You might be right that is the nature of the game. I played DotA for the thrill of having a powerful character exerting his dominance over other players. It just doesn't happen if your team isn't performing. Plus, DotA has incredible death penalties.

The fact that you are launched into a game where your fun depends on the performance of a bunch of strangers in a fast -paced, hostile environment that penalizes mistakes heavily with only short bursts of text to communicate is a recipe for vile players.

The weird thing is that the stakes are largely only whether the game will meet the player's expectations.

Also, humans are generous when judging their own abilities and are miserly when judging a stranger's abilities.

Also it's a compounding process. Having a game that's fun only when you're succeeding selects for players that like that, which creates a social component that makes it so it's only fun to succeed.

I don't find this genre fun whether I'm succeeding or not, for me it's 100% journey (casually and socially exploring the way mechanics combine into interesting gameplay - including failures as much as successes) and these games and their player base seem to be the precise opposite of that.

The death penalties are what really turn me off to Dota. A player A killing a player B results in player B being unable to play for a short time, player A getting experience AND player A getting gold? It seems like far too many matches quickly become one sided and you either farm them or are the ones getting farmed.

Relevant to your last point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

That's actually curious -- studies have shown that people from more collectivist cultures don't tend to make the fundamental attribution error, such as places like East Asia, and the former USSR states.

This game is massively popular in both of those regions.

If you force slaves to work harder, they'll work harder. Whoop dee effing doo.

I think MOBA games (except for the kiddie ones like LoL) are popular there because they like their games to be challenging. Most games today are rich in graphics but poor in gameplay, dumbed down for the masses to enjoy. At least in D2 and HoN even the most dedicated players still get a thrill out of sharpening their skills and being better then the other guy.

Relevant: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/toxicity

All this discussion about dota (and LoL etc) boil down to one thing: you NEED to play as a team.

A lot of games involve team work, but it isn't crucial: that is you'll play better if you work as a team, but you don't need to and you can still enjoy the game if you ignore your team.

This is manifestly untrue for Dota. if you ignore your team you'll have a horrible time and so will the rest of your team.

As result this is actually an interesting social experiment: based on dota it looks like a lot of people don't like working as a team.

In FPS games the gameplay is a lot more ephemeral. You're racking up point after point, and your teammates are all interchangeable. In DOTA, there's only one real point. Your teammates are people you're stuck with for the entire duration of the match. And you can see their every move, no matter how far they are from you. And the worst player? The scrub? He's not just ineffective, he's actually feeding power into the opposition.

I spent some time analyzing this when playing WoW. The strongest correlation is with the "goal" aspect of the players.

Imagine that baseball games were played using a non-discriminatory matchmaking service. So start of the "Dodgers vs Giants" game there would be a pause and then 25 "players" would materialize. Some of them would be athletes in their 20s with strong skills, some would be 40+ year old veterans who have good skills but aren't in shape, some would be 10 year old little leaguers who are very knowledgeable but inexperienced and out of shape, and some would be people who just randomly picked "play baseball" as their selected activity, not really knowing even what the rules of the game were. Then there is a "manager" who has to create a starting lineup, assign positions, and win the pennant.

Extremely frustrating.

Blizzard was working on "fixing" this by segregating selection of players into "twinks" and "non-twinks", "experienced" vs "non-experienced" and "hardcore" vs "casual" which helped but it still made for a crappy experience a lot of the time.

Dota 2 has fantastic matchmaking, so it avoids the problem of total newbies playing with experienced players. Because there are over 100 different heroes to choose from, sometimes you end up with people who are very experienced at the game but completely new to their heroes though, which can be frustrating for them.

How the hell does it end up 50% wins all the time? It frustrates me to no end that, no matter how good I get, DOTA can still make sure I only win half the games.

Also, I realized that I feel around ten times worse when losing than how good I feel when winning, so the expected derived pleasure from the game is really really negative, so I scaled my playing down a whole lot.

>How the hell does it end up 50% wins all the time?

Because that's what the system was designed to do. If you're winning more than 50% it means that some percentage of the time, the game can't find 5 people who are better than you to put in a game. You'd have to compete at a semi-pro level to get this to happen.

Yeah, but it has to find a whole group that, collectively, is just a bit better than my entire group. That's not very easy to do, I don't think.

I think you're vastly exaggerating the situation, especially for people who are not at the extreme low end play skill. 10 years ago this may have been the case for some games, but a lot has been done towards fixing it. Guilds in WoW allow for players to only do 25 man PvE or premade PvP with people they both know and are equally skillfull. Besides, arena is is the only PvP that's truly competitive in WoW and that has both a matchmaking system and ability to have premade teams.

Other games such as Dota 2, Starcraft 2 and League of Legends feature excellent match making. Anyone who takes these games seriously usually has a set group of people to play with, and only do public games when they have to.

You forgot the part where every time somebody drops a catch / pitches a ball / gets a strike the other team gets stronger and faster and if one player were to get struck out / get a walk the game often becomes a forgone conclusion.

That's why matchmaking in MOBA is not "non-discriminatory". LoL has elo points, HoN has MMR, Dota 2 has some hidden rating. Overall it converges to win ratio about 50% for most players.

you wouldn't believe how much effort was put to actually make LoL matchmaking reasonably correct. Game collects a lot of data points per match and it is fine tuned frequently

It's not inherently the nature of the game. It's the nature of matchmaking.

I played HoN before matchmmaking, and it was quite interesting: you created a lobby, people would join, and you as leader could vet your teammates and kick the ones you didn't want to play with. Then the game proceeded once both sides were happy.

It took about ~10mins to get a game going, but the games were far higher quality.

I played DOTA back in highschool and HoN for the first year or so. The toxic nature of the DOTA community has nothing to do with matchmaking. You can certainly filter people in your own games, but that only identifies the people who are so socially inept that they can't make it to the start-game-countdown without being a jerk. In the WC3 era, people left during the 5 second countdown (i.e. after attempting to ensure they were not jerks) so often that the various hosting assistance programs would watch for it specifically.

The real hazard in DOTA / AOS / MOBA games are the people who slowly (or quickly) transform from quiet or reasonable people into insanely angry trash talking monsters. After all, the DOTA community got its reputation for being awful back in WC3, totally independent of any matchmaking.

I found that the playerbase in HoN, even before matchmaking, was awful. Far worse than DotA 2.

There wasn't really a good way to tell who was going to be an asshole, and who wasn't going to be one.

Good grief, it sounds like surfing. (the original kind, in the water)

> It's basically an offensive response to assholes: also be an asshole.

You could be contributing to the problem a lot more than you think, e.g. by way of the Broken Windows theory[1].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory