That promised Dota 2 "major balance update" is in testing, and as the patch notes reveal, it's a doozy. It's probably too early to tell whether it will change the dotes in any significant ways, but the community has uncovered a reference to the much-missed Terry Pratchett in the meantime.

One of Dota 2's new endgame items is called the Octarine Core, an object "formed from Mystic Staff and Soul Booster" that reduces all cooldowns by 25%, and bolsters intelligence, HP, mana and some other bits. Octarine, you might be aware, is the colour of magic, as seen in Terry Pratchett's 'The Colour of Magic'. It is not the name of a fruit; you're thinking of pineapples.

It isn't the first game to smuggle in a reference to the author—Elite: Dangerous recently honored Pratchett with the addition of a new starport named Pratchett's Disc.

Dota 2's update 6.84 changes so many things that I'm not going to list them, but you can check out the ginormous notes here. (Thanks, Eurogamer.)

Correction: The patch is now available in the Dota 2 Test client; not live in the game.

The world of professional Dota is about to get a lot busier. Valve have just announced the Dota Major Championships, an annual series of 'marquee' tournaments that will include their established The International event. The other three shindigs, they say, "will be Valve-sponsored events hosted by third-party organizers at different locations around the world".

As you can see in the above picture, there will be an event in each season, starting in Fall/Autumn and culminating in a bigger event, presumably The International, in Summer. The first is scheduled for this Fall/Autumn, and Valve say they'll reveal more details as that draws nearer.

Next week, Dota 2 will receive a "major balance update", along with this year's version of The International Compendium.

I just played a sixty-minute solo ranked game of Dota 2. We were winning for a long time. Then, as happens often, we stopped winning—they had Sniper, Veno, and Techies, and fighting uphill was a pain in the ass. Around the fifty-minute mark, we killed Roshan with the intention of giving the Aegis to our Slark. Then, our Axe took it. Then, Axe destroyed the sentry wards that Necrophos had dropped so that I could carry them. Then, Axe blinked blind into their base, died to mines, came back to life, and died again without buyback. They pushed. We couldn't defend. The game ended.

Axe threw, I think, because he was bored and kind of a dick. The latter is a tough fix; the former indicates a problem worth exploring.

Bored players are a bigger problem in this patch than they have been before. This is the era of game-prolonging comeback mechanics, Sniper, and pub teams that can't fight uphill. It won't last forever. There will come a time—hopefully soon—when regular Dota gets faster and snappier. I imagine Valve and IceFrog are looking towards the fifth International with a view to ensuring that matches don't run long and cause the whole thing to overrun (while also, y'know, putting the idea of an eight minute victory to rest.)

Regardless, regular Dota will always be a long, demanding game. I've internalised that side of it, as have most players. When you play, you are committing to a game that is likely to last between thirty and ninety minutes and that you're not allowed to quit. Back when I taught the rest of the PCG team to play, this was one of those things that I had to learn to see from their perspective: the notion of a game that you're not allowed to stop playing is totally alien to most people.

I also play a decent amount of Smite and lately I've been playing Infinite Crisis for review. Both of these games—as with the majority of MOBAs that followed the League model—provide surrender options and a variety of game modes, including those that result in shorter matches (single lane variants, and so on.)

For the majority of new players, the length of a Dota match in is an obstacle in the way of enjoyment. Developers of new MOBAs treat it as a problem to be solved.

For the majority of Dota players, however, it isn't a problem. It's part of what makes Dota what it is. That the game is demanding and that it asks a lot from you is a bridge you cross over on the way to getting more out of it than you'll get out of other games—and a lot of players are happy to make that journey. Its complex mechanics require room to breathe, and that 'room' is provided by having long matches. As a player, you're asked to respect that. If you don't respect that, you move on to something else.

The issue with this approach is that it divides players up along binary lines. The reality isn't really like that. Everybody who plays the game—even those who play it a lot—has a different amount of time and patience. Some are more willing to commit energy in the lategame than others. Some will play until it starts to get boring or hard, then throw or abandon in order to move onto the next one. This might be the wrong attitude, but it's sustainable for the players who engage in it. That they are sacrificing the enjoyment of nine other people in order to get their way is only a problem if they agree that it's a problem, and from their perspective it probably isn't (see also: 'dicks'.)

The issue with a purist approach to Dota, then, is that it doesn't account for people who play but don't care about spoiling the experience of others if it suits them. In an ideal world, people who didn't like playing Dota 'properly' would get bored with the game and stop playing: in reality, they show up as that guy who costs you a handful of MMR points every now and then. Even if most players never do this, even if some players only do it once and then quit the game forever, enough people play that it will reliably crop up as a problem for those that stick around.

With that in mind, then, I've started to see the value of 'shortform' modes. They don't really exist in Dota at present—1v1 Solo Mid takes less time, sure, but it changes so many of the game's basic systems and victory conditions that its relationship to regular Dota is limited to a few very specific areas. All Random Deathmatch is more lightweight, but can still take a substantial amount of time.

When official custom game modes finally make their debut, I hope that they'll play a role in offering alternatives that help to draw the throw-happy player away from regular matchmaking. Valve could do this themselves, of course—a 2v2 or 3v3 mode on a single lane would be interesting—but it's far more likely that they'll leave it to the community to build. And, honestly, I think it'd be a success for Dota as a whole if somebody does.

While there are many things about the regular MOBA model that I hope stay far away from Dota 2, the provision of more accessible ways to play is a proven good. It's a rare example of a community-dividing design decision that actually divides the community in the right way: not between serious and casual, but between 'willing to play for twenty minutes' and 'willing to play to the end'. I'd rather players declare the limits of their attention span when they choose a game mode, not when they throw at the end of a long match.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 277. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US.

Dota is hard. It demands moment to moment skill, collective coordination, and a vast amount of learning. Despite being the most popular game on Steam by an order of magnitude, it s an acquired taste—and one that, despite years of listening to Chris drone on about it, the rest of the PC Gamer team has yet to acquire. Over the course of a week, we set out to see if that might be changed. 

In the first case, our goal was to determine just how difficult Dota 2 really is to pick up. Is it possible for newcomers to have fun straight away, or will those first hours always be punishing? What can more experienced players do to lower the barrier to entry, and how do you best go about matching characters and roles to players with a diverse gaming background? How do you introduce Dota as an action game, a strategy game, a sport and a social experience all at once?

More to the point: why make the effort? For some of the team, gaining a new hobby was not incentive enough to pour hours into the game. We needed a goal—something to fight for. We found one. Concurrent with our own efforts, our longtime friends, rivals and (in several cases) former colleagues at Rock, Paper, Shotgun began training their own Dota novices. The stage was set for a showdown that would pitch veteran against veteran, newbie against newbie. We really, really wanted to win.

That meant training. With Chris as our guide, we set about getting our hands on the bottom rung of Dota 2 s daunting ladder. Over the following pages you ll discover what sunk in, what didn t, and how we fared when exposed to public matchmaking. Spoilers: Dota is hard.

SESSION 1

Baby steps

CHRIS I ve thought a lot about how to introduce people to Dota. My approach is to simplify as much as possible. I start the first session by ushering the guys into a meeting room where I ve prepared a 15- minute presentation. Instead of focusing on the minutiae, I introduce general concepts. Dota 2 is a numbers game, I explain. Much like an RTS, it s about building and maintaining a resource advantage. How you go about achieving that is as complex as you d like to make it, but as long as you remember that simple concept, you can t go too far wrong.

I don t know how much of my introduction sinks in with the guys. It is, after all, a powerpoint presentation. When it s over, I assign roles and heroes that I believe suit our fledgling team.

SAMUEL Dota 2 is intimidating to learn, but Chris has been so specific in assigning us roles that we re really only learning the one small part of it we each need to function within his battle plan. I m the muscle, so Chris assigns me Earthshaker, a large hairy creature that turns up in the heat of battle to lay down Fissure, a powerful barricade that will help us control encounters.

PHIL I m playing the support, although we re not calling it support . We re calling it position five, because of graphs. My take on the presentation is that our job as a team is to filter resources in a way that keeps our joint performance stable, even as our individual power shifts. As an intelligence hero, I ll start stronger relative to my teammates. The upshot of this is that I have to buy a donkey. 

CHRIS After the presentation, I load us into a private lobby and give the team a tour of the map. They line up behind me like ducklings, and already look confused. 

TOM The strategic overview is useful for clearly laying out our priorities, but I can t help but start to get bogged down in the minutiae when we roam the map. The home shop is different from the side shops, which are different from the secret shops hidden in the jungle. They all have different items that you can combine into better items to give you stat boosts and special powers. These have weird names like the Black King Bar and Heart of Tarrasque . I comfort myself with the fact I m playing Sven. Sven s a blue barbarian guy who hits things with a big sword. I can do that. 

ANDY Prior to Chris s presentation, I don t know a thing about Dota. After it, I know a bit more, but I m still very much a member of the Clueless Club. Then we go for a walk around the map and my brain starts to rebel. Why are there so many items for sale? Which ones do I buy? I ve reached a point in my life where I m pretty resistant to learning new things, and Dota is a big thing to learn. I figure that when it s time to play against another team, Chris will just tell me what to do anyway. That I can deal with. I like that I ve been assigned ranged characters, because then I can just hang at the back.

SESSION 2

Rise of the robots

CHRIS I ve assigned everybody two heroes. For our initial bot games, I take the middle lane and send Andy and Sam to one lane and Phil and Tom to the other. This gives me a chance to keep an eye on them from a position of relative isolation. Some take to the game faster than others.

TOM Phil and I get into a good rhythm. I get used to Sven s attack timing and getting the last hit on creeps—this gets me gold to buy those complicated items. When you first look at a Dota battle, you might assume you ought to help your little guys get to the enemy ancient. In reality, they re RTS minerals to be slurped up, one hit at a time. Just when I think I m starting to get the hang of things, Chris asks why I ve bought two separate pairs of boots. I have no idea how that happened. I blame Phil s donkey.

PHIL You would think, given that my first job is to buy a donkey, that I would be good at buying a donkey. While the transaction itself goes smoothly, I forget to take him out of my inventory. My other job is to place wards. I do this by asking Chris where I should place wards shortly after every time he reminds me to buy and place wards. My job, I assume, is just to help other people be awesome. It s part way through the first bot game that I realise that s not quite right. Chris pings a location and telling me to wait. He draws in the enemy team and I activate Crystal Maiden s ultimate: Freezing Field. 

Everything dies in a flurry of snow and dancing. I cackle.

SAMUEL I m struggling with Earthshaker. I m not sure what my purpose is in the early game—I die a lot and I m pretty poor at aiming Fissure across groups of enemies. I enjoy teaming up with Andy but he s far more effective. In the next bot game, I switch to Lich, an ice-based long-range mage that seems a bit more well-rounded. This proves a far better fit and I die a lot less. A character fit for a coward! 

ANDY As Sniper, the game slowly starts making sense to me. I figure out that if I increase my range, I can attack towers without getting hit. If I keep killing monsters, I can earn money to spend on the thing that gives me lightning bolts. But when we fight tougher bots, everything falls apart.

I die constantly and start to zone out. I lose faith in my ability to get Dota. This isn t for me. I m not into competitive games that you have to play for a thousand hours to get good at. I play games for stories and experiences, not learning.

SESSION 3

Oh, the humanity

CHRIS It s time. We need to actually play real people if we re going to stand a chance against RPS. I load us into a match against equally-new strangers, using a fresh account to mask my own rating. I know, I know, that s naughty. I justify it to myself by assuming that the other guys will be doing the same thing. I take Storm Spirit, the first Dota hero I fell in love with, to the midlane. 

ANDY Humans! Actual humans. This is the first time I ve played Dota with people I don t work with, and the pressure is rising. But once the match begins, they seem as clueless as me. I dutifully farm away, waiting for Chris to give me instructions. Occasionally I get into a fight with another player, and I don t die every time. That s encouraging. I farm and farm, and I buy the lightning bolt thing, and upgrade my character. 

PHIL My assigned heroes were Crystal Maiden and Witch Doctor. After trying out both against bots, I decide to stick with CM from here on out. Witch Doctor s stuns are pretty handy, but I like the more reliable damage over time of Crystal Maiden s Frostbite spell. Also, I just enjoy being a magical snow princess. She starts every game by flirting with Sven, which I think is having an awkward effect on Tom s and my working relationship.

TOM Playing against humans is one thing; the big problem is dealing with new and unpredictable heroes. Phil and I face off against Alchemist, who likes to throw bottles of gunk to stun and hurt enemies. Bounty Hunter can turn invisible, which he uses frequently to gang up on us and then run away. We re spending a lot of time laning against three opponents, and it s miserable. There s no time to mouse over enemy abilities to read their details—the only way you learn how an ability works is to be killed by it. 

PHIL Bounty Hunter is awful. Until now, I ve done a good job of faking competence and stoic reliability, but I am not a good Dota player. I struggle to disengage against the enemies I can see, and now I ve got to deal with this shit? Bounty Hunter s damage is mostly to our confidence. He s out there somewhere, and even with Sentry Wards laid down, I m jumping at every shadow. 

CHRIS I face Mirana in mid, and it s clear that this is actually a new player and not an asshole on a fake account. I win the lane pretty handily and realise that I am an asshole. I am, however, an asshole with options. I move top and score first blood, then roam the map scoring kills fairly effectively. A highlight is when Bounty Hunter moves in to kill Andy. I catch a glimpse of him on the minimap and know what he s about to do, so I tell Andy to stay still and bait out the kill attempt. I punish it with a flashy Storm Spirit play and feel like Andy s cool magical lightning uncle. 

Then, Sam gets called into a meeting and has to leave the game for 20 minutes. Rather than risk him getting pegged with an abandon, I get him to hand control of Earthshaker to me and I play both heroes for a little while. I m used to the notion that you can t quit a Dota game once it s started, but it occurs to me that this wouldn t necessarily be clear to anyone else.

As we approach the midgame, the enemy stacks up items that make it harder for me to control fights: Orchid Malevolence, Black King Bar. That Alchemist has a Shadow Blade; my ducklings are struggling to deal with the invisibility it grants him. They re struggling generally, actually. I feel like I m spinning plates—if I make a play on the top lane, Andy will die on the bottom lane. If I go bot, Tom and Phil will get in trouble top. These games were never supposed to be about me.

TOM We re having a shaky time learning how to fight as a team. A lot of us have stun moves that can start a big fight, but we re hampered by a strange awkwardness, as though we re all trying to fit through the same door. There s a lot of after you, no, after you, and we never quite manage to synchronise our charges. Four out of five of us have no idea whether we re winning or losing a fight, so we disengage in drabs and get picked off individually. Only now do I truly realise how hard this is going to be. 

ANDY A player using the Phantom Assassin hero keeps killing me, over and over again, and I start to lose interest. I still haven t fully embraced Dota, and I m reminded why I hate playing competitive games online. Even these low-level newbies we ve been matchmaked with are better than me. I know I could get better if I practised, but I don t want to. I don t want to Dota. 

CHRIS This is salvageable, I think, but I m daunted by the number of small things I ve got no time to explain. I count off the enemy s full list of stuns and successfully teleport out of a fight gone wrong, but I realise that being able to do that represents the better part of thousands of hours of accumulated experience. It s no good saying teleport when they ve used all their stuns to people who have no idea how many stuns they have. 

PHIL We re relying on Chris too much. It s clear he wants us to start taking the initiative, but when he tells us he s coming to gank, we interpret it as him coming to singlehandedly make everything better. Even when he does lay out a step-bystep play, it turns out people are unpredictable. At one point, I hide in the treeline of the safe lane, waiting for Chris to draw the majority of the opposing team into Freezing Field s range. They move in and I pop it, waiting for the glorious snow-death. Instead, they move back. I miss everyone. It s deeply unsatisfying. 

CHRIS The game runs long—over 60 minutes—but we re pushed back steadily by Alchemist and Phantom Assassin, who both scale well into the late game. Eventually, our respawn timers run too long; there s nothing else to be done. If we re going to beat RPS, I resolve, we need to focus on fighting as a team

THE MATCH

PC Gamer vs RPS

CHRIS I think we ve got what it takes, although Andy is less sure. RPS have an advantage, because two of their players—Alice and Pip—have about as much Dota experience as I do. To make matters worse, one of their newbies takes a nap and doesn t turn up. They get a ringer, Quinns, who was a member of my original Dota group. He hasn t played in years, but a hundred hours of experience two years ago trumps five hours last week. I m sure it ll be fine if we stick to the plan.

I don t stick to the plan. I was going to play Storm Spirit again, but I don t want to beat up newbies with a hero they can t handle. I pick Invoker instead, a flashy mage who combines elements to conjure spells. He s an advanced character and I m merely all right with him—I feel this is a fair compromise. RPS don t compromise. They take Viper and Puck on their experienced players, characters that are very difficult for new players to deal with. Shit! 

ANDY The team seems fairly confident about the big finale. I m not. I m just planning to keep my head down, kill monsters, and hopefully not make too many mistakes. But then the match starts and I catch my first glimpse of a rival hero and suddenly all I care about is beating them. I manage to stay alive for the longest I ve ever stayed alive in Dota, even with a Drow Ranger pummelling my hero with magic arrows. This is promising. 

TOM This is it. I m a little terrified because I m laning against Pip s Viper. She keeps needling me from a distance, pushing me away from the creep wave. That means fewer last hits and less gold. There s some slightly frantic banter about the whereabouts of the RPS midlaner, who is apparently some sort of rainbow-coloured death fairy. I try to focus on killing creeps. 

PHIL Adam from RPS is playing Witch Doctor. I know how to play WD, and that, I realise, means I can respond to what he s doing. At one point, I see his health start to tick up, and realise he s activated Voodoo Restoration. I know for a fact that it s bottomed out his mana, because I once made the same mistake. Annoyingly, I can t do anything—Pip s Viper is too effective for us to get a kill—but I m pleased at myself for knowing a thing. 

CHRIS I m nervous. I don t get anywhere near the farm I need. An invisibility rune spawns, and I figure I can use it to make a game-opening play on the top lane. I do so, but Andy and Sam aren t anywhere near close enough to help and the enemy successfully withdraws. The long walk back to the fountain gives Alice plenty of time alone. 

SAMUEL Andy and I are gradually getting to grips with the tactical retreat. Early on I take out Alec s Drow Ranger, which is a great boost to my self-esteem. We re working well together. Then Alice arrives to ruin it all. 

ANDY Everything seems to be going well, but then I get killed by a giant floating frog fairy, and again, and again, and now I m mad. Every time I see the magic frog I run away, and I spend the next part of the match just hiding in a corner, killing creeps. 

PHIL I keep making logistical errors. I m so focused on where to place wards that I forget to buy them. Twice I mis-click, activating my ultimate when I meant to place a ward. It s frustrating, because despite having only played a few games, I already think I should be better than this. I m not the only one getting annoyed. Chris sounds frustrated. I don t know if it s with us or himself, or some combination of the two, but it has a profound effect on morale. Until now, we ve fed off Chris s relentless optimism and belief. We re not long into the match, and it s clear he s behind. His frustration hits me pretty hard. I go very quiet. 

CHRIS Alice has built a Dagon, a magical laser wand that allows you to explode underleveled heroes in a single hit. My ducklings are underleveled. It feels like a dick move. Really, though, I m cross at myself. I should have played what I knew, but I tried to both be noble and a show-off in a single stroke. I pull the team off their lanes, into a clump for safety. Regaining a bit of composure, I land a global snipe on Alec s fleeing Drow Ranger with Invoker s Sunstrike. We re still in this, barely. 

TOM It s a huge relief to get out of the lanes. I start amassing a bit of gold by chopping away at the wildlife in the jungles. I m gradually building the famed BKB , which I can activate to gain immunity from magic spells for a few precious seconds. I wait, and bide my time killing a colourful jungle ostrich. 

ANDY The latter half of a Dota match, I ve learned, is a lot more fun. Once you ve got better items and abilities, the combat feels a lot more satisfying. I m as engaged as I ve ever been in a Dota game. I want to beat these guys. 

CHRIS I m running the numbers. Alice is scary, but she s also pushing her luck. She over-extends more than once, and we re able to feint, counter-attack, and kill her. But the big picture looks grim. Quinns has Shadow Shaman, whose ultimate—Serpent Wards—allows him to place a nest of menacing snake-turrets. They re deadly against buildings and deadlier against players, and he s good at trapping people in them. At the beginning of this journey, I assumed I could ignore most of the little details and lead a team to victory by focusing on the major themes. I m wrong. You really need to know how to escape a Serpent Ward trap, how to clear them from a tower, and so on. There s no time to explain. They close on our base. 

TOM The mid-game felt like a fragmented mess of half-formed fights. Only now, on the doorstep of our ancient, do we finally rally. We re all in one place, and our mission is clear: kill anything that comes up the steps. That gives us the focus we need to start getting kills. We even manage to wipe their team at one point. We ve lost too many towers, though, and our barracks, which means we re being swarmed by enemy mega-creeps. My items have brought me back into the game, but I have to spend all my time beating back the hordes. It s a valiant last stand, but we can t get out of our base. The end is nigh. 

ANDY The RPS army is relentless. They won t stop coming. I m dying a lot, and they re all a higher level than me. Game over. I stand in a corner, lower my rifle, and wait patiently for the match to end. I just don t have Dota in my blood. 

PHIL I m distraught—partly at RPS s win, but mostly at myself. I didn t play well. I don t think I can play well yet. As I wallow in post-game ennui, I realise that I d really like to learn how. 

CHRIS I m heartbroken. I know this feeling. I look around the office. Phil feels it. Tom feels it. Sam feels it. Andy s already moved on. Something occurs to me: I can tell which of us will keep playing—they re the ones who are utterly, utterly crestfallen. Dota this weekend? Phil asks. I agree. Our next conversation concerns revenge.

The very first thing I wrote about Dota 2 was this article, originally posted to a blog and then republished on the Tumblr that preceded this column (before being republished, again, about a year ago. It's been around the houses.) In it, I describe the thing that drew me into Dota 2 in the first place: what I saw then as a 'performance-style structure' that recreated in an online game the kinds of experiences that I valued when I did a lot of live comedy. Dota was special to me from the start because I felt like each match—each 'performance'—taught me something about myself and the people I was playing with.

My perspective on the game has changed since then. What you're reading now, as it happens, is the 52nd weekly column I've written about Dota—a year of writing, representing almost three years of thinking too hard about wizards. Temporal neatness is as good a reason as any to explain the way that thinking has shifted.

If I started out thinking of Dota 2 as a complicated videogame and moved on to thinking of it as a form of performance, I now think of it almost exclusively as a sport. Much of what I used to understand as creative or social challenges—getting five people to work in harmony with one another, experimenting with the opportunities afforded by the hero pool—I now think of in terms of organised competition and self-improvement. Dota 2 isn't a toybox any more: it's a test. It's a wall to be climbed, an encounter with a system that demands respect and doesn't owe you anything.

There's something valuable about this transition, I think. The vast majority of games, even multiplayer games, promise the same sorts of experience: here is a challenge designed to be overcome. Here is how you level up; here is your reward for doing so. Here is entertainment, functionally: here is entertainment that, one way or another, is designed to make you feel good. Even when I started to perceive Dota in terms of performance I was still thinking about it as an entertainment product, albeit one where the players were collectively responsible for creating that entertainment for themselves.

While playing the game is entertaining, that's no longer the reason I do it. I play Dota to get better at Dota: to learn something, alone or with my friends, and to apply that understanding over and over again in a dozen different configurations. Play is practice, and practice is both gratifying and utterly, mood-crushingly frustrating. It's a fundamentally different approach to games than what is considered to be 'mainstream' or 'normal'. It's not even 'hardcore', because that as often as not translates to 'person who plays every game that comes out'. This is different: 'person that plays a game even when it isn't fun because they're getting something else out of it'.

I was thinking about this in a different sense, a couple of weeks ago, shortly after the release of Bloodborne on the PS4 (a crying shame that it's not coming to PC.) The backlash to the widespread acclaim for the game concerned its inaccessibility, challenging the ease with which critics praised Bloodborne for being punishing, repetitive, and occasionally unfair. Some of these arguments centred on the notion of the 'average' gamer, alienated from their hobby by a hardcore contingent who encouraged the creation of games that were too hard for others to enjoy. 'It's all well and good that you enjoy this', these arguments ran. 'But what about the guy on the street?'

I was the guy on the street when I started playing Dota 2—somebody whose critical interest in games was based on late-noughties singleplayer experiences with lofty cinematic or literary ambitions (BioShock, Mass Effect, GTA IV) and whose highest competitive achievements amounted to bronze-level StarCraft II and being terrible at Street Fighter. I was completely and abidingly average, and then I encountered Dota, and Dota taught me that committing myself to a single, very difficult game could teach me things—and deliver a sense of satisfaction—that I could only get by treating the game as a sport, a challenge to be personally overcome. There is a direct line from that change in mindset to my subsequent enthusiasm for Bloodborne. Dota opened up pathways in my brain.

The sting in the tail is that I am still completely and abidingly average, and not just in the sense that I'm a bit shit at Dota. Hundreds of thousands of people value challenge in just the same way that I now do. Many of them are playing League or Dota right now. The journey won't be the same one, in each case, but the pattern remains: the 'average' player of games values challenge, values being asked to get better at something, values having to work for something. This is true regardless of age, gender, or level of experience: these are the most popular videogames in the world for a reason.

There's a lot about my time with Dota that has made me question my place in the gaming community. It's a toxic environment, often, and there have been points where it really does feel just like being a rat fighting other rats for a go on the 'treat' button. Despite this the mass appeal of serious competition—of games as sports, collectively-owned hobbies that you engage in because they test you—gives me faith in gaming as a whole.

Wanting to get better at something is a very basic and very human drive, one that is diminished whenever somebody argues that the 'average' player just wants to be entertained. The great thing about taking a game seriously is that it proves that attitude wrong: not just in terms of what it says about the games industry, but in terms of what it says about people. People, it turns out, are very good at learning and working hard and, from time to time, at cooperating. Dota is no longer important to me because it represents a performance of personal traits: it's important to me because it represents a performance of these universal ones.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.

Last night marked the end of a long run of pretty bad Dota. I'd felt my enthusiasm ebb before, but never this substantially, and this is was the first time in the history of my almost-three-year-old hobby that I've considered taking an extended break. The main problems were thus: I wasn't winning very much, I didn't like how long games seemed to always run, and I felt like I was being more of a dick than usual.

The latter is the biggest problem. I don't valorise extreme 'saltiness'—I think it's a weakness, as I've written a bunch of times before—but I can't deny that I get frustrated with myself and with others. A little salt, I think, is fine. It's actually a pretty good analogy, as these things go—salt provides both flavour and, when things are icy, necessary friction. Aggression does the same thing. But too much of the former will kill you, and too much of the latter will kill your enthusiasm for the game—and your friends' enthusiasm for you, potentially.

Facing rising frustration in Dota, it was easy for me to commit more time to games I find less stressful—Destiny, Pillars of Eternity, Bloodborne, Smite. Eventually, that time commitment looked like it might threaten Dota's place in my favourites list. I then realised what I always tend to realise, in these moments: that when you're falling out of love with the game, you need to actively make a change. You need to figure out a way to make Dota fun again. You can't just wait for the salt to go away: you need to think about it.

Here's what I thought about.

Don't just play because you think you have to

Most of my Dota games start with someone asking me if I want to play Dota, which leads to playing when (a) I'd rather be doing something else and (b) I'm basically unready to do anything competitive. I play regardless because of the feeling that time not spent playing Dota is time that I'm secretly wasting. Does everybody feel that way about Dota? I assume so.

Rather than resisting the urge to say yes—and consequently playing fewer games—I find it helps to be the person pulling the stack together. If I'm choosing to play, it generally means that I feel ready to do so. What 'ready' means will change from person to person. For me, it's a case of having eaten and maybe gotten some sleep and generally feeling focused and like I might actually win this time. Emphasis on 'might'.

Actively choosing to play also means that I'm more accepting of the notion that the game might not go well. I know what I'm getting myself into, and one of my priorities is to feel good about the game afterwards: while that hopefully means winning the game, it definitely means not being a prick to people. If you go in with the right attitude, I find it's easier to come out with that attitude intact.

Resist the spiral of sadness (and saltiness)

Learning to pick up and try again after a loss is important when you play a lot of best-of-threes, but that's not the case for the majority of people who play Dota. Learning to recognise when you're on a losing streak and quit is important too: continuing to tilt is only going to make you feel worse. The perfect time to find something else to do is when playing more Dota is going to make you like Dota less.

This goes the other way. Last night, when I felt like I'd finally broken out of this kind of downward spiral, I only played a single game. I went 28/6/12 with an offlane Windranger: 'that'll do', I thought afterwards. 'That'll do for tonight'. I spent the rest of the evening clearing out a dungeon in Pillars of Eternity and killing a boss in Bloodborne. Because I ended on a high, my positive Dota experience retained its integrity for a little longer.

This isn't viable all of the time. You need to play more to get good, so bailing after your first match of the night isn't going to work in the long run. But it can be great for your salt levels: I finished that match feeling pretty good about the game, about myself, and about the people I was playing with, and that feeling hasn't abated yet.

Determine whether you need to change things up, or double down

One of my worst habits is that I rarely play the same hero twice even if I'm doing well. I know players who are the opposite: who will keep banging their head against the same wall even if it's never going to yield. Both approaches have problems, particularly when the game is becoming more intensely frustrating. I find myself playing characters and roles that I'm unfamiliar with, getting angry at myself for underperforming and second-guessing my teammates who find themselves dropping into the role I'd usually occupy. Similarly, getting counter-picked for the Nth time in a row because you only want to play Storm Spirit is going to make you angry.

In my case, I've found it helpful to pick a handful of characters and stick to them: a mixture of flavours of the month and old favourites that I reliably enjoy. By suspending the drive to 'learn' a new hero by leaping from one to another with every game, I'm playing a lot better. Playing a lot better, on the whole, is less stressful and leads to a more positive outlook.

The solution may go the other way for others: there are times when clicking the 'random' button opens up doorways and makes the game fresh again. Take a look at your situation, your skill level, and what it is that is making you angry about the game—then either mix things up or commit as appropriate.

Don't over-analyse

If there's a theme emerging here, it's this: that you can functionally take a 'break' from Dota by giving yourself a break from the most competitive parts of Dota. The people I know who have the biggest salt problems—myself included—are those who take their performance (too) seriously, and who are inclined to fix every problem they encounter by picking it apart, watching the replays, coming up with plans and data and formulae.

There's a time when that's appropriate, but I'm starting to learn that not every pub game warrants a post-game debriefing. We often think of 'salt' in terms of the frustration that manifests in-game—flaming, excuses, and so on. It's equally evident in the way you assess your own play, and that of others. It's here that the really insidious stuff creeps in, the micro-aggression that makes the game less fun for everybody. I'd be happy if I never again begin a sentence with "we just need to..." or "I was just trying to..." during yet another post-match breakdown. There are times where this works, where it makes you better. There are also plenty of times where it drags everybody's enjoyment of the game through the dirt.

It's a question of balance. Dota is distinct among competitive games for the way that it can be both extremely silly and extremely serious at even the highest levels of play: 'saltiness' and frustration arrive, I think, when you end up trending too much towards the latter half of that equation. My solution is to remind myself that it's okay to simply play for fun. That I seem to win more often when I play that way is a weird, but welcome, bonus.

To read more Three Lane Highway, click here.