DotA 2 general tips

   This article is about Defense of the Ancients 2, or in short, DOTA 2. In this article, I'll try to give some tips to new players, but I'm pretty sure everyone has something to learn from it. These are all based on my personal experience of 3500+ hours and 4600 MMR (which translates to top 5% in the world, considering that the game has currently 10 million+ active players).

   So, DOTA 2 is a free to play MOBA game developed by Valve on the Souce 2 platform based on the Warcraft 3 mod called Defense of the Ancients. Dota 2 was officially released for PC via the digital distribution platform Steam in 9 July 2013, following a Windows-only public beta phase that began two years prior in 2011. After a couple of weeks of its beta phase, the biggest e-sports tournament at that time, The International, took place, featuring a prize pool of 1.6 Million dollars. After that, DOTA 2 kept the tradition with The International becoming an annual event and bringing players from other MOBA style games to DOTA.

   From a personal perspective, DOTA 2 is an action packed, adrenaline inducing, time eating, very addictive, mind game. It can be a lot of fun if played properly or very frustrating and competitive otherwise. The main idea of the game is to team up with 4 other players, each one controlling a hero and together to destroy the enemy's main building called the Ancient. Meanwhile, the enemy team will try to do the same. Simple, right?

   The only problem is that there are, at the moment, 111 heroes to choose from, giving us more than 128 million possible hero combinations. Each hero with its own abilities, mechanics and specifications. Besides that, in order to achieve your goal, you have to gain gold to buy items...lots of items, which adds a whole new dynamic to the already very very complicated game.

   The result is a fascinating game more complex than football and chess combined in which every single decision adds up to ultimately decide the winner. The only downside of this is that there's a huge skill gap between players. I see DOTA 2 as a hard to learn - impossible to master, since there's always room to improve.

   And some of the ways to improve are:

• Watching other people play
  
     This one sounds boring, right? "Why should I watch someone play instead of playing the game myself? That's just dumb." Well the truth is that other players, better players, were already in your shoes and after hundreds of games, they realized they do some things wrong and changed them. You can watch a couple of hours of people playing the game and explaining why they do what they do, or play yourself hundreds of games and wonder why you're losing more than half of them. The choice is yours. BSJ, Khezu, PurgeGamers, AdmiralBulldog, Gorgc, Wagamama are just a few of the DOTA 2 players who you should check out.

• Watching your own replays
  
     This one sounds very much like the first one, but the concept is fundamentally different. When you watch others you learn what you're doing wrong, when you watch your own games, you try to recognize the things you were doing wrong, according to better players, and change them. This is by far one of the most underrated forms of learning the game. No one is doing it in the lower ranks. You should.
• Watching live tournaments
  
     Tournaments are a lot of fun, and besides the fun you'll be having watching the best teams in the world compete with each other and hearing it from the best casters in the DOTA 2 community, you'll learn a lot of things from it. From the way the meta goes, to the most overpowered heroes, from the newest bug abuse to the cool way a new mechanic works, you can learn a lot of things that you can later try out with your friends or in the Solo Queue.

• Change your mentality
  
     This is by far the biggest problem in the DOTA 2 community. The toxic mentality doesn't bring you anything good. Try to remain calm no matter how badly your opponents screw up. The truth is, they will always screw up, that's a constant. The only variable is how well YOU play, so start focusing on that. Think of what YOU could have done better in order to win a specific game and always try to motivate your team to win. Remember, no match is lost until one Ancient falls. I've learnt that the hard way, so trust me on that one.

• Play the correct heroes
  
     Sometimes, the best idea to rank up is to spam certain heroes that are in the meta. To know which ones, go to step 1 and 3. Be sure to also have a backup plan in case your hero is picked or banned by another player. And you shouldn't do this for a long time. If you get too far on the ranking system with just 2 - 3 heroes, you will play bad with the rest and eventually lose games because of it. You should have a 10 heroes pool that you're good at.

• Play for fun
  
     Remember, the goal is to have fun. If you're not happy, what's the point? You can always try the Arcade Games or play some unranked with your friends, the choice is yours. DOTA 2 gives you so many options that you can never get bored. But if you play just to win, you'll get frustrated when you lose and that will turn into rage and that will turn against your future teams which will lose you more games.
  
     In rest, good luck and have fun and I hope I'll see you in the battlefield soon enough.