Dota 2 placeholder skill icons on snapchat

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Favorite Dota 2 Joke Icons

Before every great game, there’s a skeleton of a great game. Dota 2 is no exception, and before all the actual skill icons are implemented, apparently some placeholder joke items are created. While I haven’t played the game long enough to see all heroes’ joke icons, a Redditor luckily archived them to share the bones of the past, well into the future. Here are my favorite visual puns pulled off by them folks at Valve. ❤

Nerdgasm: The Horrible, Horrible Losing Streak

I’ve been playing DotA 2 semi-seriously recently, and by that I mean tryharding in pubs and whatnot. For the most part I feel I’ve made strides of improvement for the last year or so. I’ve learned plenty of the items, have gotten comfortable with a lot of the heroes, and feel that the decisions I make have been pretty darn good. Of course, I’m aware that I am FAR from one of the best players out there. That’s why I, you know, tryhard in pubs. To improve.

According to my stats on dotabuff, I’m sitting at around a 52% win rate. While it’s not awesome like 75% or anything of the sort, it’s still over .500. That, for a guy who had no idea how to play the game a year ago, is definitely a win. But it wasn’t until the past few months that I actually started winning. The first 100 or so games I played were miserable and I’m pretty sure my win rate was pure garbage. But now that I’ve hit this 52%, it is now safe to say that I am on my longest lose streak in what feels like forever.

And well, it’s pretty damned depressing to be honest.

When you’re putting your blood, sweat, and tears into something and you just keep failing over, and over, and over again. It hurts mentally to go through that. To just feel as if you’re doing so many things right but there are so many things wrong. Even typing out the length of my loss streak somewhat feels “painful”: I think I’ve dropped 8 recently. The worst part, though, is the somewhat mental and psychological state that you get in: I can see now how teams at TI2, after dropping game after game in the group stages, could just simply feel conflicted and have no morale at all. THIS is how it feels, and it doesn’t feel good.

The thing is it’s difficult because you get into this mindset where you’re desperately trying to find an answer, a logical reasoning to these results; however, because you feel you’ve practice so hard you sorta block out the possibility that YOU were the one that made the mistakes. I mean, you can tell yourself that, but your mind just can’t wrap your head around it. So then you end up blaming your teammates, who end up blaming you and other teammates, and then the whole team just breaks down mid-game. It’s tough because you realize that they’re in the same exact state you are. They, like you, are frustrated and desperately just want something to go right in-game to subdue the suffering. This is a dangerous state because people need to be accountable at this point: people need to just take a step back, take a breath, and realize what exactly happened, what’s accountable, and just move on from it.

Which is hard in the thick of battle. It’s easy to blame the guy who blinked in crazily, initiating a bad fight under the enemy tower. It’s hard to realize that you all were focusing different targets or that you all, knowing it was a bad engage, just didn’t back off, saving two or three of your team’s heroes rather than face an entire teamwipe.

One thing I can say, however, after a friend spectated my last game, is that it’s actually alright to be told it wasn’t your fault. The source of all this frustration is not necessarily that you entirely believe that a lost game is their fault, but that you’re guilty because you’re aware of your own actions and are actually mad at yourself for not doing good enough. You blame the others because you know what’s your fault and you just don’t want to be antagonized or yelled at. Most of it is just pure guilt. So being told “it’s not entirely your fault” helps with the team because it makes players realize that the burden isn’t on one person: it’s on the team as a whole. Even if the carry missed 80% of their last hits, or the support overextended four times, being told that WE failed rather than YOU failed makes the burden that much easier to bear.

People aren’t perfect: they make mistakes. We shouldn’t lash out at anybody because of them, we should help them improve on them. I know that I wasn’t playing my best today, but I’ll keep going and keep striving to improve. Many of these games I felt I did good, many of them I did bad, but when it comes down to it, the hard part is realizing that my team failed on a whole rather than just myself. It’s frustrating because I feel that the mistakes I made could have changed the game if I had not made them, but I’m aware it’s the mistakes of the team that costs the game.

It’s just bleh. Losing eight in a row. Ugh.