{"id":106731,"date":"2016-10-10T08:58:50","date_gmt":"2016-10-10T06:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/?p=106731"},"modified":"2016-10-10T09:00:11","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T07:00:11","slug":"it-sucks-to-play-dota-2-in-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/pc\/106731-it-sucks-to-play-dota-2-in-south-africa","title":{"rendered":"It sucks to play Dota 2 in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

The folks at Lazygamer <\/a><\/strong>recently wrote a rather excellent piece on bias and prejudice\u00a0in South Africa’s gaming community.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

To be frank, it’s not a great experience actually playing the game in South Africa.<\/p>\n

Despite the presence of local servers you will still experience constant dropped connections and pauses.<\/p>\n

Once again this is part of the game, but the long matchmaking times<\/a><\/strong> we experience certainly aren’t.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

It’s just that the community could be in a much better place than it is at the moment.<\/p>\n

\"ranked\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

More gaming news<\/h3>\n

The biggest movie releases in South Africa this week<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The 4 best budget laptops in South Africa right now<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Kids who played porn game at Panarotti\u2019s offered free therapy<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GG EZ n00b.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":234,"featured_media":81872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_enabled":true,"_sma_x_custom_text":"","_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[6385,22521,2218,2163,17680],"class_list":["post-106731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","category-pc","tag-csgo","tag-dcommunity","tag-dota-2","tag-south-africa","tag-toxic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/234"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106731"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107503,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106731\/revisions\/107503"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}