If you're thinking of getting into this game, don't.

While it can be extremely rewarding to play well, the game also punishes you for things that are out of your control. The amount of time required to play at a high degree of skill far exceeds what a normal person should dedicate to any sort of video game. If you're an average player playing on your main account, the quality of your games will greatly depend on what the other 4 teammates of yours are like. Not only can a match be ruined by a teammate, but smurfing does occur and is something that can be dealt with through a large effort from your team through communicating a lot, which is rare to see.

This game is like a toxic relationship. It will love bomb you at the start and then bring you down. Right as you're about to leave, it somehow manages to give you quality games which gives you hope for future games, but that is simply not the case. Your hopes run out and just as you're about to leave, it gives you yet another tiny dose of hope. Rinse and repeat until you end up becoming very toxic, depressed, hate the game or a mix of all the aforementioned.

Dota 2 is less a game, and more of a lifestyle. If you opt to play casually then prepare for an onslaught of insults from your teammates. If you play the game religiously, prepare to be let down by casual players that hop into your matches and play in unorthodox or even game ruining ways.

While updates do come out to change the meta, and new heroes are released occasionally, the development plans for this game are often unclear. The player is left hanging, left to guess when the next patch will drop. Patch notes are not released ahead of time either to give players time to prepare for the next patch. Instead, patches come out of the blue with patch notes dropping at the same time as the update itself.

The quality of the seasonal games modes has dropped significantly as time has gone by. Aghanim's Labyrinth was a breath of fresh air and a great addition to Dota, until it was removed. The only upside is that the workshop community is active and fortunately someone brought that game mode back. Besides from that, there are no actual new game mode implemented to the core Dota game. The seasonal game modes that are released are all very lack luster and minimal effort as well. The last two events game modes that came out have felt like reskins of each other.

The reporting system for this game is something that has improved a lot in my opinion, although it is still flawed in its own ways. Communication reports are still not something that seem to have much impact. With a community as toxic as the one that Dota fosters, you'd assume that communication reports would've been something that was added on the Overwatch update. Overall, the Overwatch system seems to have helped and reports do seem to mean a bit more nowadays than it did a year ago.

Finally, the matchmaking. The matchmaking in this game seems to be designed to keep the players engaged with the game, rather than providing a satisfying experience. For some reason, matchmaking seems to be rigged for a 50% winrate. If one player is too good, even if its not on you, matchmaking will try to balance it out with very much inferior teammates while providing opponents of higher quality than your team's average. It almost feels like dota does a coinflip for its matchmaking on what team will get the better quality players to keep everyone at a almost guaranteed 50/50. This is not to say winstreaks or lose streaks dont happen. However I have found that for every win streak you get, you are bound to have a lose streak of the same length.

TLDR:

Dota 2 is a great game, unfortunately the development team is incapable of communicating with the player base, and seem more focused on releasing more hats than they are in improving game play. The community is a big part of the game, and unfortunately due to the high competitiveness nature of MOBAS, the community is very toxic. The only people friendly to new players are those that queue with them, and the few saints that are actually patient. If you have never been in a relationship, but want to know what a toxic one feels like then Dota is the game for you.