It sucks to play Dota 2 in South Africa

October 10, 2016

The folks at Lazygamer recently wrote a rather excellent piece on bias and prejudice in South Africa’s gaming community.

While the article touched on a number of much wider issues, there’s one point that particularly stuck out to me – how toxic the community can be.

While I’ve only barely scratched the surface of games like CS:GO and Team Fortress 2, there’s one game that stands out as a particularly toxic environment – Dota 2.

At 76 hours in I can’t claim to be a Dota 2 expert – the difference is, compared to the other games, I don’t want to be.

In part this is because of the game’s steep learning curve, something that every player has to deal with but also part of the game’s innate charm.

And don’t get me wrong, I can take a “GG WP” and “git gud” with the best of them, but it starts to take a bit more of a malicious tone when the insults are coming from players with racial epithets for nicknames.

Dota 2 is an “angry “game (and for good reason – it’s stressful and demanding), but take the blend of internet juvenility and unique South African hate speech and it can become unbearable after a couple of games.

There’s a pervasive attitude of everybody thinking they know better than everyone else and for something that’s supposed to be a team game this can be a serious mood killer.

To be frank, it’s not a great experience actually playing the game in South Africa.

Despite the presence of local servers you will still experience constant dropped connections and pauses.

Once again this is part of the game, but the long matchmaking times we experience certainly aren’t.

Add to this a dire exchange rate that makes every community-market purchase heinously expensive and the reasons just seem to keep piling up.

I’m not saying you’re wrong to play Dota 2 or that you should stop playing it, frankly I wish I was better at the game so that I can explore its intricacies more.

It’s just that the community could be in a much better place than it is at the moment.