themselves out over time—people will stop granting mid automatically to the highest-rated player, games will become less about ensuring that the enemy's best guy has a bad time—but, to me, it feels like Dota 2 has arrived at a strange middle ground. Competitive rating systems have two purposes: to ensure that players are matched with equally-skilled opponents, and to provide players with a goal—a way to gauge their improvement. Dota 2's system works reasonably well for the former, but it's terrible at the latter.

The current MMR system is visible enough to define how most people perceive their value as players, but the task of significantly altering your MMR is so monumental that it's out of reach of all but the most dedicated. Plenty of studies have been done that show that, eventually, your MMR will rise or fall appropriately—it is certainly possible to improve your rank as long as you're sufficiently dedicated and capable. That isn't in doubt, nor is the achievement of those players who have managed to significantly improve their position.

It certainly is an achievement—improving your rating by a notable amount (normally a matter of thousands of points) takes months and requires a huge investment of time. It is a marathon: grueling, unforgiving, and, a lot of the time, really unpleasant. The Dota community gets some of its best qualities from that process. It also gets a lot of its worst ones. Playing the MMR game feels a lot like wading through a mire: progress is incremental and your destination is always very far away. Also, the mire is full of dickheads. You look down; the mire is dickheads.

Personally, I see no reason why the current system couldn't work as the basis for a faster, more gratifying ladder system. In addition to improving my MMR slowly over time, I'd love the ability to play for a position within a monthly ladder, with tiers of performance—master, diamond, gold, and so on—that give you a sense of your general skill level at that time. In particular, I think being able to do this with a dedicated stack would fill in a gap between pub play and in-house leagues that Dota 2 currently desperately lacks. The best option available to beginner teams at the moment is JoinDota League, and that's both sporadic and a competitive tier above what most people will be looking for.

The great thing about time-limited ladders is that they provide a clear goal and they let you know whether you've succeeded or failed in a reasonable amount of time. That simply doesn't exist for Dota 2 at the moment: you're either in for the long haul or you're not in at all. While you could argue that Dota 2 is set aside from its competitors by this very fact—that it's Dota because there's no 'quick' option—I don't think ladders would make the game any less competitive. In fact, I think it'd make it more competitive. And—crucially—I think it'd make it friendlier.

The lie of MMR—and I've said this before—is the idea that it represents you all of the time. Your MMR is an average—that means that you will sometimes play better than your rating, and you will sometimes play worse than it. If your rating says '4000', you are not a 4K player every day, or even every game. An awful lot goes into a game of Dota, and you're only as good as you are capable of being in that moment.

The problem with the current system is that it suggests that MMR is forever: this is only true if you only play ranked, and you play it all the time. The advantage of a ladder is that it is located in time. I can say 'I was a rank 12 Hearthstone player in March last year' and that will remain true regardless of my current skill level. This encourages a bit of necessary perspective—each new ladder is proof of whether you've improved or slipped—and discourages you from obsessing over any particular rating. People still do, of course—but the system itself plays against it.

This can only be healthy for Dota 2. I'd love to see Valve make the switch—or explain, in a detailed way, what they're hoping to achieve with the current system.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

The International is less than six months away. That doesn't feel quite right—I'm pretty sure last year's tournament was two weeks ago, but whatever. It's coming in August, it's very likely to be back at KeyArena in Seattle, and a lot of fans, myself included, will be looking for the event to recapture a bit of the spirit that was lost in 2014.

That's not to say that TI4 was a bad event—not at all. It felt like a much bigger deal than the Benaroya Hall Internationals did. The scope of everything involved was larger, from the prize pool to the merchandise. But it was also a colder event, less intimate, which perhaps goes with the increase in size but does not necessarily need to. Having more fans in the building should make for a more energetic show, but TI4 moved in the opposite direction.

With that in mind, there are a few changes I'd like to see this year. The key thing, though, is that the Valve need to re-establish an understanding of what type of event The International is. Esports tournaments traditionally fall somewhere on a spectrum between 'fan convention' and 'sporting event', and Dota 2 has been no exception to that. In the main, however, it comes down closer to 'sporting event', with less emphasis on things like cosplay competitions and, over time, a reduced focus on the Steam Workshop or voice actor meet-and-greets.

TI4's biggest problems emerged when the 'convention' part of the equation started to intrude upon the 'sport' part. That's where I'd start.

Rethink the Secret Shop

If you needed any more evidence that cosmetic items have a strange, powerfully detrimental affect on esports, look at last year's International. The Secret Shop was a very slick, efficient operation with a two part ordering system designed to move people in with their money and back out with their stuff as fast as possible.

Even this, however, was not enough to prevent the line for the Secret Shop from occupying most of KeyArena's mezzanine for the full duration of every day. When huge chunks of your audience are standing in line for hats (actual hats, this time) rather than watching the sport they came to see, something has gone wrong. Unless you're trying to create a live-action version of the Year Beast event, in which case good job.

The issue is ultimately that the Secret Shop will always draw people away from the main event regardless of how efficient it becomes. The lure of hats is like a gas; it expands to fill the available space. The only answer, I think, is to turn the Secret Shop into a mail order service. You should order and pay for goods online and, in the case of International-specific items, be given a collection time at the event when you can go and pick up your stuff. If you miss it, have general 'free for all' periods at the end of the day when all of the games have been played.

The Secret Shop needs to become something that you jump up from your seat and do in 20 minutes between games, not something you commit an afternoon to. And that means giving Valve as much control as possible over how many people arrive and when. Ultimately, it'd be awesome if they looked into something like Disney's MagicBand. They have the resources for it, after all.

Every team plays on the main stage

I hope that this one is already in the bag: after all, this year's event will run for a full six days. The problem with 2014's structure was that it underestimated the value of pre-existing narratives to sport. They can be limiting, sometimes: teams, scenes and metagames change, and fans should be encouraged to change along with them and not expect the same 'el clasico' matches every year.

On the other hand, those events have a unifying effect that helps the community cohere. Even if it takes place in the opening stages of a long bracket, people will pack the stands to watch EG vs. Secret as they would have packed the stands for Na'Vi vs. Alliance last year. You need those moments, and you can't reliably get them if the majority of the tournament happens in a hotel a week before the live event.

Having a structure that guarantees at least one main stage game for every team vastly reduces the risk involved. Functionally, it insures the tournament against sudden changes—which is exactly what happened in 2014, when the competitive meta shifted a few times and left fan-favourite teams behind. I'd say that was less likely this year, but it's never off the table and the event needs to account for it.

Figure out how to make All Star matches work

They're such a no-brainer on paper, but it's weird how often just-for-fun 'All Star' matches fall flat. There's a lot to account for: players not being invested in the games, the audience feeling disconnected from whatever is going on in the booths, the games running too long, the games running too short, the showrunners having a particular gag in mind, and so on.

There are two I can think of has having worked well: The International 2013 and The Summit 2. In both cases it's because there's a strong link between the teams and the audience—either directly, in TI3's case, or implied by BTS' 'this could be happening in your house' deal.

That's harder to achieve in a larger arena, and it can be a real energy-sapper if the match enters a slow midgame—which is what happened last year. Nontheless, I don't think gimmicks are the solution—the solution is ensuring that the players are into it and that the audience get a sense of that. Part of that is down to the selection of players (which may well be down to a Compendium vote) and part of it is down to timing. If there isn't a time when it makes sense to have an All Star event without eating into players' schedules, it might not be worth doing.

All Star matches are, ultimately, part of the 'fan convention' part of the equation—and you can tell when it's being treated like an obligation rather than a fun diversion. Like The International as a whole, what I'd like to see in 2015 is an approach that identifies what makes these events special and makes a concerted effort to not only capture that spirit, but ultimately exceed it. The odd slightly-flat event is fine, but two in a row signifies a troubling loss of momentum.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

A confession: I've not had a huge amount of time for Dota 2 this past week. I've found myself playing more Heroes of the Storm than I expected—despite my misgivings about the game's business model, it's picked up a following among friends who wouldn't touch this genre in any other form. Short on time, I've also been dipping into Smite's single-lane, three-on-three Joust mode. This, also, is a game I'm just learning. Between these two experiences, I've spent a bunch of time thinking about the few genuinely transferable skills that two thousand hours of Dota has given me, and the foremost of those is timing.

Timing is, I think, the most important single thing that newcomers to lane-pushing games need to get a handle on. Until you understand concepts like tempo and how it relates to overall strategy, a huge part of the skill of winning will be beyond you. When you lose and you don't know why, it's very likely a timing issue. This is particularly true of Heroes of the Storm, a game that has taken the Dota formula and sanded the edges off to the point where timing and basic ability management are all that's left. Heroes of the Storm is about simple plays made against an ever-ticking clock.

Having found myself explaining these concepts over and over in different contexts, I figured that I'd dry to boil them down to a couple of key lessons. These are they. If you're already experienced in these games, you might not find much to learn here: but I hope it provides you with some ideas about how you might pass that knowledge on.

There are more 'cooldowns' than just the ones the game shows you

Time is a resource equivalent to gold and experience (I'm pretty sure there's an aphorism about that, somewhere.) The most visible example of this is an ability cooldown—such as the two and a half minutes between Tidehunter Ravages—and the attendant need to use long-cooldown abilities intelligently. There are other 'hard' cooldowns, like Roshan's respawn time, the refreshing of jungle camps, and, in Smite or League of Legends, the rate at which Phoenixes and Inhibitors return. Each of Heroes of the Storm's maps add a bunch more, like the gold chests in Blackheart's Bay or the mines opening in Haunted Mines.

You need to eventually have a handle on all of these, but that's obvious—it's book-learning, ultimately, information displayed on the screen waiting to be understood. The notion of a 'cooldown' can be usefully applied to more abstract concepts as well. Regardless of who you are playing, your character will have a rate at which it can reasonably expect to return to combat-viability after a fight. You might regain health through consumables, lifesteal, or base regeneration values, but however you do it there will be a basic amount of time it takes. Likewise mana. You need to learn to perceive your character's regeneration as a kind of soft cooldown, because otherwise you will find yourself unable to take advantage of all those more-visible hard cooldowns: if you know when Roshan's due to respawn but haven't accounted for the time it'll take you to get your health to the point where you can fight for it, you've lost track of arguably the more important 'cooldown' of the two.

Another example concerns experience and gold efficiency. This will vary on a role-by-role basis, but generally speaking the moment you leave an environment where your character is gaining either of the above then a timer begins. You have a certain amount of time to either achieve an objective (for example, warding) or picking up gold and experience from another source before it begins to eat into your efficiency. The moment you start to see the sand trickling out of an invisible timer whenever you leave your lane is the moment that you really understand what 'carrying' entails.

Figure out what you need to do, then do the thing that comes before that

Rule two stems naturally from what I've just written. As soon as you get a handle on the various timers that determine what you can achieve in the game, you need to learn to sync them up—to make sure that you have health, mana and your ultimate when Roshan respawns, for example. Getting this right means making a conscious effort to not only choose what your team's next play is going to be, but to identify what sequence of actions you need to do now to ensure that it happens.

A pre-emptive play might be returning to the fountain to regen or it might be as simple as walking across the map, but there's always something—and it always takes time, and you need to be able to account for that time. How many times have you lost Roshan because your team started to get ready when Roshan respawned, rather than one minute before? Exactly.

This is really obvious in Heroes of the Storm, where games can turn entirely on how well teams prepare for the plays they want to make. If you're winning Haunted Mines but you burn away all of your health on a mercenary camp right before the undead spawn, then you might have just thrown away the game. By failing to prepare for the more important play, you've negatively achieved—got something done, but the wrong thing, and given your opponent a shot at something bigger. Something, often, game-turning.

These games get complicated when you realise that preparatory actions themselves come with their own set of timers and, in turn, their own necessary prep-work. And then even more so when you realise that every single timer in the game is related to every single other timer, even if the relationship isn't obvious at first. In Dota 2, pushing a lane might draw out a TP response. That TP has a timer, and the mana spent to use it has a timer, and the distance travelled comes with a timer too. Those timers, in turn, determine the defender's ability to respond to other timers—like Roshan. Mastery means not just recognising these connections, but making them work for you.

Apply the inverse to your opponent, always

You will know what bad timing feels like before you get a sense for good timing, and that is an important experience to hold on to—because your goal, always, should be to put the other team in a position where they feel like they've lost their tempo. If you know how to make the rhythm of the game suit you, then you know what's required to make it not suit your opponent. Often, the two go hand in hand.

If you can force someone to burn all of their health or mana without giving them time to regen before an important timer ticks over, you've won even if you haven't killed them. If you can score a single kill against the enemy team and force them to attack you four vs. five, then you'll probably get another kill even if you are, more broadly, losing. This is how you force them to tilt: not just by killing their dudes, but by killing their dudes in a way that forces them to dance to your beat. Items and levels will always arrive, eventually, but they count for exactly nothing if you're unable to synergise them with your whole team because somebody is always waiting to respawn.

This is why you push out a lane right before going for Roshan: because you've planned both, and will likely have enough time to get from one to another efficiently. If your enemy reacts to the push, then chances are they're sacrificing something in terms of efficiency or responsiveness. Even if they do repel the push and immediately run to contest Roshan, they will be doing all of this a few precious seconds short of ideal. And those few seconds, added up over time, will win you the game.

Congratulations. You are now better at Dota. Let's all celebrate by dressing in wetsuits and dancing in a flaming refinery somewhere in Germany in 1992.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Virtual reality is coming. Again. It was coming in 2012, and then in many ways it came in 2012, but then it wandered off again, resurfaced in 2014, got sold to Facebook, vanished, and now it's back. Virtual reality! The announcement of HTC's Vive marks a fresh beginning for both the wearable tech industry and the desperately optimistic tech op-ed industry.

It looks like a robot spider's face and sounds like an off-brand tropical juice drink that you might buy from a roadside van in the early hours of a Saturday morning. It will require you to carve out hitherto unheard-off leagues of floorspace, a volume of territory alien to anybody this side of North America's cavernous suburbs. It will smartly account for the possibility that you might wander into a bookshelf, but you will nontheless eventually wander into a bookshelf. None of this matters. Virtual reality is coming, and this time Valve are making it, and everything is going to be fine. You would walk into any number of bookshelves if it meant seeing Alyx Vance's face again.

What, though, does all of this mean for Dota 2? Valve's most popular game is also its most resistant to new technologies. Dota is a hard kernel of old-school PC design, rooted in the medium's past and utterly resistant to change. Its durability is key to its global appeal: you can play it on almost anything. It is Valve (and Steam's) ambassador to gaming markets that will be slower to adopt something as exorbitant as VR: Russia, South East Asia, South America.

Any application of VR to Dota 2 will always be a matter of luxury, not necessity. The game doesn't need it. But it could make use of it, and here is how.

Experience a replay in first person

You're never going to actually play Dota 2 in the first person. Even something simple, like changing your point-of-view using the minimap, wouldn't work. Dota 2's design piles complexity on top of the already-complex isometric RTS, and you can't just strip out those foundations and expect a playable game.

However! Going on a tour of the map in first person would work, and would be of interest to anybody who has ever wondered how their heroes actually experience that space. Extrapolate that out a little further and you've got a novel (if ultimately limited) new spectator mode. Witness your own best plays from the perspective of somebody who was hiding behind a nearby tree. Run into a bookshelf in your living room while trying to get the best possible angle on a pro teamfight.

Perhaps VR spectators could see each other inside the game, rendered as ghosts or perhaps as the little frogs and birds that already hop around the map. You could turn to the guy next to you and exclaim "did you see that?", pointing excitedly at a dynamically-intercepted Roshan attempt and/or a nearby bookshelf. Imagine sharing the experience of live sport with other people within the game itself, feeling the swell of the crowd with every play and encountering, for the first time in a digital context, the uniquely immersive inconvenience of not being able to see very well.

Pretend that Dota 2 is a living board game

Imagine if you could project an entire Dota 2 match—running in real time—onto a flat surface, either simulated or in your actual house. Imagine peering over it, like a god or a terrarium owner, watching these little animated miniatures run about and cast magic spells and yell at each other.

Imagine tracing the course of the river with your finger, seeing where it tumbles off the edge of the map—off the edge of the table—and down to the floor below. Imagine catching the water in your cupped hands and casting it into the air, letting it rain down onto your virtual face, laughing and laughing.

I am stretching this because I suspect that virtual boardgame Dota would actually work. It is not, in and of itself, totally ridiculous, and therefore I would both like it to happen and find it to be of limited utility to this column.

Endure the terrifying life of a creep

Here's a better one: an on-rails melee combat game like those arcade games you sometimes find where you wave a foam bat (see also: 'sword') at skeletons until you run out of money or dignity. Imagine something like that, but you're an actual creep in an actual game of Dota 2. You spawn in a barracks and run with your little brothers and sisters down a long lane, mighty heroes striding to either side. You encounter vile enemy creeps coming in the opposite direction and—swing! swing!—begin to chop at them in immersive first person.

The chaos of battle. The odds stacked against you. A tower at your back, a tower ahead. All of your kills are stolen by colourful characters with more power than you could ever hope to have. Then, as the battle looks won, as you surge forward, low on health but vitally, desperately alive, blooded in battle but never bowed, a shadow looms over you. You turn. There she is. Crystal Maiden. An ally, You think. She swings her staff: there is a bolt of blue light, and then there is nothing. Denied!

Try on cosmetic items before you buy them

Somebody once wrote a desperately optimistic op-ed about how we may one day use augmented reality technology to dress ourselves in the clothes we aspire to buy. I haven't actually read it: I assume that it exists. Nonetheless, I think this may form the basis of a fun addition to Dota 2's item store.

Imagine that you've got a modest sum of Steam-bucks to spend and you're not sure what to splash out on. At present you can preview new sets and you can cycle couriers through their various forms: you can rotate them and look at them and make a decision based on something as mundane as 'what the item actually looks like, on the character that it is designed for'. Yawn.

I'd like to try the items on myself: to be placed in a virtual store with a big mirror and parade around in the latest sets for my own amusement. I would like to attempt to wear some Broodmother armour and experience what it might be like to don Crystal Maiden's arcana cape, floating around with a dog and terrible frostbite. I'd like to try out Legion Commander's Arcana swords, and find out—once and for all—if it is actually possible to see anything when your eyes are on fire.

I'd like to pet the couriers before I buy one, and perhaps go for a ride on their flying variants. Having made my purchasing decision, I'd like to hand over virtual money to the shopkeeper himself, and take my items back to an actual Armory: this may, at last, provide a reason for me to interact with my shelves.

Stand in the player booths at The International

Let's assume that is possible to use a lot of combined camera feeds to place a virtual participant inside a different room in real time. Should this be the case, the natural next step is to give Dota 2 fans unprecedented access to the competitive scene. Valve have been slow to deliver their promise of International 2014 booth audio, so why not overcompensate with the technically unsound and deeply invasive application of VR?

Imagine how muted and awkward the players would feel, knowing that their every word and gesture was being picked apart by thousands of invisible, intangible spectators. Imagine hovering eerily behind your favourite players, listening to them alternately yell the words 'back' and 'nice'. Imagine seeing yourself as their equal despite staggering mounting evidence to the contrary. You think you know back-seat Dota? Not like this. Not like this.

Experience the life of the guy you're about to report

Let's get ambitious, here. Virtual reality could provide new perspectives on Dota 2—allow you to explore your hobby from a different angle. But what if it could make the community itself a better place? What if—and there are no bad ideas in this space, people, this is the future we're talking about—virtual reality could fix people.

I'm going to hypothesise a scenario. You are in a pub game. You are this ready to report somebody. Your mid has no gank. No gank at all! He has feed. For fuck's sake and so on. You type 'nooooooooooooob', and hold down the 'o' key just that little bit longer than you need to, grinding out your frustration like a pointless cigarette stub in the manky ashtray of your personality. You right click the player in question and select report.

But then! Your VR headset flips into a new mode. You are given a vision—a strange sensation, at first—of the same game from the reportee's perspective. You see, vividly, the lack of wards that meant that they could not realibly roam. You see that their opponent in mid was simply really good, better than you could deal with, and that they did their best but found themselves outmatched. I've been there too, you think.

Then, the headset takes you deeper. You see a scene from earlier the same day, because presumably everybody wears cameras on their faces all the time in the future or something. Your midlaner's boss is a total dick. There's a line at the bus stop. The post has been delivered to a neighbour. The pizza they were saving is missing from the fridge. The goldfish is dead.

All this, and all they wanted was a single good game of Dota. Instead, they got you—and all you did was add to the number of things they had to deal with that day. You are experiencing It's A Wonderful Life for the post-social age, if It's A Wonderful Life was a movie where Jimmy Stewart is repeatedly told to kill himself by a chorus of moronic teenagers. You do not get to descend the stairs to a town full of people who love you, in this scenario, but you may experience a moment of separation from the people whose lack of self-awareness, empathy or decency places them a few taxonomic rungs short of that sad, lost, incompetent baby seal whose only recourse is to honk stupidly into a vast empty wilderness that it will never understand. This is, presently, the best that you can hope for.

You are abruptly returned to the report screen. Your finger hovers over the 'submit' button. You close the window. Crestfallen, contrite but wiser than you have ever been, you wander into a bookshelf.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2 and related games.

One of the best things I read about Dota 2 this week was this JoinDota article about the impact of cosmetic item bundles on the competitive scene. Their evidence is compelling, and it's hard to read through the entire thing without wanting Valve to rethink the way that tournament tickets are marketed and sold.

The article both rests upon and reveals the fact that players really covet cosmetic items. That's not a groundbreaking observation by any stretch, but it's one of those things that gets weirder the more you think about it. I mean, I collect Dota items and I'm not even entirely sure why. I am guilty of buying tournament tickets for the cosmetics first and the tournament itself second.

Players desire this stuff to the point where that desire eclipses the game it supports. I gestured at this last week—Dota events traditionally stumble because players will do literally anything, even if it isn't fun, to get a shot at free stuff—even if it makes them less likely to continue playing the game those items are for. I sometimes wonder if we're guilty, generally, of just assuming that 'hats are popular' without interrogating why—of missing a broader point about the game itself because the mania that surrounds cosmetic items has become a running joke.

A pet theory: collecting cosmetic items provides everything that traditional Dota 2 does not. They allow you to make clear, visible progress in a way that is quick and easily broadcast to other players. You can work on it entirely alone, and the factors that might mitigate your progress—money, time, luck—are all nontheless things that you can control. The ineptitude of four other people does affect your chances of getting items unless there's an event on, and the way the community behaves during events backs up what I'm saying.

(This doesn't mean that collecting items is always compensatory—it's perfectly reasonable to covet something because you, you know, like it. This is more about figuring out why collection gets taken so seriously, how it ends up valued above and beyond aspects of the game that, if pressed, most players would agree are more 'important'.)

In this sense, the negative influence of cosmetics on e-sports is symptomatic of a broader malaise experienced by Dota players: the drive to derive instant gratification from a game where almost everything you aspire to do or be takes significant time and effort. Watching a tournament requires engagement, investment of energy, learning, and so on. Collecting hats requires clicking on the hats.

The only thing that makes you better at Dota is playing more Dota. The best way to show your commitment to e-sports is to watch more e-sports. These are easy notions to forget, or at least it's easy to be distracted from them. It's so tempting to look for shortcuts to that feeling of progression that you may not even realise that you're doing it—at least, that's been my experience of this hobby over the last couple of years.

I had this fact hammered home late last week. I'd spent a week teaching four total newcomers to play Dota, colleagues from PCG's UK office with less than ten games played between them. We faced off against Rock Paper Shotgun's more experienced lineup—two and a half experienced players, two and a half total newcomers (one had played the game years ago for a hundred hours, but not returned since.)

I'd theorised that it was possible to break Dota down into general, easily-remembered principles that would ultimately give my wizard-babies the edge even if they had no idea what the majority of heroes did, how the majority of items worked, or even how their roles functioned. I attempted to explain what a gold and experience advantage looked like, what staying safe looked like, what map control was and how you got it—and I think I succeeded, to a limited extent.

What I realised, though, as we lost that game, was just how much Dota has passed into the lower, reactive levels of my brain. As I attempted to formulate a simplified conscious approach to Dota, I remained ignorant of just how much I'd picked up simply by playing a lot of the game for a long time. I can see it, now, in every screenshot of that match. A level 4 Sniper pushing a tower right next to an incoming TP belonging to a level 7 Puck who would inevitably kill him. I realised how natural it was for a new player to think nothing of another glowing effect among so many glowing effects; I realised how many different experiences contribute to me seeing that image in such a powerfully divergent way. Where the Sniper sees nothing wrong, I see imminent disaster: and I see it because I've lived it, in thousands of different ways, over the course of thousands of hours.

As our ancient exploded, I realised that there's no shortcut to that kind of experience—no way for me to simply beam it into the heads of my newbies with a couple of simple instructions. I realised, also, that there was no way I was going to get better through anything other than more experience. I had been on a losing streak, otherwise, from the finals of the Rektreational industry tournament (3-2, damn!) to my recent return to solo ranked. And all of it comes back to the same thing: hours invested, energy committed, losses accepted, lessons learned. It is so, so tempting to go back to 'proving' myself with a hat collection, to amass the badges and stack up the tournament ticket stubs and get the cosmetics that say this guy cares. But that is, I think, a placebo. It's a behaviour pattern that resembles nothing less than a mid-life crisis: the attempt to spend your way out of some broader sense of inadequacy.

It's actually kind of a relief to arrive at that understanding. It takes the pressure off. You really probably don't need every item set that comes out. You probably don't even need to worry about your MMR, or your winrate, or your all-time records. You probably just need to play more, and that is the least demanding thing Dota ever asks of you.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2 and related games.

Everybody is angry about a seasonal Dota 2 event. This does not tell you very much. Events have always made players angry, and not entirely without reason—traditionally, they are not very good. That said, the angriest the Dota community has ever been was when a seasonal event didn't happen. This complicates things, somewhat. If the community is equally enraged by events that exist and events that don't exist, what have we learned? Primarily, that hardcore gaming communities are often angry about something, and that 'something' may or may not map fully onto reality. This is not a revelation, and nor is it news. Don't let that stop you, though—it's op-ed season! Grab your gun, honey, there's fish in that barrel.

Valve continue to make weird decisions about how they implement optional modes into Dota 2. Generally, knowing Valve, you can assume that this is a form of experimentation—discerning what the community will accept, what it won't. The company's weaknesses has always been that this experimentation takes place in isolation from what other companies have learned and, sometimes, in isolation from common sense. Valve give the impression of a company that is attempting to invent community events from scratch—a homebrew approach with its roots in lush, organic data. I wonder how they store and process that data, sometimes; how they account for the significant portion that is just the phrase 'FUCK THIS' over and over. It's all useful, I suppose. Nothing grows that isn't fertilised at least in part by the shit that came before it.

Where Manifold Paradox's problem was that it affected how people play regular Dota, Year Beast's issue is that it allows players to purchase an advantage in new, optional Dota. If you have lots of points your team gets a better Year Beast and that's kind of shitty to deal with. I think you'd have to attempt some pretty tricky rhetorical gymastics to take criticism further than that: Year Beast does not mean that Dota as a whole is 'pay to win'. 'Pay to win' is not a force with its own agency: it cannot creep out of one game mode and alter another. It cannot slip off the whiteboard and infect a room full of designers, it does not corrupt its hosts from within and you will never find yourself approaching Icefrog in the street only for him to raise a finger and honk "PAY TO WIIIIIIIIIN" at you like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

In short: it's bad, you don't have to play it, you definitely don't have to spend any money, and you probably wasted any time you spent sharpening pitchforks (do you sharpen pitchforks? I guess you must.) Lasting impact on Dota, the decade-old fantasy wizard sport you play every day of your life for some reason? Nil.

What does concern me about Year Beast is that it demonstrates that Valve haven't really learned their lesson regarding event rewards. In every case, the outcry over an event has ultimately been grounded in the assumption that you have to do whatever terrible thing the event is making you do, and that you have to do it because otherwise you don't get whatever reward is being dangled in front of you. During Manifold Paradox, people had to bend their entire strategy around helping or thwarting Phantom Assassin because otherwise they wouldn't get items. Now, people have to build the best Year Beast because otherwise they don't get item sets.

In gaming communities, 'material' rewards tend to override every other incentive to play. People ruin their experience of Dragon Age: Inquisition's opening hours because they convince themselves that they need all of the stuff in the Hinterlands before they allow themselves to progress. Over in console-land, hand-wringing about Destiny's loot system has eclipsed the game's successes (and failures) as a shooter to such an extent that it might as well be a Faberge handle on a slot machine. This is the age of people saying 'I had an amazing time but I didn't get the right space hat so fuck it' without irony, a sentiment that is for some reason taken seriously and not laughed at like we laugh at those teenagers publishing tearful video blogs when they don't get the right car for their birthday.

In short: the chance to win stuff tends to make gaming communities behave in some really weird ways and Valve have been naive in their approach to that. On paper, giving a reward to winners makes sense. In practice, it changes the emotional register of the entire thing. It introduces entitlement, irrationality and negativity. They made the same mistake with the first-ever Compendium, which gave every owner a different Immortal item from a limited set. Technically, they were all equally valuable. In practice, everybody wanted the Pudge hook or the Kunkka sword. The system created winners and losers, and the result was much wailing.

If every Year Beast participant had the same chance of getting a reward regardless of the match outcome then nobody would care much that it was pay to win. Well, some might, but it would be those few that are genuinely concerned with the health of the game in abstract and that tends to be a far more level-headed set. It'd also mean that fewer people would feel the need to spend money on points alone (as opposed to the points that come with the Arcana), but if Valve are serious about steering clear of Bad Free To Play then they'd have to accept that.

The goal with a community event shouldn't just be to raise a bit of extra money, nor should it be to experiment with what the community will enjoy or invest in. The aim should always be to create a sense of communal attachment—to stick a pin in the calendar at a certain point and encourage people to invest that time with meaning. You should look back on a seasonal event and think 'remember that? That was cool. That's where I got this hat.'

That goal is not incompatible with an experimental approach, nor is it incompatible with making money. But Valve need to get better at it. At the moment, the memory they are creating is closer to 'god, remember that? That was awful. I spent half an hour of my life convincing one guy not to abandon the game because he wasn't going to win a hat. I can't believe I spent actual money on momentarily enhancing my team's magical rhino-dragon so that it might win me a Sand King set from two years ago that I didn't even want'.

The key is distributing rewards evenly to create a sense that everybody wins out just by participating. By doing so, the event becomes a pinata that everybody gets an even whack at—and, like at the very best children's birthday parties, every attendee is guaranteed some candy or a toy. Have you seen what happens when a parent underestimates the importance of egalitarian distribution? It's exactly like what is happening in the Dota community at the moment, only with real six year olds instead of functional six year olds.

Here, then, is how you fix Year Beast. Remove the points system, and give both winners and losers an equal chance to earn whole sets. Match this with a reliable progression track that you move along with every game you play, unlocking scaling rewards as you go. You should know roughly what you stand to gain when you start a Year Beast match, not when it ends. That way, players go in feeling positive.

Instead of selling points, sell tickets for the mode itself. Give every player one free ticket for every day they log in and scale reward distribution with that in mind. Give extra tickets to Arcana owners, and give players who play with an Arcana owner a chance to earn tickets through playing regular Dota matches. Ticket prices should be slightly lower than the lowest-value reward from a given Year Beast game, because there's no reason why the player should stand to lose: Valve have learned this lesson before, with item chests.

Then, watch a happy seasonal event unfold and watch players flock back to the next one. If there is a next one. You might have handed the whole thing over to the community by then by adding custom game tools. In which case, it's their problem. Let the little shits run their own birthday party. Uncork a bottle and bar the kitchen door: you've earned it!

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2 and related games.

It's update week! For Smite in particular—season two went live on Wednesday, fundamentally overhauling the Conquest map and introducing a broad sweep of balance changes equivalent to a major Dota 2 patch. I've played Smite exactly twice since then because Crystal Maiden has a puppy now. Conquest revamp, puppy. Conquest revamp. Puppy. Look at the puppy! Look at it.

It's entirely too early to tell whether I'll one day regret having spent £18 on a magical cape that comes with a dog. I suspect that the answer is 'no' when it should probably be 'yes', but that's how it goes. I'm almost two thousand hours into this particular series of questionable life decisions. One day I'll end up spending even more. Imagine if the Crystal Maiden arcana extended Freezing Field's duration to three minutes and thirty-nine seconds and replaced the channeling animation with the entirety of 'Let It Go' from Frozen. I don't know how much I'd pay for that. A lot, I suppose. I wonder how much my kidneys are worth.

I'm not in a position to offer comment on the New Bloom event itself yet because of the way it is structured—the new mode is only accessable at random times, with warning given an hour in advance. I suspect that Valve has structured it this way to ensure that people in my position play it exactly twice—once when it appears by chance, and once after spending an entire day waiting. I have a job and commitments: I need to plan my Dota time in advance, and that is directly incompatible with the structure of this year's New Bloom. I imagine there are reasons for it being this way, but from my isolated place in the crowd they seem like they might be dumb reasons.

That being the case, I'm going to discuss something else. Specifically, I'm going to explain why this support-centric update adds to a long list of reasons why Silencer can go fuck himself.

Phew. It feels good to finally say that, you know? Over the last couple of years I've worked through most of my personal problems with certain heroes. I used to loathe Nature's Prophet, and Pudge, and Faceless Void—I had a very specific sense of the types of people who would play those characters. Nonetheless, I'm aware of how silly and immature it is to make assumptions about somebody's personality based on the types of characters that they like to play, and I appreciate the way that all of these characters ultimately make the game more interesting. I'd even extend that to Sniper. Sure! He's an irritating shit sometimes, but there's a kind of tragic comedy to his impact on the lategame if he gets out of control.

At the end of this long period of personal development, only Silencer remains as the hero I truly and personally dislike. He's a prick and I hate him and here is why.

I love Winter Wyvern. I love how Valve have reimagined her, and I love how silly and showy her abilities can be. Like Omniknight, she's only ever going to be a very situational counter-pick—but like Omniknight, her impact on a fight can be visible and exciting. Her skills come with plenty of potential for clutch saves and dazzling plays. In my last game with her, I discovered that she acts as a hilarious foil to Chaos Knight and Io. Watching them teleport in only to force CK to murder his glowing blue life partner in cold blood is a precious gift that doesn't get old. Other highlights: the moment your carry realises just how good Cold Embrace is. When you realise that she can do 1700 damage split between the entire enemy team at level 7. She's dependent on the circumstances being perfect, but man—what an interesting set of new ideas to add to the game.

Most heroes are like this, one way or another. I've written something similar about Axe in the past. Dota is about systems colliding in new and unexpected ways. It is fundamentally about stuff happening.

Silencer is about stuff not happening. He is a brutal counter to Winter Wyvern and any other hero that subsists on spells at the bottom of the farm priority pyramid. Expect him to be one of the major factors curtailing Winter Wyvern and Crystal Maiden's brief surges in popularity, because by design he shuts down exactly what makes these characters interesting.

This is a design issue, not a balance problem. The character has plenty of weaknesses—but, like Faceless Void, they're the kinds of weaknesses that pub players typically struggle to exploit. He's one of the kings of the potato bracket because he requires your team to do the exact things that pub teams are typically terrible at doing: building BKBs, disengaging properly, and timing engagements to coincide with ultimate cooldowns.

Unlike other powerful heroes, Silencer isn't exciting to deal with: he's just depressing. There's no spectacle or impact to his skill set. Think about how extravagant a Refresher Orb feels on other heroes. Think about the pushing power of a double Chaotic Offering—'full boy band mode'—or the way double Thundergod's Wrath feels like the actual wrath of heaven. Compare that with two Aghs-upgraded Global Silences—twelve full seconds of nothing happening, watching your health and mana slowly tick away.

He stops spellcasting. He drains mana. He steals intelligence. He disarms. He stops spellcasting again, for everyone, everywhere. Unlike every other character in the game, Silencer is designed to reduce the number of interesting interactions that take place. Replace him with literally any other hero in a line-up and the game becomes more fun for everybody. He's the only character whose complete removal I would applaud.

Just look at him. Look how unhappy he appears, in a game full of vivacious and lively characters. He's the awful guy at the party that everybody wishes hadn't come. He's the commenter that shows up to derail the discussion. He's the mob that floods your Twitter replies and doesn't know when to stop. He makes conflict less fun. He makes everything less fun. If there is ever a Silencer arcana, it should involve a fedora and change all of his voice lines so that they begin 'WELL, ACTUALLY...'

This should be a new golden age for support players. We've got a dog now and we can force carries to kill their friends. Except we can't, because there he is in every game. They've just locked in three punchy melee carries? It's Winter Wyvern time! Here they come, pushing down mid. You anticipate the teamfight to come. It's your time to shine. You're in the trees, your force staff ready, your finger over 'R'. Then -

SILENCE.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2.

Last night I lost a game of Captain's Mode to a team that randomed two of their heroes. Their captain was AFK. Our captain wasn't AFK—he was, well, me—and I figured that I could easily counterpick a team that was lumbered with a Lina and an Elder Titan that they didn't plan to play. The draft didn't matter much, as it happened. They outplayed us from the moment the laning phase ended, fighting better, rotating better and generally closing us out of the game before we could bring our non-randomly-generated plan to bear.

There are two meagre reasons why this was not entirely an unbearable experience. The first is the single message their team transmitted in English over the course of the game: a lonely 'sick my duck', perhaps an Outkast reference, perhaps simply a wonderful typo. The other is that it was a relatively straightforward loss. These have seemed harder to come by, lately: I don't know about you, but for me and mine 6.83 has been the era of the throw.

It's simply easier to lose control of a lead than it used to be. It only takes a single teamfight to completely reverse the momentum of a game. Sometimes, it's less than that—the pick-off kill that means your next engagement ends disastrously, the sneaky Roshan attempt that you forget to check for. I don't feel like we've been losing more games than we generally do, but I definitely feel like we've thrown away more advantages.

It's no longer safe to snowball, and early leads need to be treated with a mixture of respect and caution—both by the team that's ahead and the team that's behind. The rewards for storming ahead in the early game aren't what they used to be, and transitioning into the kind of lead that actually ends the game takes skill and careful mitigation of risk. It's this latter element that I've been thinking about a lot recently. Dota 2 is a game of numbers, chance, percentages: most throws begin the moment you forget that.

Two weeks ago I talked about how a team that is in an advantageous position needs to identify their 'victory switch'—the set of collective strategic and psychological shifts that allow them to properly end a game. As part of that shift, it's increasingly important to define your team's relationship with the game's unpredictable elements.

A few weeks ago I read this guide to Hearthstone's Arena mode by VivaFringe. I don't play a lot of Hearthstone, but what drew me to it was this line:

When you’re ahead, try to minimize variance. When you’re behind, try to maximize it.

What VivaFringe refers to as 'variance' could also be described as chaos or unpredictability. In Hearthstone, this is fairly easy to locate: there are a lot of random elements, from the behaviours of individual cards to the card-drawing process itself. 'Randomness' in Dota 2 is a little subtler. It means more than just Phantom Assassin's chance to crit or Chaos Knight's chance to get a four-second stun. It means everything your team can't directly control, from the positioning of enemy wards to the chance that the support you've spotted wandering alone is actually bait for a smoke gank.

Here's a scenario that demonstrates the type of variance that I'm talking about. One of your team's core heroes is mobile, good at taking down single targets, and has had a good start—Storm Spirit, maybe. Your advantage going into the midgame has been built on the back of lots of individual plays. From an even start, your team has more gold and experience because risks were taken—and paid off.

Let's say that Storm Spirit has a 80% chance of succeeding at any given solo kill attempt. That's an arbitrary percentage: it's intended to express the idea that a player with a lead will normally do well, but that something can always go wrong. When all else is equal, it is absolutely worth taking that 80% chance of success. As the game progresses, however, the one-in-five chance of failure means more. In the lategame, the 20% you can't control could mean ceding a huge gold and experience bounty to an enemy carry, a lengthy respawn, an expensive buyback, or any number of other penalties. Eventually, Storm Spirit's solo gambits will present a bigger opportunity to your opponent than they do to your own team, because your opponent has a meagre (but not impossible) chance to win big from them.

When you're ahead, then, you need to stop gambling. The odds haven't changed, but the scale of the reward has. Stop seeing it as an 80% chance to bump your K/D/A, and start seeing it as a 20% chance to lose the entire game. Secure your lead by 'minimising variance'. Prompt teamfights. Take other objectives. Transition in sync with the changing mathematical landscape of the game.

This is often the opposite of what a snowballing player wants to do, and the inverse is true of players who are on the defensive. Simply being behind suggests that conservative play is the only way to win: you lost out in the early game, so there's no way you're going to gamble with what you've got left. Well, that line of thinking goes both ways. As the enemy pulls ahead in gold and experience, you can do more with each kill you manage to get. The one consistent element of unpredictable situations in Dota 2 is that they are dangerous. People make mistakes. People die. This is the last thing you want if you're winning, but exactly what you want if you're behind.

'Maximise variance' in this regard by making plays that feel unsafe. Go for that smoke gank. Contest Roshan. Push a tower and force the other team to come meet you, then run away. Sometimes they will respond perfectly and you'll lose anyway, but that's unlikely. By taking chances you increase the chance that they'll slip up, and when they lose a vital core hero for a full ninety seconds without buyback you'll have just won your way back into the game.

To put it another way: only winners can throw a game. There's a choice you need to make, when you've built up that comfortable lead, to hold on to it. And when you're losing the best thing you can do isn't hole up in your base or repeatedly farm the two jungle camps left to you: it's to strike out and invite the other team to take a risk. Think about every time you've thrown a game because you wanted one more kill, or to show off, or to end the game because you need to make dinner—then encourage that mindset in them. Not the dinner thing, I guess. But if you want, try typing 'brb 1min need to eat delicious pizza' in all-chat. It can't hurt. Beats 'sick my duck', anyway.

If you remain unconvinced, please enjoy this brief four-minute musical essay on the importance of being mindful of the numbers powering every Dota 2 match you play.

10% luck. 20% skill. 15% concentrated power of will. 5% pleasure. 50% slam. 100% reason to remember the jam.

This is as close to a perfect mathematical summation of Dota 2 as you will ever get.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2 and related games. Art this week is Clash of Heroes by Kunkka.

I started playing Dota 2 because somebody needed to. It was that simple, at first: here was a new and popular game in an ascendant genre, and nobody in the PC Gamer office played it. We looked for writers online but found nobody suitable. The problem wasn't just confined to our walls. Many of my colleagues in the UK reported something similar, and the solution we found was to collectively set about fixing this gap in our knowledge. I stuck with the game long past the point where I knew enough to cover it for the magazine and website—this column is the product of that prolonged engagement.

The origin of my hobby was a desire to learn what a 'Dota' was and why people liked it. I more or less did so, and I've developed that understanding over time since then. Sometimes in fairly convoluted directions, as regular readers of this column will know. Lately I've realised that my understanding of the genre is entirely coloured by having learned Dota 2 first. Now that I'm experimenting with other games, I've come to the conclusion that Dota 2's particular business model is fundamental to my experience with the game, and to many of the conclusions I've reached about it since. So fundamental, in fact, that I've come to think of Dota 2 as occupying a subgenre by itself.

Recently I've been playing Smite, which I wrote about last week, and Heroes of the Storm. I've had access to HotS since the earliest days of the technical alpha, and played it intermittently at every stage of its development to date. I like it but don't love it: I appreciate its value to people looking for a light and accessible way into the genre, but having been swimming in the deep end for so long I don't see myself investing a considerable amount of time into it.

In its closed beta incarnation, however, I've become more aware of how alien I find the game's business model. As Blizzard refine the account-wide unlock systems and progression mechanics that surround the core game, I'm more conscious of the levels I don't have, the modes I don't have access to, the characters I need to grind for or buy; the amount of content that I can't quite get at. In a way, I'm surprised at how surprised I am. I understand, on paper, that all of this is a staple of the genre, and that the expectations of many players have been set by League of Legends—for whom all of this is fine. I never played League, however. I started with Dota 2. And I find this way of structuring the game deeply offputting.

When I finally understood what Dota was, I understood it in terms of steady personal growth along two skill axes: personal skill and, relevant to this article, knowledge. The game was a vast open resource, a complicated web of characters, skills, items and contradictions, something I traced a different course through every time I played. Understanding every character seemed paramount, so I played every character. I picked a path through the roster based on gaps in my knowledge, rather than personal preference or success rate. This is how I ended up as such a generalist player, with no particular role or hero that I'd say I was very good at. In some ways, I wish I had focused more closely on something specific. In others ways, it has helped—particularly when it comes to drafting.

Nonetheless, my experience of the genre was fundamentally grounded in the notion that it was a library that I had free access to. A mountain to climb, but with full freedom of movement. It's only now, playing Heroes of the Storm, that I realise how important that feeling was to my continued investment.

In Heroes, characters are unlocked with in-game gold or real cash. They cost different amounts and new characters tend to cost more. You can complete daily quests to earn extra gold, but you're still looking at a substantial grind to unlock everything. Beyond that, each character must be leveled up through play to gain access to the full range of passive traits—Heroes' equivalent to Dota 2's items.

Imagine if Valve adopted the same model for Dota 2. Let's say that the full hero pool was still technically free, but you needed to unlock new characters with in-game experience. Let's say that after you unlocked Juggernaut, you were restricted to a 'newbie-friendly' set of items—Phase Boots, Vladimir's Offering, Desolator. After three games you unlock the right to build Power Treads, Aghanim's Scepter, and Mjollnir. This would likely make for a more manageable experience for new players. It would, however, turn Dota 2 into a different type of game.

Not a worse game, necessarily! This is not a qualitative judgement, but a question of design. Bumping into Heroes' paywall—seeing a hero I don't understand, wanting to test it against other players and being unable to do so—has made me starkly aware of how philosophically different these games can be from one another. Heroes of the Storm sets out to be entertainment, and it is entertaining in a way that an MMO is entertaining. You level up and get new stuff. You always have something tangible to work towards. You are encouraged to invest deep in a single character, a favourite, and worry about the others only if it suits you.

This is anathema to how Dota 2 is best learned. In the Dota 2 community, serious novices set off on the A-Z challenge and decry pub players who lock Pudge every game. Breadth is valued, graft is valued, because the game is work. And it's not work that returns an easy reward, either—getting better at the game is noted by an incremental bump to your winrate, not with a whole new character to play.

It was utterly vital to me, in these circumstances, that Smite offered a 'pay once' option—a generous way to circumvent its god-purchasing system with a single £30 purchase that unlocked everything, forever. If Hi-Rez didn't provide that option, I don't think I'd be playing the game. Because it has this option, Smite occupies a weird position between both sub-genres. When you download it, it's a game in the League of Legends tradition. If you buy the Ultimate God Pack, it becomes Dota 2.

I've long argued that comparing these games is unhelpful. What I'm considering, now, is whether it'd be more useful to think of Dota 2 and League of Legends as occupying different conceptual spaces entirely. That argument would go: Dota 2 is characterised by an overwhelming plurality of things to learn. League is defined by a process of personalisation and selection, both in terms of character choice and in terms of MMO-style progression through the summoner system. These two divergent threads only recombine at the very highest level of play. For everybody else, these may as well be different genres. Neither is better, necessarily, but the division highlights the deep influence that business models have on the types of games we receive.

I've always been uncomfortable with 'MOBA', as a descriptor. It's clumsy, non-specific. It never felt right for Dota 2, whose proposition has always been slightly different to that of its relations—at least for me. I wonder if this is how we redefine our terms, then: Dota 2 simply isn't a MOBA. In a MOBA, you level up your account and unlock new characters for gold or cash; you pick your favourites and participate in an ecosystem of who-owns-what. Dota 2 is, well, Dota. It's propelled by different business interests—driving investment in Steam—and offers a different experience. It's the messy open source equivalent to League's proprietary software. It's Unix to League's MacOS. You could start comparing those things, if you want, but approximately fifty percent of the internet would rise up in arms against you.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2. And Smite. It's about Smite now too, apparently. The amazing fan art above is by Reddit user Pitran.

I've played Dota 2 almost exclusively since July 2012. For a long time it was the only game of its type that I played, and I've spent an order of magnitude more time with it than any other game of, well, any other type. I wouldn't be surprised if the time I've spent learning to wizard exceeds the time I've invested in games generally over the last two years. I held, for a long time, that you couldn't play more than one of these games seriously. I still believe that. Over the last few weeks, however, I've made a concerted effort to learn another—Smite. It's taught me a few things about the genre as a whole, and made me question a few further things that I held to be true about Dota 2.

Here's one new idea: surrender mechanics directly benefit support players. Back in July of last year, I wrote this article about why Dota 2 doesn't, shouldn't give its players a surrender button. I haven't entirely changed my mind about that. I still believe that the 'white flag' option makes these games less interesting overall. The Dota 2 experiences you remember are the late-game upsets, the incredible comebacks. Surrendering truncates the game, closes off possibilities, places hard limits on all of that fascinating complexity. In the abstract, I maintain that if a player is in a position where they must surrender then something has gone wrong with the game's provision of comeback mechanics. What I now realise, however, is that the decision to surrender is, in and of itself, a phenomena worth examining. The possibility of surrender creates new dynamics that alter the way you perceive the story of a match.

Dota 2's lack of a surrender option means that regular matchmaking games always end when one team destroys the other team's base. They can end no other way. It takes carries with good items and smart play by core heroes to do this, and the run of patches following last year's International have attempted to do away with ten-minute death pushes by giving defenders more options. Not only do games run longer, but the most important characters, in the end, are almost always the ones at the top of the farm priority pyramid. Earthshaker might start the ball rolling, but Faceless Void gets to kick it into the goal.

The same is true of Smite, to an extent. The role of the support, in both games, is to control the first half of the match so that it is your carries, not the other guy's, who ultimately succeed. This is where the 'Soccer Mom Crystal Maiden' meme comes from, and why support players are generally so rare—the role requires you to give up a substantial portion of your claim to glory. I've been playing support exclusively since I started to learn Smite because almost nobody volunteers to do it. As in Dota, everybody wants to play a solo roaming hero or carry. They want to make the big, game-ending plays—not the subtle supportive ones.

Teams can surrender in Smite, however, and this alters the prospects of what a support player can achieve. The goal stops being 'how do I ensure we have the best possible lategame' and becomes, in part, 'how do I break their spirits to the extent that there is no lategame'.

I'll give you an example. I've been playing a lot of Ares, a durable support who lacks burst damage but whose ultimate ability can completely turn a teamfight. The spell is called No Escape. Chains fly from Ares towards enemy players in a radius as he leaps into the air. After a few seconds he crashes down, dragging every player chained towards a central point and stunning them. Dota fans: imagine the lovechild of Magnus' Reverse Polarity and Disruptor's Glimpse. New Smite players tend not to buy the crowd control-breaking items that would get them out of dodge, so in these low-level brackets No Escape can act as a game-ending psychological weapon.

Case in point: my last game. The scoreboard is relatively even twelve minutes in. Both teams are almost entirely comprised of junglers and high-damage solo mages. As support Ares, I'm the exception. One of our guys disconnected at the beginning of the game and didn't come back for a few minutes, ceding an early gold and experience lead to the other team that we're only just clawing back. They've grouped up to push down middle lane. I tap two key combinations into the Tribes-style audio command system.

[VD2] Defend middle lane!

[VVVR] Ultimate is ready!

I approach the clustered enemy team from behind, from the jungle. The third-person perspective makes shooter-style sneak attacks a possibility. My blink is on cooldown, but I'm among the enemy team before they have time to do much about it. No Escape connects with all five. During the leap I draw them forwards, closer to our tower. They're dragged into a Chronos nuke; into that impassable ring thing that Odin does; into Loki, who presses a bunch of buttons I guess. (I'm still learning the gods.) Full teamwipe, a five-to-zero victory. They surrender immediately afterwards.

I wasn't the character who picked up the multi-kill, but I, the support, was the character who ended the game. I'd dealt the killing blow to morale in a way that I couldn't aspire to do to the enemy's base.

While I still don't think that a surrender mechanic is ultimately right for Dota, its presence in Smite has demonstrated the role it can play in redistributing power among the team. It allows for demonstrable displays of authority among 'subordinate' player roles, and creates scenarios where victory emerges from something other than a mounting lead in farm or experience. These kinds of psychological early wins play a huge role in Dota 2, of course, but I think the greater emphasis on the power of late-game carries makes them less visible to players who aren't specifically looking for them.

'Momentum' is a word that comes up a lot while discussing the way that teams win games of Dota, and I've written before about the way that this can be thought of both in terms of game mechanics and team psychology. Wins tend to beget more wins, because you've gained a material and emotional advantage. 'Snowballing'. Recently, I've been thinking about this slightly differently. I think there comes a point in the game where your team is in a position to decisively flip the 'victory switch', to turn an advantage into a done thing. This means more than just following the trajectory your momentum has laid out for you—it means identifying an exact methodology for ending the game and then pulling it off. It means closing off uncertainty and confirming victory; if a team's surrender represents a collective willingness to lose, then flipping the victory switch means collectively voting to win.

In that Ares game, the 'switch' could be defined as the moment we planned and achieved a one-sided teamfight victory. In a game where the majority of players on both teams had found themselves taking inconclusive trades in the jungle, a single convincing five-on-five was needed to establish dominance. In a sense, our opponents were right to surrender when they did: that fight in mid demonstrated superior capability stemming from a better-rounded draft, and it is reasonable to assume that we'd be able to repeat that success throughout the game and ultimately win. It was the beginning of the end and therefore, in some ways, the end itself.

Teams throw away their leads when they fail to make their advantage appear insurmountable. In Smite, the version of this I've seen most often is the single-lane death push. The key objective in the game is a Titan which, unlike the Ancient, can fight back against an attacking team. It loses power with every lane of buildings that you eliminate, but players on a roll typically attempt to punch through a single lane and win the game the most direct way they can see. This is often a really good sign if it happens to you, because it demonstrates that your opponent is willing to take risks—they are keeping the possibility space of the match open even as they attempt to end it, giving you options rather than decisively flipping the switch that takes your options away.

In a Smite match like that, that 'switch' might constitute the destruction of a second lane of towers, another Phoenix, or the Fire Giant. In Dota 2 it might be a faked-out split push that baits enough teleports to open up Roshan, followed by a jungle invasion that catches the smoke gank designed to counter the push your opponent believes is coming. These strategies are rarely seen in mid-level pub matches because they require teams to stop, assess what it would take to undo their own advantage, and then act decisively to reduce the chance of that happening to near-zero. It requires a desire to end, not just finish fast.

Learning to play a game with a surrender option has helped me to get better at identifying these moments, because it gives you unique insight into the mind of the enemy team. A surrender call tells you the exact point at which you have successfully drained hope from the equation: where even they agree that the victory switch has been flipped, and flipped by you. Over the course of a couple of weeks you learn the various shapes that moment can take.

That it sometimes takes the form of a play by the guy who buys all of the wards is a bonus, all things considered.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2.

Way back when, I wrote something about how it wasn't very useful to think about Dota 2 as a single game. My argument was that players approach the game in such diverse ways that many are no longer adhering to the same rules as one another. This is the source of the game's most vicious arguments in solo pub play—between the two people who both want to go mid; between the carry that wants to play for the late game and his team who'd rather win; between the armchair generals and those who are playing—shock!—for fun.

I've retreated from solo ranked over the last six months. I simply don't enjoy it. 'Real' Dota 2, for me, takes place with a full team of five people and probably involves a drafting phase. That's not to say that there isn't tremendous skill involved in raising your solo MMR, but it's not a skill I'm particularly interested in. Nowadays, my focus has shifted to teamplay, macro-level strategy, and putting together a hero composition that works.

Somewhere along the way, I've learned a couple of valuable lessons about Captain's Mode—particularly if, like me, you and your friends occupy the middle part of the skill ladder. Needless to say, people at the top don't stand to learn much from a man who can't stop blinking into Disruptor ults. For everybody else, I hope you find this useful.

Meta isn't better

There's a corollary between playing Captain's Mode and aspiring to be a pro—it is, after all, the mode that most closely resembles professional play. It's tempting, in this environment, to assume that professional-style picks and bans are always the right picks and bans. That simply isn't the case.

The metagame is a product of, and specific to, the very highest level of play. 'Top tier' doesn't really mean 'powerful', it means 'powerful in the hands of the best players'. If I'm playing against a random stack in team ladder and their first bans are Brewmaster and Razor then I take that as a very good sign: in the majority of cases their captain is thinking about a game they've watched, not the game they're playing. If I see this from a team I actually know it's an even better sign, because targeted bans are always preferable at a level of play where players have limited hero pools.

In the middle of the pack, I'd argue that pace or teamfight-controlling heroes like Silencer, Faceless Void and Tidehunter make for bigger bans than the current top tier. These are heroes that can strongly entrench a lead, and in general mid-level players struggle most when playing from behind. When picking, always go for heroes that you're familiar with over heroes that pro teams are drafting—unless you want to practice them, and you're willing to lose.

Under pressure

This one might actually be applicable to pro players, but only in certain circumstances. Try to be conscious of the amount of pressure that you're under. You may not feel any, in a regular match, or you may be playing in an amateur tournament or in-house and feeling nervous. Be conscious if you are in any way off your game, because players that are not affected in some way by pressure are incredibly rare.

In game terms, nerves act as a straight debuff to everything you attempt to do. If you are a 4K player normally, you have to assume that you're going to be a 3K or 3.5K player under pressure. Draft with that in mind. I love Brewmaster, but there are days when I know my brain just isn't in the right space. In those circumstances, I should play Centaur Warrunner. The same goes for the whole team—if you're in game two of a best of three and you've lost the first game, playing safe with the draft isn't a bad idea. This principle is how my team has ended up two games from the grand final of the Rektreational games industry tournament despite doing awfully in the first game of almost every match: we think too hard about the first game, and then we pick lots of big circular spells in the second and third.

2 EZ

Credit to Blitz for this one: when assessing an enemy draft, or your own, don't just look for synergies and obvious combos. Look at how easy it is for your opponent to achieve what they want to achieve. If you see a Magnus, Sand King and Gyrocopter, you can see the kind of teamfight they want to have. But as dangerous as that seems, it relies on a number of things going their way. That Magnus needs to be able to land his ult. Their team needs the presence of mind for everybody else to be in position—and so on.

On the other hand, a team with a lot of reliable stuns has far more room to move because it means less if any one member of the team makes a mistake. Answer ambitious drafts by making the game easy for yourself with disables and AoE and you'll win matches that, on paper, you should lose. It's for this reason that I secretly love Wraith King as an early pick: you can cycle him through a couple of roles if needed, he has a reliable stun, he answers wombo combos relatively well and—most importantly—he seems to bait out complicated powerplays from the opposing captain. It's after you draft WK that you see people draw Wex Invokers or Diffusal Blade carries, and unless you're playing teams who are particularly individually skilled at those roles they've probably just backed themselves into a corner. Then you beat them up in that corner.

The unifying theme, here, is staying humble. Know what skill bracket you belong in, why you're there, and what you can practically hope to achieve in the match ahead. Bear in mind that you won't always be able to make the big plays that you want to and that, when it comes down to it, you're probably better off picking another character with a ranged stun than going for whatever it was that Team Secret ran last week.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2.

Dota 2 is about winning. I'm not sure that's a very controversial point. Interpretations of the game are split by experience and skill level, role, personal investment, taste, and so on. How much winning matters is perhaps a more divisive topic, but what it comes down to in the end is this: Dota 2 is about winning. It's about executing your plan in such a way that your opponent doesn't get to execute theirs. It's about tumbling into the random number generator in the hope that this time will be your time. It's about clicking on the little wizards and hoping that their health bars run out before yours do.

That's the theory, anyway. My experience of Dota 2, particularly my recent experience, is a little different. I'd say that while most people would agree that their ultimate goal is to win, the majority of matches actually revolve around other goals entirely. At some point - usually in the midgame, after establishing a startling early lead that makes victory in twenty minutes all but a certainty - many players find their priorities shift. If there's one defining characteristic of normal and high-bracket Dota 2, for me, it's this: that the majority of teams do not actually want to win in twenty minutes. At the very least, they do not act like it.

Here, then, are five things that are often seen to be more important than winning the game. Another way of putting that might be 'ways to throw a game' - but I think that's too reductive. What I'm exploring, here, are the directions you throw in. You can't just throw something; you have to throw it somewhere.

Endorsement of the Faceless Void extended schooling program

Poor Level 7 Faceless Void. Nobody believes in him. He's a little slow. He was this first-picked, supposedly brilliant addition to the enemy team, but look at him. All that popularity amounts to a young man that barely has the mana to string his two spells together. He's rocking brown boots and Gloves of Haste. Even popular kids, you realise, need help sometimes.

Extra tutoring is what is needed, here. With space, time and encouragement, Level 7 Faceless Void has every chance to make good on his potential. You see the importance of a flexible education system that accounts for the needs of the individual, one that understands that not every Level 7 can be expected to perform to the same degree.

To your delight, the program works. You give Faceless Void the freedom to work out his issues on jungle creeps if that's what he needs to do. You feed him a few free meals, now and then, to allow him to focus on his studies. But most importantly you show him that it's worth persevering: you step willingly into Chronosphere after Chronosphere, demonstrating that - yes! - he lives up to the hype. The first time you see a smile creep across that faceless face, lightning bristling from a freshly-completed Mjollnir, you cant help but smile back. Then your ancient explodes.

Dire victory.

Respect for Roshan's personal space

You understand that you are a visitor to this place and that - unlike another team we might mention - you respect the rights of its native inhabitants. Roshan is a prisoner of a sort, yes, but that does not mean that he is below your regard. It would be entirely more proper of you to simply leave him to get on with whatever is he's doing in that cave that's barely big enough for him. What one hunchback dinosaur demon bear monster thing does in his spare time is entirely up to said hunchback dinosaur demon bear monster thing, you resolve.

As for planting wards around his pit - what are you thinking? How would you feel if somebody set up surveillance cameras in your driveway? Violated, is how you would feel. Monitored. Roshan may never leave his cave, but should he ever decide to - likely to go off and ruin an all-star match somewhere - he deserves the right to do so without being tracked like an enemy of the state.

You're not like that. You respect Roshan, and believe that he respects you right back.

Roshan has been slain by the Dire.

Getting the high score in famous singleplayer character action game, Dota 2

Sure, sure. It's a team game. More like asymmetrical co-op. Remember how, in Super Mario Galaxy, Player Two could sit there with a Wiimote and hoover up stars or whatever while Player One went about the actual business of beating the game? It's like that. You're Player One, and your friends are basically just four Player Twos, planting wards and clicking creeps or whatever while you play the actual game. But Dota 2 isn't Super Mario - it's Devil May Cry. It's Bayonetta. You're Player One and you're going to S-Rank this thing. You're 10-0 at eight minutes: it's time to dig deep.

You don't build combos going one-on-one. You need to be taking two, three, four enemies at a time. One versus five? Why not. Let's go. Time to fine-tune those clutch counters and perfect your dodge-roll. You are totally Dante. You are not Dante. There is no dodge-roll button. Shit. Guys?

The integrity of your minimalist performing arts piece about the failings of Athenian democracy

"Guys!" "Guys?" "GUYS." "Guys..."

"..."

Dire victory.

Pursuit of a Cultural victory

Military victories are boring, more about rote lategame clean-up than creativity or finesse. Culture is where it's at. You don't just want to win: you want to demonstrate that your way of life is more advanced, has greater inherent value than that of your opponent. That you are so sophisticated that you do not care about how sophisticated you are.

It is for this reason that your supports do not need Mekansms or Force Staves. These things are feudal barriers in the path of enlightenment, expressions of man's feeble paleolithic need for shelter, protection, warmth and safety. A true culture is beyond these things. In a true culture, every single god damn person has a Dagon.

The Dire have achieved victory through Domination!

Astute readers will have noticed that these noble goals are not mutually exclusive. In the right conditions, it is possible to achieve every one of them in a single match! And still lose.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2, and this is the last installment for 2014. We'll be back in January!

Dota 2 is a game about momentum. That's an often-repeated truth—it's one of the best ways to explain the drama of a competitive match without getting into the inaccessible specifics of high-level play, and it's a piece of advice that I return to over and over as I try to get better at the game. The momentum you build in the early game is important, but what wins matches is your ability to translate that momentum into a strategy that leads, step by step, to the enemy ancient. A dominant start is great, but it needs focused guidance to make good on its potential.

I am a middling Dota player at best, so it's in the midgame that most of my matches stall. Luckily, I can rely on the fact that most of the people I'm matched with are bad at closing out games too. The story of Dota, most of the time, is the story of a team with a bunch of kills and big items trying to summon enough collective will to achieve something in the here and now. It's the story of people wandering off to farm for no reason, of Roshan attempts left uncontested and teamfights lost because the carry has decided to chase Puck halfway across the map rather than pin down the soft and slow enemy supports left behind. Of a lack of focus, in short, and of the faint disbelief that comes with losing from an advantage: 'we were fifteen kills ahead! Why are they knocking over our tier four towers?'

This is also, I think, a fairly good metaphor for Dota 2 as a whole in 2014. This was the year that, after the giddy rise of the game's first two years and the triumph of its departure from beta in 2013, Dota 2 settled into its all-important midgame. And, consistently, what we saw spoke to a mellowing scene and a downward shift in momentum.

Four new heroes were released in 2014 compared to ten in 2013, and two of those arrived right at the beginning of the year—so much so that Terrorblade and Phoenix feel like part of the previous set. An equally dramatic shift occurred the previous year, of course (more than thirty heroes were added in 2012), but it nonetheless speaks to a slower rate of change. The coming engine update and addition of custom game modes will be the most significant thing to come to Dota 2 since its inception, but they arrive at the expense of the Diretide and Frostivus events—and, I suspect, at the expense of Winter Wyvern, Abyssal Underlord, and Arc Warden.

For Valve's part, they've actually got much better at talking to fans and setting expectations—but the nature of that communication has always been 'check back in 2015'. It's like struggling through your midgame and deciding that you're going to take the game late. "Just farm and we'll be fine" is often good advice, but it's hard not to feel some of the same inertia, that nagging concern about whether it's all going to be worth the wait, when so little happens for so long.

If the internal development of the game has entered a kind of passive hibernation, then the growth of the professional scene is defined by a fitful emergence into the real world. The relative simplicity of the last couple of years is over: there are dozens of tournaments now, arguably far too many, and not a single event I've attended this year has been free from technical or scheduling problems of some kind. Top-tier players feel overstretched and under rewarded, and play and audience numbers both suffer as a result. EternaLEnVy's blog on this subject has its detractors, but a lot of what he says is believable in a scene that has grown this quickly and with this little guidance.

E-sports has ever been thus, and the solution is never easy to come by. Centralised control a la StarCraft's WCS can kill momentum just as readily as a run of badly-managed individual events, and besides it's an approach that runs so counter to Valve's philosophy that we might as well write it off as a possibility right now. Valve's faith in the wisdom of crowds is rewarded when the data they gather is processed by a team that understands the limitations of that process. Ceding control of the professional scene for most of the year to a scattering of e-sports organisations doesn't constitute quite the same thing: it's chaos that can only resolve itself by passing through periods of rough adolescence. That's what this year has been, I think: the overconfident teenage Dota 2 scene stumbling into arenas that are too big for it, business deals that do not benefit it, and schedules that it cannot sustain.

That this year's International was a bit of a let-down is actually a separate problem, one that stems from Valve's own stop-and-start growth as an event showrunner. Could they have anticipated that the popularity of exclusive Secret Shop wizard hats would drain a third of the arena at any given time? Probably not. Should they factor that in next year? Absolutely, yes. Could they have guessed that the metagame would stabilise so absolutely—and in such a boring way—right before the grand finals? No. Does it require a response? Again, yes.

2014 revealed 2013's wonderful International to have been a perfect storm in many ways: a confluence of a dynamic scene, fluid metagame and intimate venue that well suited the type of event that I associate Valve with. It can be that way again, I think, but work needs to be done both on the game and on the structure that surrounds it. Meanwhile, the broader pro scene needs to find its feet again, and stabilise long enough for accessible narratives to emerge that we can watch play out on the road to TI5.

This has been a muted year for Dota 2, but it is not—to borrow one of the community's favourite phrases—a dead game. Nor is it dying. It's simply reached the point where, for the first time, growth for growth's sake isn't good enough: where momentum needs to be matched with strategy. Dota 2 just lost that big teamfight around the nineteen minute mark that tells you you're in for a fifty minute epic. Victory is on the cards, but now it's going to take work.

Happily, I think that's what is happening. Valve need the technical apparatus in place to allow them to update the game regularly and sustainably, and that's exactly what they've spent so long creating. The new engine will enhance their ability to entertain the community, and custom game modes open the door to a potentially-infinite source of new ideas. Patch 6.83, released this week, continues the work 6.82 started. Dota 2 is slowly evolving into its next form, and while that work started in 2014 I think we'll feel the result most keenly next year. Finally, the pro scene will be forced to change. MLG and JoinDota are taking an active role in restructuring and unifying fractured tournaments into something better, and player feedback (even if it comes in the form of protest) should force other showrunners to seriously consider the logistical task they're setting themselves when they go for this venue or that schedule.

You know that bit, in a Dota match, when your team loses momentum and somebody immediately taps out 'gg'? That's what I think we've seen in the last couple of weeks. 2014 was a stall, but not the end—and if anything, Dota 2 looks ready to take this one very, very late.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Three Lane Highway is Chris' weekly column about Dota 2.

I've written a lot about the importance of attitude in Dota 2. 'How you act' is as interesting and important a subject to me as 'how you play'—or, at the very least, it's the subject that I feel I'm more qualified to talk about. I've got two and a half years of Dota experience, but significantly more experience of being a human who has to interact with other humans in order to achieve things and be happy. Dota is no different to a vast number of other difficult things you might try to do with other people in that regard, and there are patterns of thought and behaviour that, once you learn them, are a general help. You will be a better player, I've always argued, if you spend some time learning how to avoid being a dick.

I've come at this idea from a couple of different angles over the last six months. Recently, though, I've had another run of unhappy encounters with the game. You might have picked up half a paragraph ago that there's a 'but' coming—something that complicates my typically unquestioning approach to The Importance Of Being Nice. There is a 'but' coming, I'm afraid. Specifically, a 'butt'. I am the butt. I have been a butt, lately. That was a pun. I am really sorry.

I've realised, the hard way, that keeping your shit together during a stressful game isn't something that you learn once and take for granted. Even writing essays about this stuff isn't enough, it turns out, to prevent a backslide into being a backside to your friends. I experience this feeling of having broken my own rules with sufficient regularity that it has become a recognisable psychological scenario in my life: lying in bed about 1am, wishing that I could have closed out that last game of Dota without being a dick in this way or that, feeling generally and pervasively unhappy about the type of person I can become under pressure.

If you've got to this point in the article and thought "chill out, man, it's just a game" then, well, yes, that's the goal. But games make you have all kinds of thoughts and feelings—that's why you play them. You probably play Dota 2 because of the feelings it makes you have, and those feelings make you do things. Controlling what the game makes you do is important. There's no 'just a game' here because games are powerful, and no 'chill out, man' because chilling out is, paradoxically, hard and requires work. Besides: I've been going deep on Dota 2 for long enough now that I might as well keep going. I'm pretty far up the Mekong at this point. The horror, the horror, and so on.

I've realised that setting yourself rules doesn't work if you struggle to provide yourself with an environment where following the rules comes naturally. An analogy for this problem would be the difference between a practice game and a streamed competitive match: the strats you plan, the high-concept drafts you consider can crumble quickly when the parameters of the game change. The same is true for a rule like "never start a sentence with 'why'"—it makes tremendous sense on paper, but Christ! Why did she/he/we try to contest a Roshan attempt that she/he/we knew they were ready to defend? This stuff is rhetorical comfort food. It's bad for you, but it makes you feel better and it's hard to resist unless you are specifically ready to resist it.

One of my new rules, appropriately enough, comes from preparing for competitive matches: treat every game like somebody else is watching. I realised that my outlook is generally more positive when I'm streaming or playing with strangers. If I treat Dota 2 like a performance then I find it less stressful and my behaviour is better. There are obvious concerns raised here about how authentic I'm being—but honestly, I'm authentically an asshole. I'd rather be a pretend person who is fun to play with.

The second point is related, but almost the thematic opposite: watch how other people play for your benefit, not theirs. I'm terrible at this, because I'm bossy and habitually micromanage unless I make myself stop. The key thing I've realised is that in the vast majority of cases the small inefficiencies I might perceive in someone else's play are either entirely in my head or totally insignificant to the match as a whole. The urge to educate is more accurately an urge to replicate my own behaviour in somebody else. And I suck! I'm far more likely to learn something about what I'm doing wrong by watching somebody than find something to correct in them—and its even less likely that what I attempt to correct will be so significant that it's worth sundering the mood of the game to do so.

There's one exception to this, and it's when someone has actively and clearly asked you to comment on what they're doing. It's nice to be micromanaged by a better player—useful, fun, energising. You should try it. But doing so unbidden, deliberately or not, is pointless. You might as well walk up to somebody in the street, look at their outfit, and advise them to wear all of your clothes because they're your clothes, and they fit you, so they must be the right clothes.

The key here, I think, is recognising the benefits of actively cohabiting rather than passively coexisting. That sounds pseudish and awful but there's truth there. Being actively engaged is key, because you can't ever trust your passive urges to lead you in the right direction. I might really want to chew somebody out for a mistake, and it might make me feel better, but I know from repeated experience that it'll make me feel bad later. I'd be dumb to fall into that trap again.

Finally: quit while you're ahead. There's another thing you should never do even if you really want to, and that's play another game of Dota 2 when you just lost one and you're already tired but you really want to win. This is the error, for me. It is the fun-killer, the little death that brings total obliteration. You've got to Bene Gesserit up in the face of that 'just one more' urge. It won't be fine next time. You won't learn, because you're already tilting. Nobody ever turned a tilt around by tilting harder in the same direction. Tilts do not work that way. They are not cyclical.

The ultimate way to create a scenario where you don't lose your temper with your friends is to go the fuck to sleep. You can't stare at the ceiling at 1am regretting your decisions if you're happily unconscious by then. This is the nuclear option, I guess, but honestly? The community as a whole would be much more positive place if Valve tried an event where players earned Arcanas by taking a lovely nap every time they lost a game.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.