When you do something stupid, you probably won’t know that you’re doing something stupid, but the rest of your team will.

The first ten minutes are normally the ten you can get away with before someone calls you out on doing something wrong, unless you do something daft like go and get yourself killed. Twice. Within the first 30 seconds. Before the match has even started.

After this, your team will probably start having different ideas and theories about where everyone should be pushing and exactly what should be in your inventory and when you should and shouldn’t be running into and out of a fight and things start getting interesting, or at least stressful, which is a kind of interesting.

A quest for understanding

There are many people who do not understand DOTA 2. Several of these people are DOTA 2 players, but  the rest are those who might have tried DOTA 2, got shouted at and decided it wasn’t for them, people who have seen it from the sidelines and failed to see the appeal, those who don’t own a PC or haven’t seen it as a gaming platform, and those who don’t understand gaming as a whole and don’t know what a DOTA is, let alone that there appears to be two of them.

As of a few weeks ago, I firmly sat somewhere between the camps of people who have been shouted at and people who don’t see the appeal. It’s a really odd title and your first few games will likely make it or break it for you. Or maybe it will just confuse you enough to make you want to write a 1000+ word blog post about it.

What is DOTA 2?

When you’re starting out with DOTA 2, there’s a lot to take in. In short, Defense of the Ancients Two (DOTA 2) is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) developed and published by Valve (Valve isn’t an acronym) and sporting a free-to-play (F2P) model making it open to anyone with a Steam (also not an acronym) account.

Just in case you’re keeping up with this, MOBA is the new-fangled term that the internet has given to something that’s a DOTA clone. Let’s put a little breakout box thing around here to give you a bit more history if you want it.

Two teams of five go head to head to head to wipe out their opponent’s base, specifically the structure at its heart which is called the Ancient, whilst protecting their own base and Ancient from the same fate.

Each individual player controls a hero chosen from a roster of 108 different heroes, each with unique abilities and play-styles that all work with and against each other differently. At this point, the complexity is probably enough to put people off, but the rabbit hole goes deeper when you then throw in around 60-odd items that enhance various attributes that you can buy from different shops and combine together to build up your heroes using the gold you earn from killing neutral monsters on the map.

Oh, there are neutral monsters on the map that fight with or against you that you can kill off to gain gold and experience, that experience you then use to take your hero from level 1 through to level 20 and beyond in a single match, unlocking abilities and skills to become more powerful along the way.

In order to win, you have to do this faster than your opposing team’s heroes, so not being taken out of action thus allowing them to overtake you is crucial if your team is going to stand a chance.

What are your first matches in DOTA 2 going to be like?

There will be shouting, albeit often typed shouting.

There will be people disappointed in you.

You will be called names by incredibly unpleasant people and most of this will come from people who are on the same side as you.

You will not understand why half of this is happening and even when you’ve got to grips with the basics, reasons for just how angry some of your team can get will still elude you. Apparently the angry people start thinning out a little the more you play but we’ll see if that’s true or not.

You’ll possibly learn a bit of Russian, although not anything you can repeat in public.

If you don’t know what you’re doing in DOTA 2, it appears that it’s very easy to tell this. A few of the things that have given me away include:

• Getting killed in the first few seconds of the match
• Not buying items from the shop
• Not knowing how to use the donkey (donkey management also a core part of this game)
• Running away from a fight
• Running into a fight

Additionally, actually saying you’re not sure what’s going on is often not enough to satisfy the more unpleasant members of your team. Essentially there are plenty of ways you can go wrong and there are wildly varying levels of patience in the player community.

Why would anyone play DOTA 2?

It’s not often you can play something for 14 hours and still not really know if you like it or not. Whilst I’m fully aware that I haven’t exactly sold this game, I’m equally not sure I want to.

I’ve heard people have clocked up 200 hours or more to DOTA 2 and still feel like they don’t know what’s going on, so it’s hardly surprising, but for a frame of reference, in 14 hours I could have played through Bioshock Infinite one and a half times and been able to give you a complete breakdown of how it is to play, offer an opinion on the general feel of the game and have a mini discussion about the games themes and much debated ending. With DOTA 2 I can give some vague ideas about lanes and what you should do in those lanes, a bit of an impression on heroes and comments about a general feeling of anxiety that it’s likely to inspire when you know you’re doing something wrong but don’t really know what.

For your first few games of DOTA 2, the best thing you can probably hope for is that you get shouted at for something different in each match, at least that’s how I’m tracking progress. It is of course entirely possible I’m just an awful player and a bit slow on the uptake.

The title of this post led me to believe you would give me some help with DOTA 2. Why haven’t you given me any help with DOTA 2?

I am in the very worst position to give you help with DOTA 2. I can say that it does get better, but I’m not sure how much better it can get. Faced with the prospect of either playing a bit of DOTA 2 before bed or writing a 1000+ word article about DOTA 2, the writing was the much more inviting option so it’s not always something you’ll feel like playing.

But there really is something about it. I’ve written before about that feeling of looking at something you don’t understand and wanting to know its secrets and how much that can draw you in. DOTA 2 has this factor in larger quantities than anything else I’ve ever seen, including Dwarf Fortress.

If you’re looking for actual help with starting the game, Welcome to Dota, You Suck is the excellent starting guide often passed around to new players and reading through that will get you past most of the dark times and at least help you work out why everyone is getting angry with you most of the time.

As for this, I might post a few more things about DOTA 2 as I work them out, so follow @ChaoticTortoise on Twitter  if you want to hear more of my confused ramblings.

Next on The Dota Diaries: Donkey Management