I’ve spent a lot of time in Dota. As of last week, my steam is officially registering over 10,000 hours in game. That’s more than a year of my life, spent locked in hour-long bouts with people who most of the time, would rather tell me to uninstall and die, than offer anything constructive about the game or how to win. I’ve often said that Dota is a game for psychopaths and masochists, and while that’s an intentional exaggeration to convey the mental fortitude needed to endure these games in large doses, they certainly wear away at even the most stoic and un-tiltable of us. Within the last few years, I’ve finally started to question why I bother. Why slog through a game that is supposed to be fun, only to perform poorly and be berated for it until my ancient finally falls. I think a lot of us feel this way. It’s tiresome, and uninspiring. Thankfully though, I’ve done some work to adjust my habits around the game, and now I only play with friends, the majority of my games are unranked, and I take things far less seriously. I enjoy Dota now more than I have in a long time, and it’s much easier to de-stress with than it had been previously.
While I was working on these changes though, I was left asking myself why our community was like this. There’s been lots of discussions all through game development circles around player toxicity, and how to curb it, and what incentivizes certain types of behaviors, and a bunch of other buzz-wordy type explorations, but I had never personally felt that they were directly applicable to the behavior I saw. Nothing ever quite cornered the issue, and gave me something to point at and scream “AHA!” so that I could stamp it out, or cleverly skirt around it. One of the most striking observations I made during this period came to me when I was about as far away from my computer as I typically get. I was at the hockey rink. My team was playing in a playoff game, and while it was early in the game, we were down a couple goals and things were looking tough. The other team was skating toward the neutral zone, and dumped the puck into the corner, where I skated out of my net to retrieve it. Upon handling the puck, I turned back, and looked for a forward to make a breakout pass to, and when I found my target, completely whiffed the pass. The puck dribbled out 10 feet in front of me, the attacking skater picked it up, and gingerly tapped it into my empty net. For the readers below the 49th parallel, I basically did one of these. The immediate shame that washed over me was incredible and I started to beat myself up, and prepare for the jeers from the bench. As I sauntered back into my crease though, both of my defenders came over, tapped me on pads, and said “no worries buddy, we’ll get ‘em back”. I chuckled to myself, and for a brief instance before the puck dropped again, thought about how differently that communication from my teammates would have been had I just whiffed an ultimate in a game of Dota. If I’d done a classic “I thought I blinked” echo slam or ravage.
That moment stuck with me, because it exemplified an attitude that I’ve had instilled with me since I was a kid. While I never played at any serious competitive level, I had played team sports since I was maybe four years old. First softball, then soccer, then hockey. Whatever sport it was, this attitude was consistent, “We win together, we lose together.” No matter what mistakes an individual player makes, you are there to build them up, and help them play their best. If everyone on the team plays their best, and you still lose, then you hold your head high, knowing you gave it everything you had. If someone wasn’t playing their best, then you as a teammate need to step up, and help them get there. Whether it’s through a reassuring affirmation like my defenders made, or a bit of constructive feedback, or just a joke to lighten the mood, you have a responsibility to the morale and energy of those around you. A lot of players will tell you that hockey is a mental game because of aspects such as these, but we play Dota, the king of mental games.
“Dota is a sick mental game. It brings out the best and the worst in you.”
- Johan “N0tail” Sundstein – The International 2018 Truesight
What I think the key difference is that I’ve observed, is that in Dota, many players don’t recognize or care about the ability they have to influence the output of their teammates. In team sports, your team is one that you play with across many games. A full season in a rec league can be 20-30 games, and typically you’ll play more than one season with the same group of guys. In order to maximize performance, players tend to naturally gravitate towards social behaviors that make their teammates more comfortable as it produces better results. It’s not just about the single game performance, it’s about creating an environment and atmosphere of positivity so that over the course of a season, everyone has more good nights than bad. Everyone makes mistakes, or has a stressful day that can impact their play, but the important thing is that if everyone shows up to a game excited to play, they’ll do ten times better than if they show up worried about being judged. Due to the single-game interactions that we see in matchmade games like Dota, it’s easy to see your teammates as adversarial, especially since the pool of players is so huge that there’s a decent chance that you’ll forget who those teammates are before you ever interact with them again.
I believe Dota reinforces the negativity that we all recognize and fear via the absence of this expectation of future interaction. The more times you anticipate interacting with a person, the better you’ll treat them. Imagine a new person starting at your company or school. They bump into you in the hallway and spill your papers. You may be annoyed, but I’m sure most decent people would smile and dismiss their apologies without hesitation. It’s even a cliche setup to a number of romantic comedies. However, that same morning while driving to said school or work, someone cuts you off in traffic. Under your breath you mutter some obscenities and wonder to yourself how that person ever passed their drivers test. The difference? The expectation that you’ll interact with that person in the future. Your coworker is someone you’ve deduced that you’ll see five days out of every week, for potentially years into the future. Beginning a feud with them on the first day of those potential years is trepidatious, even for the most ill-mannered of people. Flipping someone off in traffic though? In a big city, your chances of ever seeing them again are lower than 1 in a million. So it goes with Dota. We have social patterns that reinforce tribalism built into our understanding of the world, and those manifest by treating the people we play with as expendable.
So then how can Valve adjust for this? Is this not a problem that’s plagued multiplayer games for over a decade now? Well yes, but I have some thoughts. Some of them are drastic, but I would argue that at a certain point, shaking things up may be warranted given the declining player base and the notorious reputation Dota has for its toxicity.
Firstly, expand the guild system. Something about it simply taps into the tribalism I pointed to earlier, and encourages better interactions. Out of the 50 people in my current guild, I personally know maybe 6 of them. However, when I see a fellow SMAT in my games, I instantly get a little bit more jovial. If they’re on the enemy team I’ll say something cheeky like “SMAT v SMAT!” in all chat, or if they’re allied, I’ll drop a “SMAT! Let’s do this!”. God knows why. I don’t know that person, and would likely have never said a thing to them had they not had the tag, but guilds tap into that familiarity, and even competitiveness. They create healthy rivalries, and bonding friendships, and they encourage cross-talk that can only positively impact the games community. I look at guilds now the way that I look at sports jerseys. You may not know that person walking down the street, but if they’re wearing your colors, a high five is most certainly in order, or at least a nod in the covid era. There’s a lot that can be done to guilds. Right now they’re an odd system that gives out a few cosmetic rewards to players who participate, but I believe that if Valve pushed on these in the right ways, they could become a more integral social hub to the game, where guild members interact with each other more than with randoms, which creates greater expectations of future interactions, and pushes towards parties and in-houses which make Dota infinitely more bearable and fun.
Next, I would strongly consider making ranked matchmaking a 5v5 only experience. I expect this to be the most contentious of my suggestions, as solo ranked has been a significant part of Dota for a long time, however, I feel as though it pushes for better interactions. By leaving solo Dota to unranked, we reduce the negative impact of a player disagreement as there’s no MMR on the line. Valve can still maintain their unranked rating system, and we can still have balanced and even competitive matches in solo games, they just won’t have visible points attached to them. I also feel that this change would be benefited by the above expansion of the guild system. If people formed tighter groups around filling 5-stacks for ranked, there’s a lot of opportunity for guilds to feed these play habits. Surfacing your guild as a place to fill out those stacks, or start them, allows you to see more of the same people more frequently, and build connections that form more teams for our withering esports ecosystem, as well as drive casual players to bond around more common and fun goals. This concept certainly has kinks to work out. How do you handle squads that boost low ranked players? How do you balance queue times with fewer “units” of players to matchmake with? I understand there’s technical issues associated with these, but I do firmly believe the majority of these issues are tunable and can be addressed with a careful eye and minor adjustments. Would eliminating solo ranked be a huge change? Absolutely. Do I think we’d see a stronger Dota community and esports ecosystem for it? A hundred times yes.
Finally, I’d love to see an effort to impart some level of permanence to a player’s behavior, both positive and negative. Currently in game, a low behavior score only has an adverse effect on you once you drop low enough for low priority to trigger, and a positive behavior score has… basically no tangible benefit. Additionally, due to the way steam nicknames work, toxic players can rebrand every day if they so choose, and make it nigh impossible to tell if the person you’re playing with today, was the same person who was griefing you yesterday. It would be nice to see Valve attach some permanence to player profiles which would force the perpetrators to carry around a more public badge of shame. This would allow positive players to track and recognize negative actors easier, allowing for quicker mutes, and better use of the avoid system. What exactly that looks like, I’m not totally sure. Perhaps once your behavior score reaches a certain threshold your ability to edit your username is restricted, and your account is tagged with an indicator that you’re considered a toxic or belligerent player. The same could be done to the inverse where players with exceptional behavior scores are given some level of badge, similar to Overwatch’s endorsement system. All of this ties together to add more positive and negative reinforcement to positive and negative behavior in games.
I would love to hear the community’s thoughts on this below. Do you think my suggestions make sense? Do you think the Dota community can ever be reformed? What would it take for new players to find this community a tolerable place to spend their time? Is discussing these things even worth it amidst years of self-reinforcing toxicity?