DOTA 2 Identities
By: Mehmet Köse
Tags: Gaming, Esports, Dota 2, Identity

We promised to talk about identities, so here we go.

You can identify players in 3 ways: nickname, color, hero name. Unlike other social places, nicknames are the least relevant. This is probably because people know the heroes better than they know the players.

Another reason might be the short duration of matches. You don’t have much chance of seeing the same player again (unless he is in your friends list), so why bother memorizing his nickname? Call him with his hero’s name.

A third reason can be the foreign characters in nicknames, which makes it impossible to read and type for you.

Colors are important identifiers too. Each player has a distinct color. Their nicknames and hero names are displayed in this color in chat and information messages. You can observe it in the mega-creep defense video below, or any other DOTA replay for that matter.

Notice the coloring of nicknames, as well as avatars in the chat

Stereotypes

Although players identify each other through their heroes, it’s still easily noticeable that humans are the main factor. At this point, we can list some classes of DOTA players based on the behavior they exhibit:

Leaver: Probably the worst type. They abandon the match and ruin it for everyone. Their teammates are now playing 4v5, we know why it sucks. You can sell their items, and the 1 gold/second they receive (like every other player) is now distributed among the teammates. However, this does not neutralize the disadvantage of playing outnumbered. Their enemies might have got an advantage, but the match is less fun for them now since it is less challenging. You can see the Weaver leave the game in the above image. The recent chat messages give an idea why.

By the way, the leavers’ team does not always lose the game. I remember playing a match 3v5, after 2 of my teammates left during mid-game, and we won it. I was playing as Slark — one of my favorites, and two of my teammates were int heroes though I don’t remember which.

Stay out of my way and maybe you won’t get hurt, but I doubt it.

Rage-quitter: A subclass of leaver. A leaver can leave the match for any (or no) reason, you never know. However, a rage-quitter leaves because he or some of his teammates failed one or more times. The title speaks for itself, I guess.

Never-submitter: The duality of rage-quitting is never giving up. These guys are the optimists of the community. Most people would give up fighting and type “ff” in all-chat, meaning finish fast, if the game seems almost over. But not these guys. An epic example can be seen in this replay. A typical DOTA match lasts around 40 minutes, and I call it a long match if it reaches 60 minutes. These guys played for 3 hours, and 2 hours of it was mega-creep* defense, which is insane.

Rambo: If you have seen any of the Rambo movies, you would recognize this one too. He dives into multiple enemy heroes all alone, making a tragic scene for himself most times.

Flamer: These guys start blaming everyone in the team in the early game and do not stop until the match is finished. Ironically, they are usually the worst player in the team. They end up being muted (more about this in the upcoming post) by their teammates.

Mid-or-feeder: Recall from our last post that usually 1 player from each team starts on mid lane. The mid player gains more experience and gold. Actually, this has nothing to do with the lane, but the number of players around the creeps killed. In effect, there might be a conflict in the team if more than 1 player demands mid. You can even see one them type “mid or feed”, meaning he would either go mid or feed the enemy by dying intentionally.

To be continued…

We didn’t have enough space to talk about parties and report-commend mechanisms. At this point, I guess communication is more important than those concepts anyway. Hence, we will talk about communication in DOTA 2 in the next post.

*Each team has 6 barracks where the creeps spawn: one melee and one range on each lane. When you destroy one of these barracks, your equivalent of that barrack produces super-creeps which are stronger than regular creeps. If you destroy all 6 barracks of the enemy, you will have mega-creeps which are even stronger than super-creeps.