Rule 1 - Be Friendly, Forgiving, and Supporting

- Three things that I normally try to do in my games are these. I try to be friendly to my teammates and usually this helps in getting them to do stuff later. Things like, telling them they have a cool set, making casual small talk, and complementing good plays or kills (this can easily be done without even looking, just use the “Well Played!” thing in your chat wheel). Another thing is to be forgiving, if your teammate gets caught out somewhere, or dies to a 5 man gank, don’t flame them instead, tell them to be more careful, and offer them helpful advice such as farming around the team, or where we have vision. Being supporting is actually the easiest part of this trinity of sorts, this can be done by actually playing a support, or doing support things, such as stacking a camp, buying wards, placing wards, helping out with ganks, and if you’ve won your lane and taken a tower, help your team out by pushing other towers instead of farming jungle for 20 min.

Rule 2 - Be Positive

- it is always good to stay positive when going into something challenging. Too often I see this mentality in dota games where people mainly believe its a 1v9 and you have to win before your team can throw. I think that if you go into a game with the mentality that you’re going to lose, then you’ve already lost the game. One of my firm beliefs when playing dota is to never give up until they have you team wiped, have mega creeps, and their whole team is destroying your ancient. If you die or lose your lane, don’t “gg” out and give up 15 mins into the game, keep trying. This mentality is the very reason why I put the “Don’t Give up!” on my chatwheel, because I don’t think giving up is an option, with enough effort and positivity you still have the mental fortitude to come back from even the biggest throws.

Rule 3 - Don’t Flame

- This could probably be grouped in with 2/3s of this article, but I felt like it deserves its own part. Basically, don’t flame your teammates, even if they really honestly deserve it, just hold yourself back and have some sort of patience. Try to be helpful if you can, and if you’re prone to geting flamed and or not being able to listen to teammates I have three easy steps for you.

- Open your Dota client
- Go to game settings in the Option Tab
- Go over to the chat and toggle “Mute all incoming chat” and/or “Mute chat from enemies” to your prefrence.

Have Fun!!!

Dota is just a game, and games are meant to be played for our entertainment, if you aren’t entertained, then go read a book or something nerd. Part of having fun in Dota is just simple things like playing your favorite hero, stacking with your buddies, playing inhouses, or trashing Debruyne in lane. If one of your main reasons for playing dota isn’t fun related, then you should probably take a break or quit and take a long look at yourself in the mirror. This is the most important part because if the game isn’t fun for you, then your non-fun having ass will probably rub off on everyone else, and then no one has fun.

Hopefully you’ve learned something from this PMA guide and you’re able to take what you’ve learned here and put it into action in the real world. ;)