Day 3
It’s been three days since I removed the game which became an essential part of my daily life, something that had to be given time to no matter how busy, tired I was. Unlike many of the games I have played during my short life, Dota 2 has taken up most of my time – more than 1600 hours. It all started with a beta key for the game and then it sucked me in like no game has ever done before.
For the uninitiated, I shall give you some insight. Dota belongs to the MOBA ( Multiplayer Online Battle Arena ) genre. It’s complex and will take around 60 hours for someone to learn the basics of the game. The objective is simple – destroy the enemy stronghold along with your 4 team mates before the enemy team destroys yours. Like I said objective is simple but the game isn’t. I have never come across a game where there are so many things to calculate take into consideration.
So it’s a hard to learn strategy game which needs some time investment as it has a long learning curve? Wrong. It is a game filled with racists and short tempered people. Make one mistake and your whole team will blame you throughout the game, along with the enemy team. Do your best and you will still get abused because the others are like that. I am not sure how Call Of Duty players are, since there seems to be a good number jokes about the communication abuse but this game is the worst in that area. If you want to look at it in a positive way then you will learn to abuse others in foreign languages like Russian, Malay etc, as they love to communicate and try to chat with people in a language others don’t know.
Why do people still play the game? Today there were around 1 million concurrent users in game. I think the answer lies in the fact that the game is complicated and it feels rewarding. Many don’t quit because of the time already invested in the game to learn the MECHANICS. Due to this they feel obliged, also because it’s completely free to play and there are no pay to win mechanisms ( very few games exist like that).
Unfortunately, I have missed out on a lot due to my inability to control myself from playing. I didn’t play any of the games I have in my Steam library, I didn’t even bother to post a single line on the blog and kept making time to play the game. Realized it a bit late, that we need to find the right balance and ensure that the game is not hindering other aspects of our lives and affecting relationships. If you are someone going to start the game or has just started, make sure you aren’t addicted. Don’t neglect your real life relationships and duties for killing some dudes virtually, even though it’s really pleasing. Now that I have removed it, I can concentrate on some areas like writing random stuff here to improve my typing speed *chuckles* , learn basic mathematics which I should have learnt two years ago and reading more stories set in some fantasy realm.
Keep Calm and Play Doto. But remember to keep calm bobo.
