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DotA 2 is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game designed to rape the pleasure center of your brain in order to steal your time and money, and ultimately waste your life. People will tell you that this is a deep and intricate game interwoven with layers of strategy, coordinated teamwork, and precise timing; it definitely can be in the 1% of games where your teammates aren't selfish toxic bastards or have lukewarm potato soup in place of a functioning brain. A huge majority of the player base is horribly racist and/or toxic and it has consistently been this way for years. Of course, the game is a much different experience if you play with a team made up of your friends, which most people who play Dota don't have (probably because they play Dota). Even then, you still run the risk of running into account boosters and smurfs which are pretty prevelant at the average skill level of the overall player base.

While the community is probably one of the worst things about this game, the actual game itself has many significant problems too. One of my biggest gripes about Dota is that there are actually a lot of cool and fun features that should be included in the base game, but are locked behind paywalls (dota+, certain compendium features, etc.). With their most recent seasonal event, Valve has now introduced CSGO style cases into the game for DotA skins; I already hate everything about the CSGO model of microtransactions, which is essentially a worse version of gambling, and Valve just copy and pasted the system into Dota because they finally realized how dumb and easy manipulated the player base is. The business model around Dota 2 continues to become more greedy and exhortative with each passing day and will continue to do so.

The gameplay itself can be good, fun, and addictive but is ultimately soured by everything else that surrounds it. Valve's attempts to update and expand the game throughout the past years have been pretty good, but (at least in my opinion) has failed to meaningfully improve on the core gameplay or enhance player experience. Overall, any time or money you were considering spending on this game would honestly be better spent on almost anything else, trust me your life will be better of for it.

Coming from someone who has spent an embarrassing amount of hours in this game, it is absolutely not worth it. I would be a much happier person if I could refund all the time and money spent on this heaping pile of garbage designed to suck your life away one minute and penny at a time.

♥♥♥♥♥♥ bleb this boah