MOBAs and obsession over play hours.

[MorphingDragon]

So I've recently started playing DOTA2 and enjoying the shit out of it because it's different in ways that I like compared to LoL. But my enthusiasm has been marred a bit now that I've hit level 5. With random pub matches, player communication seems to have devolved into complaining over what hero is OP on which team and judging other people based off their play hours. I actually wish I could report these guys for being unsportsmanlike, but ignoring seems to be working just as a matter of personal enjoyment.

I honestly don't get it. What are play hours supposed to mean? I could leave my DOTA client open for a week and clock up over 200 hours on steam. Does that suddenly make me less mediocre? It seems as dim witted as judging posters based on post count in a forum.

It's not just DOTA too, I had similar fun trying trying to get into LoL and even less serious communities like TF2. After awhile you just end up with people who seem to take the game as an exercise in e-peen stroking, while not strictly being any better than anyone else in the game. I kind of wish I was back with the real noobs who were just trying to learn the game. At least they communicated, trying to help each other.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Psh, no one on TF2 gets on your case over how much playtime you have. TF2 is all about how fancy your hat is. Those with the fanciest of hats are obviously the best players, and those with less fancy hats are the plebeians forced to wallow in misery over how undecorated their heads are.

I present to you, the best player in TF2:

Spoiler

 

[Esotera]

It gives an indication of how much experience you should have, and whether you're going to be half-way decent as a player. Anything over 100 hours means I'd expect you to know the basic mechanics, 500+ hours I'd expect you to be fairly decent & work as a team. That said, I don't think I've ever used hours to judge some randomer in the party.

The best advice you'll ever get is to play Dota 2 with friends, preferably a 5-man team. That way the communication should be better and there's no-one to blame when it goes wrong.

 

[Zhukov]

I play Smite. I've only seen people bring up hours played once. (Some guy who started bitching about other people's performance. On being told to look at his own unimpressive score he responded by informing us that he'd played over a thousand games so shut up.)

Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of whining, accusations and bitching whenever the match starts going downhill, and it increases steadily the higher you get. But in my experience hours played is not frequently an issue.

Maybe it's specific to the DOTA crowd.

 

[Lictor Face]

The thing about MOBAs, is that they are ( relatively speaking ) commitment free multiplayer. You do whatever you can do for your team in the match, once its over, shake hands and walk off to the next match.

In all honesty, I do check people based on their player hours. If someone with say, 40 hours of dota does something incredibly stupid consistently. He needs to be chastised and taught how to stop doing the same stupid thing. But if he has, say, 800 hours, you'll probably dismiss him as an idiot and try to work past it.

LoL I believe, might be somewhat worse than dota. LoL has distinctly separated elo levels ( bronze, gold blah blah ). This translates into generally more competent team mates, but perhaps more nit-picking and.....try-harding.

Also, level five? You are VERY fresh to the world of dora. Probably no more than 12-20 matches?

Your earliest games will be a mixed bag, from games with newbs like yourself, to old salts from the original dota transitioning into the dota 2 interface. Thus the somewhat....mixed community.

( Also, dota 2, to an extent, is a considerably OP moba. It only balances out because everyone is OP at different things at the same time. You'll eventually get used to all the OMG OP DROW/URSA/BOUNTYHUNTER/ASDF cries after a while )

ALso the mute button. USe it to blank out irritants.

Have fun with your mona!

 

[Smertnik]

If you dismiss for a second the fact that this kind of complaining more often than not comes from inapt players unwilling or unable to realise their own failures, the time spent with a game does roughly indicate the skill level (even though it can be skewered in many ways, of course, as you pointed out). And since you can't see the amount of wins on profiles anymore it's the only way to quickly "judge" others' skill.

If it bothers you too much you can always turn on profile privacy in the game's settings which prevents others from accessing your Steam profile via scoreboard. Or you can just ignore what random strangers you'll most likely never meet again say about you.

 

[MorphingDragon]

Also, level five? You are VERY fresh to the world of dora. Probably no more than 12-20 matches?

I'm nearing 60 matches so your scale is a bit off. But even then that scale is a bit skewed. You get extra "points" for winning, being commended etc. But I still realize I'm in no way "good".

Blame Valve.

No, seriously. Usually, you can look at wins and have a good idea of how experienced a player is. Unfortunately, Valve went ahead and made it so you couldn't see the wins of other players you haven't got on your friends list as part of their "Let's make a super fun happy nice community" plan which also involved implementing the retarded mute system and making sure players who tick the "English" box in matchmaking actually speak English. Just kidding, they just let anyone tick the box, so get ready for cyka. If it sounds like I'm bitter its because I am.

Of course this whole wins/play hours thing wouldn't even enter the equation if matchmaking simply matched you with players who are about as experienced as you, which also isn't the case.

No, I get annoyed at that as well. There's no for reporting for if someone is speaking exclusively in a foreign language for a server.

The best advice you'll ever get is to play Dota 2 with friends, preferably a 5-man team. That way the communication should be better and there's no-one to blame when it goes wrong.

What I've started doing is befriending good people from a team after a game. Works as well I guess.

 

[Schmeiser]

More playtime equals more experience and dota is all about experience since every game is unpredictable as fuck since it doesn't follow the standard LOL lane compositions. Obvoisly there are exceptions to this rule but it's pretty much that.

I don't understand why do you even care about the other people epeen stroking as you put it. Just play your game, call the shots that have to be called to win and mute anyone who's a dick.

 

[LostCrusader]

I usually ignore other players wins in LoL, especially since I pretty much exclusively play unranked games. Most people seem to treat that as either lets try something new or lets troll mode. But even with over 1500 wins I think that most of the time when someone is having a shitty game, its usually just they are having a bad day or got a crappy match up.

Also, I never ran into any complaints about hours played on TF2, the go to complaint on there seemed to be whether someone payed for the game before it went F2P.

 

[WenisPagon]

Play hours only equate to flat experience. If the player isn't a good learner, how long they've been playing is nowhere near a good measure of their skill.

There are people who have been playing since WC3 DOTA who play in the lowest of the skill brackets, not to mention new players who click with the game and rise towards the top after only 20 games.

 

[Bonk4licious]

I've also only played SMITE, which has a few of the same problems but I don't play it competitively so I may just not have run in to them.

My biggest problem so far with it is that other players find it necessary to boss me around because I'm a lower level than them, despite the fact that we're just playing casual random matches. I'm fine with "Hey Bonk we've got left and right, go middle" or something like that, but I've been flat out criticized by players for not getting tons of kills when I'm playing a defensive role (and keeping up in rank), and yelled at for not doing certain things. If I were going out of my way to play badly it would be one thing but a lot of them are flat out mean when they can't up the e-peen after their match.

But SMITE is getting a little dated and quite a few too many Gods if you ask me, so I may have to try DOTA sometime.

 

[ProfessorLayton]

That's a problem in every online game on Steam and always has been. Play hours are just an easy way to see how dedicated to the game you are and get a quick idea of how long you've been playing. I'd even rather be on a team with a guy who has 500 hours rather than someone with only 20. However, I have known people who sit with the game open while they're afk so they can get more hours.

It's something that can literally only be fixed by you playing more. People will never stop judging you based on how long you've played so just try to ignore it until you've reached a respectable time.

 

[Combustion Kevin]

you just have to push through that part of the player base, as you get more playtime and keep your reports to a minimum you'll be matched with more players who actually know what they're doing and know the value of good communication, while the less productive members of the community either learn from their mistakes or are delegated to the low priority pool.

personally though, I've never been called out on my playing time, and never even bothered looking up the player profiles of strangers in pub games.

 

[GoaThief]

Hours played do act as a general guide for player competence. It's not the be all and end all by a long shot but as a general indicator it works.

I don't play MOBAs really either, but it is applicable to any genre of game.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

MOBAs, particularly DOTA 2, have a skill curve that is largely composed of layers of iterative knowledge. Learn all the heroes, and all the skills, and all the combinations, and all the items, etc, etc, and you have a huge leg up. That takes time. Ergo time played = more skilled player...on the average.

That said, there's never an excuse for being a dick to a teammate. Razzing some newbie for being inexperienced isn't going to make them play better...if anything it will make them second guess everything they do and play worse. Either be helpful and patiently instruct, or shut the hell up and do the best you can with your own hero. Yes, it's frustrating when you're doing everything you can and someone else is gaffing the game away, but finger pointing and name calling accomplishes nothing. Best case scenario it'll earn you a lot of reports for being a dick.

 

[Launcelot111]

I just hit level 12 in DOTA and I've never seen anyone complain about someone's play hours.

Doesn't mean people aren't dicks, that's just not the topic they're being dicks about

 

[GigaHz]

Playtime tells you absolutely nothing.

They could be former DOTA players who just started playing DOTA2, they could be smurfs, or they could be people who have played several hours but still can't grasp basic concepts.

And even if they were new, who cares? It's a win or loss in a non-tournament game, something that has no real world consequences.

At the end of the day it's just a stupid game.