The game is wonderful and very kind to beginners... While they are in the menu.

The community is not only positive, but also has telepathic skills. They told me that my dad wasn't really my dad, and my mom wasn't working where I thought she was.

Also, one of the advantages is that there are many doctors playing Dota 2 and they can easily diagnose your mental and physical abilities.

Oh, I remember.
Made me uninstall mid tutorial, that's how boring this game is.

Impressions are purely based on nearly 200 unranked games, but by god is Dota 2 one brilliant video game with one incompetent developer and millions of players who don't deserve access to anything made after 19th century.

I wish I could enjoy it because the actual game part is brilliant. It quite the first of its kind, but it definitely defined and popularized it, and it's easy to see why. They took the fun of hero characters in RTS games, amplified it tenfold, and then built a whole game around it. Every match you have a lot of decisions to make that vary drastically based on the state of the game, team compositions, economy, individual player builds and playstyles, etc. Even the characters themselves are so diverse, and I think this is the biggest leg up it has over the competition. Gameplay itself can shift so much from character to character that it's almost understandable why some sickos pick one flavor and the eat nothing but that for thousands of hours.

It's also an almost paradoxical game where both hero and system overall enable a great amount of skill expression, yet proper teamwork and coordination are still important to an extent that you rarely actually see in team based multiplayer games. It's also one game where "nobody is broken when everyone is" really does feel accurate. In the right hands and with the right items, pretty much every character can do things that will make you think "well, that's some bull****," yet there is often a powerful counter to it, a way to play around it, or something equally bull that every other character can pull off. Dota 2 *feels* loose in every element of its design, yet when you look closer at any of those elements, you start seeing thin but unbreakable connection that weave the fabric that Dota is made of.

Even in terms of visuals and storytelling I like more about it than I would expect from a MOBA. There's a lot of lore to explore, and while much of it is lacking, and Valve is sort of just sitting on it, it feels like whoever is responsible for putting it all together still cares deeply about the universe that this game is set it, and Crownfall is hopefully first of many examples of what can be done with it.

The only caveat here is that Valve also has some of the soulless, greediest monetization practices, and very low standards for maintaining the visual integrity of the games they created. All the fine craftsmanship that was put into creating the art style of TF2 was smeared with crap once lootbox money started rolling in. CS mostly resisted this, because cosmetics used to be limited to only weapons, but Dota 2 art style also went down the drain. Anything is permitted, and the more offensively tasteless it looks, the more rare and expensive it is.

The base characters all have their charm in some way. I understand that they aren't to everyone's taste. Many of them lack maybe one or two features that would make them feel like a "main character," which is something that I feel a lot of hero based games chase after. All of them are just a bit too plain or simple to fit that role. You have dozens of dudes in armor of various colors and sizes, but it weirdly appeals to me that no individual character feels too "special" I guess?

That was all thrown out the moment Valve smelled money. Now you can spend an unreasonable amount of money in order to turn your unremarkable mook into a high level MU Online whale. It's funny because Valve still has those brilliant cosmetics guidelines for people who want to make something, but they haven't cares about what is said there for years. Silhouettes? Who cares. Glance value? Dude, just remember that this pile of pixels is Sniper. The arcanas are especially offensive, because they advertise extra crap as a selling point. Most Dota 2 chars emit zero lights or particles, some sets will give you clouds, glowing gems, arcs of lightning, buzzling flies or orbiting stars, excess is the goal over something coherent or appealing, and the community happily eats it up. Perhaps they don't even care about the look, since all of this is connected to the real money marketplace that enables gambling addicts, whales, and kids who think they can make money by playing their favorite video game.

Anyway, Valve happily enabling gambling aside, one of the main things that makes this game harder to enjoy is the quality of matchmaking and moderation. I have a succesful griefing report for pretty much every single day that I played, and to give you an idea, that doesn't even include a case where we had a willow that stood AFK in the fountain and sent our her courier to die, I guess that didn't count or something. Griefers would be one thing, but there's also so many accounts that are merely days old but obviously aren't remotely new to Dota. If it all it takes to avoid smurf que is to occasionally throw a game, then I'm not sure Valve understands the point of smurf que. Finally even ignoring these two points that already ruin 90% of my matches, the game loves to put new and old players together. I don't care if MMR is similar, a Zeus with 12k wins will be stronger than (non-smurfing) Zeus qith 20 games under their belt, it makes no sense to not take player count into account.

Maybe ranked would've resolved some of my woes, but you need 100 in-game hours to even gain access to that. It took me well over 150 matches to get to that point. I'm not sure if Dota players understand this, but the point of ranked isn't just to stroke your ego and to achieve the highest number/icon possible. It's there to enable fair matches between equally matched opponents. If someone is new and bad, they will be put up against other new and bad players, that's good.

"But it keeps smurfs out" please reconsider even attempting to think that this makes sense. More dedicated smurfs are buying accounts and paying boosters to get whatever they want, Valve is exceptionally bad at handling that too. More stingy ones are then thrown into unranked with players who could've been playing ranked, and I'm not sure too many of them are willing to endure low quality matches for 100 hours before they are allowed to experience something more tolerable. It's really a shame. Under more caring developer, Dota 2 could've been a fantastic experience.