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Oh My God – I HATE Playing With……[INSERT NATIONALITY HERE]
Wait, wait, wait just a minute there fella. This is a Pyrion Flax lecture. I don’t want to hear your point of view. This is not a discussion, this is a wake-up call for all you ignoramuses out there with your stupid e-pinion about them foreigners coming over here and ruining your game of Dota.
“BUT PFLAX”, you whine in a shrill, high-pitched falsetto that instantly belittles both you and your argument, “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. I PLAY WITH NATIONALITY-X ALL THE TIME AND THEY ARE TERRIBLE!!!!!!!”
First of all, SHUT THE FUCK UP. Secondly, stop talking in all-caps, it’s considered rude on the internet for some dumb reason. Thirdly, allow me to break down for you why you’re a wrongful idiot.
These People are Ruining My Game Because they Don’t Speak my Language:
Chances are the group of people in question come from a very large country. Brazil and Russia seem to be the ones most widely accused of producing baddies. But here’s the thing – if you play on, say, a US East server, the main nationality you’re likely to bump into other than ‘Murricans, is Brazilians. I queue on three different servers when I’m looking for a game, and I’m sure they do too.
Brazil is a bloody huge country. And they speak their language of choice which is Portuguese. Know why? Because THAT’S what bloody huge countries do. Ask any American what language they speak and they speak English (like all good-hearted folks) but they wouldn’t speak English if they didn’t have 300 million people around them also speaking it. They’d speak a whole bunch of languages.
Ask Switzerland. It’s a small country sandwiched between a bunch of bigger ones. I know people from Switzerland and they all speak, like, fifteen languages, including Dothraki. But Brazil is fucking massive. They’re a magnet for other people, and when people go to Brazil they are expected to speak Portuguese, or be able to wave and point and shout “beer beer beer” a lot. People come to THEM. They don’t go to you. Ever met a bunch of Brazilians on holiday? Me neither!! They can go on holiday any time….IN BRAZIL. It’s awesome. The point is, large populations of people tend towards having less need to speak other languages. You’re going to have to deal with this concept. My favourite part of this is the incredible amount of irony in American and English people screeching about how Brazilians talk funny and only speak one language.
Dude….seriously….look at yourself.
But they have their OWN Servers, why don’t they STAY there?!
I play on European servers and some of those are in Luxembourg. I don’t speak any German or French or Luxembourgish. It would, under your rules, be perfectly reasonable for people from those countries to ask me to stick to my own kind and play ONLY with people who share a language with me.
That’s kind of uncool, you know what I mean man? Because the internet is meant to be about, like, breaking down barriers and stuff. Now I don’t speak those languages, but the rules of the game are the same. We all play Dota 2 and it’s universal. Valve have even given us the chat-wheel, you can ping stuff, and everybody knows the word “noob” and “scrub” and “gg ff”. So how about you learn some Russian swearwords, cyka.
But I’ve Played with HUNDREDS of People and WITHOUT DOUBT the Worst have been from COUNTRY-X:
Time for a simple statistical mathematical scientifical break-down. I don’t care if this isn’t accurate or if the numbers don’t add up. The first point is, I cannot add and the second point is, I don’t care and my fourth point is, fuck you and listen. Imagine that the population of a given game could be represented by a bowl of snacks. Yeah, SNACKS. This is serious.
The quantity of each different snack in the bowl is related to the population of the country it represents, and half of all the snacks in the bowl will be bad. So for instance – if 15% of the people playing Dota 2 at any one time are from Brazil, we’ll represent them with a Brazil nut. So 15% of the snacks in the bowl are Brazil Nuts. But since 50% of all the snacks are bad, that means half the Brazil nuts will not be very good, in fact they’ll be bad and taste terrible. This represents the sizeable number of people who are casual players, who don’t really try that hard and probably couldn’t even if they wanted to. They’re scrubs. They’ll buy the wrong item, ignore their teammates and just play for themselves. You’ll find these people in EVERY game in the history of games, going back to whatever they did for fun in Ancient Greece. Marbles or something. Most marbles players STANK. The thing is, if you dip your hand into the snack bowl and grab a snack, there’s a 15% chance you’ll get a Brazil Nut. And a 50% chance it’ll be bad. And since there are 4 other players on your team, that means you’ve got four chances of getting a bad Brazil nut. So fully 7.5% of the entire snack population of Planet Snackbowl are bad Brazilian players. But hey, 50% of the players from Lichtenstein are terrible too. But since there are so few people FROM Lichtenstein you’re unlikely to grab the one teeny tiny snack in the bowl that represents that country, AND that player will probably speak English so where they’re from will never come up. You’ll just write him or her off as being a bad player and move on.
Why is this relevant? Why are you talking about snacks and making me hungry? Because a hungry mind is a keen mind. Just ask a fat dude. He knows EXACTLY how far it is to the nearest vending machine at all times. They’re switched on, those guys, they really are.
But do you get my point? Do you? Huh? If there are more OF a thing then you’re more likely to SEE that thing and notice it, especially if it has a noticeable characteristic such as calling you “cyka” or going “huehuehue”. And even if the distribution of good to bad is the same amongst ALL the peoples of the World, you’re going to bump into a lot more of those bad people from the larger countries and then your simple insect-brain is going to say “hey Brazilians are bad because I met a bunch of bad Brazilians”. But you’re wrong. What you meant to say was “Most players are bad, and holy shit a lot of people that come from Brazil play Dota 2, when they could be at the beach watching mad amounts of ass bouncing around in bikinis”.
And guess where Dota is most popular – Brazil, Russia, China and the USA. Now I play on US East, EU West and EU East servers, so I can’t speak from experience when it comes to Chinese players. But I can say with a lot of certainty that there will be the same distribution of bad and good players among their population as there is in all the other countries of the World.
How? How can I state this with certainty? Because that’s how human beings work. We have good players and bad players all over the place. The reason some stand out more is because there are more of them. It’s just simple mathematics people.
So for the love of Gabe can we PLEASE try to get along and stop all this stupid cloaked xenophobia? Because it plays into the hands of certain groups of people I like to call “Shitlords”, and Shitlords want us all to hate each other and assume we’re better than everyone and close our eyes and get boners about our own nationality because that way it’s easier to fuck everybody over. You’re doing it every time you lose a game and say “we lost….because of Russians”.
No. You lost because you collectively stank up the place. Stop being a knob.
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