I need one if you don't mind steam Id is amorales2005

This game is my obsession...I also have a bunch of invites.

Funny...8 months ago this game was my obsession....today, even more so lol. I played 6 games between Tuesday/Wednesday night and I just want to go home now and play allllll day.

Yeah, I can do that. I tried getting Tim into it...but unfortunately the game we played he got steam rolled and it understandably burnt him. I've always been into competitive PVP style games though. From FPS, to MMO, to RTS, and MOBA (Multiplayer online battle arena).

This game is definitely not good to new players, but everyone starts somewhere/sometime. I actually started playing dota2 by myself (I had played dota 1 quite a bit) and frankly, it's rare to ever see another player again. That maybe adds to the bashing you may get because players are so anonymous, but it also made me feel comfortable learning and being a noob too. I would give a disclaimer that I'm pretty new. I just took any hateful comments and shrugged them off, I didn't care, I told them I'm learning and often times if you are playing by yourself new, the other players are either new too or on re-rolled smurf accounts. Either way, no one will seriously hold it against you and you won't see those players again. It gave me a blanket of not caring what they thought of me.

Now when you group up, you get equalized a bit in the matchmaking. I've played with a new guy and we got matched against new guys that I then just stomped...and it was nice for him to be able to learn w/o the pressure of needing him to make good plays lol. But other times we've been pushed up closer to my skill range and then he gets creamed and as a team we get creamed because he "fed" the enemy and they got powerful.

Bots and solo que are a pretty decent way to learn. There's a tutorial now too, but I haven't gone through it. There's also tons of websites dedicated to giving useful info. Another super useful thing now is being able to load a hero build. So I use these all the time when I play heroes I don't have my own strategies with, you just open the menu and look at some popular builds (skill and item builds) and then as you level it'll highlight the skill you should learn next (and they often put in some text to give you tips on using those abilities) and same with items. They'll be prioritized as starting equipment, core items, situational items. That's real handy to save time trying to read everything and pick the best option while also trying to play the game.

The most important thing to learn is to not die. Play conservative if you have to, but dying is the worst. It obviously happens, but each death gives the opponent heroes more xp and more gold to increase their advantage over you and your allies.

Well...I report players for being A-holes and so do other people. Then a week later I get a notification that they've taken action against one or more players I reported for bad conduct.

Also, to add to the whole "anonymous" thing. I go to dotabuff.com to see better stats and I played a game last night and I was checking stats on the site today. Not everyone's name shows up on this 3rd party website because you have to enable it, but some of my opponents had it enabled. With someone's name/profile I can click on them and and it will show me their stats but also show me how many games I've ever played with this person.

And this is how I can say you rarely see the same person twice. Only twice so far have I seen more than 1 match with someone (I haven't clicked on everyone I've played with obviously). This guy, I played 2 matches with, one last night, other one 8 months ago lol.

I just went back 51 games played, which put me to August 28. I clicked on everyone that wasn't private profile and blocking 3rd party apps. Probably average of 3 people to look at each game. That's 153 profiles I checked. There was 5 people I've played 2 games with. Everyone else, only 1. And FYI, my total matches played is 712. So, it's not like in some games where you may have a reputation and have like a persona or presence in the game....you really are 1 little drop of water in a huge pool.

Very cool, can't wait to learn more!

Aaaaactually, this disappoints me. IMO the benefit of consoles in the past has been their focus. There's been a little deviation in the last generation in the form of their respective network offerings, with expanded media options, but their main focus hasn't deviated from being a game console. To hear "Xbox is not only going to be a console" sends shivers up my spine. It sounds like the business/enterprise side of MS is starting to infect the gaming division. I liked it better when they were separate.

Wow. LOL.

Don't worry D_W, I was fooled too, just didn't want to admit it lol

Wow. Very impressive.