While munching on that chocolate éclair, please take a moment to consider the title of this post. It’s something that new players have said to me on many, many occasions, or a variation of it anyway, since they think I’m some kind of agony aunt or sympathetic figure. Little do they know, I despise their weakness.
Generally it seems that the idea of playing – and probably losing horribly because you suck – is SO SCARY to some people that they hope to avoid ever having to play Dota. They want to watch it, to understand it, to enjoy it…but PLAY it? Oh no, kind sir, not me! I’d probably be terrible. What if we lost and it was my fault?! What if people flamed me?! What if the sky falls on our heads?! Who the fuck cares? Grow a pair of balls/ovaries and play the fucking game. It’s a game. A GAME. The result of your stupid, pathetic game of Dota will not matter. Nobody will notice. Once it’s finished nobody will care. Valve wisely deletes replays after a while anyway so don’t worry, historians of some future age who will no doubt dissect your fascinating life will never truly understand how you went 0-50 in your first game. And as I said before but just to make it clear – you’re not important enough for anybody on the planet to give a shit about how bad you are at Dota.
I really want to hammer this point home so I am going to say it again: You = worthless human being. Dota = video game. THEREFORE : WHO GIVES A SHIT = NO FUCKER, ANYWHERE.
Were you scared about losing the first time you played snap? Did you tell your opponent “well I need to do some research and really get to grips with this before I go up against a human being, maybe if I built some kind of snap-playing robot and honed my skills first then I’d be ready to challenge you to a casual game with perhaps a 0.5 of a second handicap in my favour since I’m unfamiliar with the game”?
No, you just played it. If you lost you laughed (or cried inwardly) about it and tried again. Or you just decided that snap was and is a SHIT game and the other person was clearly cheating, so fuck you Dave you keep peeking at the card instead of slamming it.
And that was back when games were played face-to-face. There was no anonymity. You were losing versus the worst people in the World to lose a game to – your friends and relatives. Losing a board game to your brothers or sisters is worse than Hell itself because the crowing and gloating never ends. You’ll be reminded of their victory at every opportunity. Your grave stone will include an engraving of your head-to-head record so that everyone will know you never beat your brother at Madden. EVER. Because that time you unplugged his controller and ran in a game-winning 80 yard punt return doesn’t count.
Well now, thanks to clever people wasting their talent on things like games programming and fibre optic communications, you can play with and against people you’ve never met, and WILL never meet in your entire life. They may as well be robots. It’s like the Turing Test for artificial intelligence: if you can have a conversation with the AI and not be able to tell if it’s a human being or a machine, then it’s passed the test. So far, no computer has managed it, but if it makes it easier for you, you could just imagine that you’re playing a bot game you fucking lily-livered coward. And if you don’t like what the nasty people say to hurt your pwecious widdle feelings you can just mute them. Or, you know, just not let the abuse of some kid in Ohio and some kid in Switzerland get to you because it’s meaningless.
In fact, it’s so easy to play and lose with other poor suckers that it astounds me that people are still too scared to do it. What are you actually afraid of? The other people? OR YOURSELF?
Are you afraid that if you melt down your soul into a pool of liquid metal and assay its worth, you’ll be found wanting? Are you scared to place your hand into the tree stump in-case the wood beast stings you like in Flash Gordon? Are you so gutless and cowardly and terrified about losing a stinking VIDEO GAME that you just avoid playing it altogether, never truly discovering your worth as a human being (aka your MMR)?
That’s the truth isn’t it? You can’t stand to lose, so you choose the same copout as the Computer in the movie War Games and just DON’T PLAY. That machine should have nuked the planet and rid us of its horrors.
I think the people who are scared to play are actually scared to fail because they’re such tryhards and so insanely competitive that they choose to avoid failure by dodging the contest altogether.
Make this your new mantra: Failing to win isn’t losing, failing to play is.
It makes NO SENSE at all, but it’s the sort of thing a coach would say to a player who needed a right royal kick up the arse. So get a grip, realise the consequences are inconsequential and for fuck’s sake don’t end up on my team because I will flame you until my tongue bleeds.
I don't want to play not because I'm scared, but because I can't fathom the idea to be bad at a game (understand in the top 2%). I can't invest anymore the time needed to be *good* at the game. As was the case for WC3, SC1, SC2, DOTA...
So, I'm keeping at what I enjoy and own : wow, CS and solo games. It's a kind of fear because I know I'll be bad and I hate that, but not the same. Being bad is just neither fun nor enjoyable for me, so unless I can invest the time and dedication, I'll just not play.
You are trying to apply a logic; proving that human life is insignificant, and therefore concluding that people shouldn't feel so bad the way they do. The problem here is a psychological one however, and I believe can't simply be 'outreasoned'.
Let's take a more serious psychological issue, like a childhood trauma. People who go to the psychiatrist want to get rid of their trauma. Some of them probably also think like you, and say to themselves it is silly to feel the way they do. No matter how much logic they apply, they still feel bad however. The feeling is caused by something more than just our conciousness. What you are saying here is equivalent to telling a patient "GOH, JUST DONT FEEL SO BAD, SILLY"; which obviously solves nothing.
If every psychological problem could be solved with simple self-applied logic, we wouldn't need psychiatrists would we? The issue at hand here is nothing as problematic, but I think my example shows that you can't just 'will all your feelings away'.
And I think it's silly to assume so. I think YOU are the silly one here.
i'm sure the game is a blast once you've spent an enormous amount of time memorizing things and learning the arcane rules, but i get more fun out of games that don't have that ridiculous requirement
On April 17 2014 21:47 PRJ wrote: i don't play dota because it's poorly designed
i'm sure the game is a blast once you've spent an enormous amount of time memorizing things and learning the arcane rules, but i get more fun out of games that don't have that ridiculous requirement
That's odd. The game is actually fun from the very start and the fact that there are always new things to learn makes it rewarding in a way that most games nowadays do not even come close to. I would say most games are time-wasters, dota on the other hand is something that you'll get more out of the more time you put into it.
On April 17 2014 19:42 []Phase[] wrote: You are trying to apply a logic; proving that human life is insignificant, and therefore concluding that people shouldn't feel so bad the way they do. The problem here is a psychological one however, and I believe can't simply be 'outreasoned'.
Let's take a more serious psychological issue, like a childhood trauma. People who go to the psychiatrist want to get rid of their trauma. Some of them probably also think like you, and say to themselves it is silly to feel the way they do. No matter how much logic they apply, they still feel bad however. The feeling is caused by something more than just our conciousness. What you are saying here is equivalent to telling a patient "GOH, JUST DONT FEEL SO BAD, SILLY"; which obviously solves nothing.
If every psychological problem could be solved with simple self-applied logic, we wouldn't need psychiatrists would we? The issue at hand here is nothing as problematic, but I think my example shows that you can't just 'will all your feelings away'.
And I think it's silly to assume so. I think YOU are the silly one here.
On April 17 2014 19:42 []Phase[] wrote: You are trying to apply a logic; proving that human life is insignificant, and therefore concluding that people shouldn't feel so bad the way they do. The problem here is a psychological one however, and I believe can't simply be 'outreasoned'.
Let's take a more serious psychological issue, like a childhood trauma. People who go to the psychiatrist want to get rid of their trauma. Some of them probably also think like you, and say to themselves it is silly to feel the way they do. No matter how much logic they apply, they still feel bad however. The feeling is caused by something more than just our conciousness. What you are saying here is equivalent to telling a patient "GOH, JUST DONT FEEL SO BAD, SILLY"; which obviously solves nothing.
If every psychological problem could be solved with simple self-applied logic, we wouldn't need psychiatrists would we? The issue at hand here is nothing as problematic, but I think my example shows that you can't just 'will all your feelings away'.
And I think it's silly to assume so. I think YOU are the silly one here.
Well, in fairness to him, its normal to think everyone is like yourself. If you can do something, then everyone can do it (and all that jazz) mentality is something I find very common amongst the people I meet be it racists "everyone should be white like me" or activists "Everyone should be Vegan, just like me" or gamers "everyone should be good at game _____ just like me" etc....
So he isn't acting silly as much as he is acting self-centric.
On April 18 2014 00:11 SpaNiarD wrote: I'm scared of posting here... What people would say about me? Will they point to me everytime everywhere? T_T
We will all buy plane tickets to spain, hire a private investigator and a translator so we can find you and mock you in whatever language would belittle you the most.
EPT
