I’ve been playing a lot of Defense of the Ancients: Allstars (DotA) lately. It’s a Warcraft 3 mod, and is testament to the strength of the mod tools there, as two entirely new genres (Tower Defense is the other one) have spawned from Warcraft 3 mods. For those who haven’t played it, the best way to describe it is as a massively accelerated MMO. You control one hereo from top down, and you level him up to level 25 and purchase a variety of equipment. There are two sides of heroes, and each side also gets a constant stream of NPC Creeps that head towards the opposing base. The goal is to destroy the opposing base, so success depends on a combination of dealing with Creeps and dealign with other players.

It’s quite an interesting game. Because you have to deal with both other players AND the other side’s creeps, there are a lot of choices for character development. There is also a massive number of unique heroes, 93 as of right now. You may be thinking that it’s nearly impossible to balance that many heroes, and you’d be right, but almost every hero is interesting and fun to play. When you have two even sides, and everyone is working together on a team, it’s an absolutely exhilarating hour or so of gameplay. DotA at it’s best is some of the most fun I’ve had playing games.

The problem is that when you play online, this essentially never happens. I’ve never been as frustrated and disappointed with gamers as when I try to play DotA online with random people. First, in about 90% of games someone will drop out of the game before it’s over. About half of the time it’s due to lag/network issues, and about half of the time it’s someone ragequitting. The people who DON’T leave the game spend most of their time telling you in specific detail why you suck and should end your life. This is from teammates, not the other team. Oh, and 25% of the time, someone joins the game with the explicit purpose of throwing the game and making the opposing team win. Playing DotA online is a total crapshoot in terms of fun and emotional trauma.

So why is the DotA player base more bitter, angry, and mean towards each other than almost anywhere else? I think it comes down to DotA having the perfect storm of of problems, that all build on each other:

1. Once someone leaves a DotA game, there is no way for anyone to rejoin. This is a limitation of the WC3 engine.
2. Games last from 45 minutes to 1:30, which is a long time when people can’t rejoin
3. There’s no penalty for leaving. Because DotA is a custom game, there’s no ranking that can be decreased when people leave, and no way to see how often they leave.
4. It’s heavily team-based. The only way to do really well at DotA is to interact with your teammates, and a bad player can bring the team down.
5. There’s no skill-based match making, so teams often consist of a random set of skills. This would normally not necessarily be a problem.
6. Success is somewhat cumulative. There is a fair amount of self-balancing built into it, but if you start out doing well it can be difficult to recover.
7. Players think that success is way more cumulative then it actually is. I’ve been in games where one team has recovered from being far behind. Despite this, as soon as it looks like they’re not explicitly winning the game, they will immediately quit.
8. The item-upgrade system is fairly complicated. It is possible to make some bad choices in buying items, as it depends a lot on which character you have. As a consequence there are bitter wars over what the “best build” is, despite the system being complicated enough that there are many valid builds.
9. As a consequence, if anyone on a team does anything that isn’t absolutely 100% perfect (according to what build that player thinks is right), most players will instantly mock them for it, almost always in as nasty a way as possible.
10. As most people don’t like being called an idiot repeatedly, it’s very hard to learn anything, and new players will end up quitting or just ignoring the good advice of the small number of actually helpful people. Very quickly, everyone on a team hates everyone else on their team.

When you combine these, 95% of DotA games on the internet are painful, demeaning, and a waste of time. Perhaps Demigod or League of Legends can take the DotA concept and make it a fun, compelling online experience, but until then I strongly recommend that you only play DotA with friends. The fact that I keep trying to play it online by myself, while getting burned every time, says something about myself I think…