DOTA Guide: How to Survive Public Games and learning Dota 2 with Emotions Intact by Purge.

You are going to feed. You are going to ruin games, and someone is going to be happy to tell you why. DotA was originally played in Warcraft 3, and they had the most bad mannered, whining, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥s on the gaming internet.

The only thing that comes close is Xbox Live. Luckily, with Dota 2, Valve has been making some really great strides to create a better environment for all players involved. The people playing the game are better than they used to be, but you are still playing a TEAM game that requires your allies to not be idiots for you to succeed. There will almost always be some levels of disappointment, and frustration between your aliies, and you.


My #1 tip to playing Dota 2, is that if someone flames you, or is freaking out about your play in an OVERLY(key word) critical way, press the mute button on them immediately, and then enjoy the rest of the game from your peaceful, but mysteriously quiet ally. Ignoring them doesn't work. Let them say 1 mean thing, and let that be it. Your day will be much better this way, I promise.

If you don't know how to mute, I made a super easy diagram. If you can count to 2 YOU ARE SET!

Muting in Dota 2

You are going to have to have thick skin to play Dota 2. To get around this major barrier of entry, PLAY AGAINST THE BOTS WHEN YOU FIRST START. The Bots will not rage at you, they won’t care if you feed. They will teach you the heroes by destroying you with them, and no one has to know.

Here are a couple quick hero modes that you might be confused about as well. Not all of these are available in matchmaking quite yet.

All Pick(AP) lets you draft(pick) your hero from the entire pool. You can also random for an extra 250 gold at the start of the game.

All Random(AR) forces everyone in the game to receive a random hero. Randoming is a great way to learn all of the hereos.

Single Draft(SD) is a mode that gives you 1 strength hero, 1 agility hero, and 1 intelligence hero to choose from. The heroes are random. As of this writing, you CANNOT swap heroes in Single Draft mode, but it will be fixed eventually.

Random Draft(RD) is a mode that randomly chooses 20 heroes of the hero pool for the players in the game to choose from. You take turns between your team and the opponents to pick your heroes, similar to kickball. If you don't choose in time you get a random hero, so make sure you choose fast!

Captains Mode(CM) is the mode that you see the professionals play, which involves rounds of banning, picking, banning again, and then final round of picking. This mode is not recommended at all for new players.

If you would like to submit your own tips for surviving public games in Dota 2, please post a comment below. Thanks for visiting! Also check out our main Dota 2 section for more guides. The link can be found below.

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