I don’t play DOTA2 but that’s some seriously great live service management. Smurfing in Overwatch2 drove me nuts (I’ve even given up playing the game). Constant leavers, toxic behavior, and no repercussions.

Tracking smurf accounts back to their main (likely by reviewing IPs as one account logs out and another logs in) is a powerful way to stamp out this behavior and deter people from smurfing in F2P games where having multiple accounts doesn’t cost a cent.

Smurfing prevented me from playing LoL and Dota2, impossible to get into a game when you can’t get off the ground, the opposition is made up of smurfs and half or more of your team as well, and you get shit on for trying to learn how to play.

That was my exact experience with the original Warcraft 3 mod to the point I’ve never bothered with MOBAs beyond Overwatch.

DotA Allstars was the worst and was the thing that made me initially not get into MOBAs. I always used to nickname that game Defense of the Assholes because of how toxic the player base was.

Best memory was sixteen years ago being labelled a feeder, kicked from an -apem game on Bnet mid-match, added to a global banlist, and told by the game host to hang myself when I asked him what his fucking problem was.

What was the cardinal sin I committed which led to such a heavy-handed and toxic response, you may ask? I bought Mekanism while playing Dragon Knight.

Funny thing is, depending on the time period, mek on DK wouldn’t even be that outlandish. I’ve seen it built in pubs and pro games plenty of times.

I think it’s a problem with competitive gaming. People are incapable of critical thinking, and my fifteen-year-old brain’s thought process at the time was that DK had very high innate armor and health regeneration, and Meka would not only bolster that, but allow me to heal/buff allies, push waves harder since it affects minions, and just snowball the game.

I think it’s just because most players tend to be good at micro, but not so much macro.

Having a set “build” takes the macro thought of your item choice out of the equation so they can focus on their micro. The thing is though, you can easily make up for subpar micro with good macro. Picking the best items for a given situation, even if they aren’t necessarily “meta” is incredibly important and something most players just don’t feel like mastering.