In the previous post, I went over a mind map of my experience with DOTA 2. But this begs the question: what does any of this have to do with my choices in careers and college? To that, I have an answer.
This externship has shown me that I'm suited for a profession that demands much attention, requires endless patience and the ability to withstand criticism and turn it into something productive. Already that opens up several options for career choices and college majors: I could become a writer, a software engineer, a coder and more. All of these professions require patience and dedication, and I have that in boatloads. This externship has also reinforced my choices of majors, one being linguistics and a minor in computer engineering. I think I have a mind for these, and I expect I won't be disappointed should I choose to pursue a path down these choices. All in all, if there's a field that's similar to the experience I've had during this month, then I'm most likely going to go down it with vigor.
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This is my mind map of DOTA 2 and my experience with it. It's fairly simple. Why? Because fairly simple things are easier to explain and to mentally digest, much like frustrated yelling.
So, DOTA 2 has a core of players, as with any game, and has a core of meta-gaming as well, like a massively popular game typically has. Meta-gaming by the way, is the act of using specialized or esoteric information about a game and it's players to make advantageous choices. (If you know that a person playing on the other team likes to pick magic-heavy heroes, then picking a tanky, magic resistant hero and building anti-magic items during the course of the match to would be meta-gaming.) Moving on from that tangent, the player branches out their skills near the top, learning how the shop, hotkey configurations, movement, and other controls work. They all connect to the player and the idea of an over-arching skill set entered over DOTA 2. However, beyond that central core, you roam into the secondary, but still important part of DOTA: the frustrations that come from the meta, the game itself, and the players (partially.) See, meta-gaming is what drives change in a competitive game like DOTA 2, as players always learn new and unexpected ways to thwart the game's balance, causing patches and fixes and tweaks to come out. Sometimes the meta is simply an annoying cluster of heroes that are a chore to have to deal with when playing your favorite hero, which is where frustration begins to build. Learning how to navigate the meta isn't always easy, and it doesn't help that toxicity from players is very common. So on top of your frustration that a single hero has defeated you nine times before the 15:00 minute mark is up, you also have to contend with other players yelling into their mics to yell at you for being, as they see it, a complete imbecile. To round out the frustration of learning, being to slow to adapt means you have less control of the map, as the meta-rulers have unfettered access to spots of their choice, and that means you lose towers or structures, or they can farm gold freely on your side of the map. Which you will get flamed at for, inevitably. Now, this sounds like all cons and no pros, and you'd be justified in thinking that it would be improbable for someone to overcome these barriers. But you'd also be wrong. These pressures have only made me better at DOTA 2, not worse. How? I don't mute the flamers, the people who yell at you. Instead, I ask why they're yelling at me in the first place, how exactly I screwed up the first time. That way, I know what not to do the second time. If the meta is making a match hell for me, I look at the hero and build that's wiping the floor with me, and ask what can shut it down. There's always a work-around in DOTA 2, no matter what the opposition does. I learned that from one of my mentors the hard way. Link to two successful combos I used as Nature's Prophet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROZIsMk9wFo I can't say that there has been anything that could have prepared me for the experience of DOTA 2 throughout the course of high school. High school is a routine of roaming from classroom to classroom, learning or practicing a thing or two a day, then eventually testing that knowledge via quiz or something similar. It's very un-intensive and slow; courses are spread out over the course of almost 10 months for a single topic. DOTA on the other hand is a demanding, fast-paced efficiency machine that gives you two options: either learn everything fast and begin quickly practicing good habits immediately, or fail, fail, fail again. Nothing of that nature has been taught or mentioned in my high school experience, so I guess you could say that DOTA 2 caught me off-guard. Yeah, that kind of off-guard. But, there is one skill or trait I've had that has been obvious since day one: commitment. When I say commitment, I also mean committing every spare moment you have towards flash-learning and practicing DOTA 2. Commitment is important, because it will make or break you in multiple ways, both as a player and your in-game decisions, As a player, if I don't commit to practicing mechanics like last-hitting and farming well, I will lose value during matches, and my net worth of experience, gold, and contributions to the team will falter and fail. In-game, if I don't commit to a role and play it, I become useless; I can't be fragile and fast while also being strong and slow. The middle ground between roles is an indecisive player and hero, and every minute spent deliberating is another minute lost that could have been spent doing something useful. See, at any point in time you aren't team-fighting or pushing or building an item at base, it's generally a good idea to farm. In DOTA 2, farming is defeating the neutral creeps that spawn in the "jungle" of the map, shown in the first image. To efficiently farm, and to get more gold + xp per visit to the camps, you can stack a camp, shown in the second image. Stacking is luring out the creeps from their camp just as new creeps are about to spawn, so when they return, twice the amount of creeps are in a single camp, thus stacking the amount. Usually through a match, you take time to stack a camp or two repeatedly, until you have a sizable number of creeps to farm, shown in the third image. Once stacked, it's time for the E-Z m0neyz. Stacking is, like farming, is a committed process. If you don't take the time to stack, and don't commit to stacking, you will lose out on gold and experience, setting you behind the enemy team in net worth. When you think about it, there's a lot of things that require you to commit attention to in this game. An almost unmanagable amount, really. This experience, interestingly enough, is similar in a way to my previous internship through the above mentioned trait of commitment. See, I had to help out in an under-staffed department at the San Diego Opera, and I was tasked with compiling an enormous spreadsheet of potential donors and sponsors for the Opera, and to find foundations willing to donate money. Every day I spent nearly all my time sequestered in my intern cubicle, typing and checking and referencing and going through 501 (c) 3 PDF forms to see the money that was hypothetically available to be donated. And near the end of my internship my mentor and his boss agreed: I had done a fine good job. Why? 'Cus I kept plugging away at it, committed.
That's the only part that's similar really. Everything else has been different, as I mentioned above. Except for the spreadsheets; undoubtedly the most engaging and exciting and completely not-boring activity I've ever done. It's even more colorful and vivid than DOTA 2! See? Just look at how interesting it is! This is a practice match that I played Nature's Prophet in, a hero that specializes in sieging structures like towers and barracks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x7TFJdQfqM Well. As you recall, I have said that DOTA 2 is a very hard game to learn and play. As you'll also recall, I said that there are half a hundred different things to learn aside from basic mechanics like fighting and dodging. These things eat at me without relent. One of the challenges I've encountered is fast hot-keying. In DOTA 2, there are many abilities that your hero can use on the battlefield as well as items that can assist allies, harass enemies, or perform a helpful function when activated. As you can see, there are only a few items to memorize and learn, and each of them have a passive (non-activated) effect, or an activated effect. You can carry up to 9 items in your backpack, but can only use 6 of them at any given time. 6 items to use also means 6 hot-keys are needed to use them quickly. An item like Boots Of Speed is a passive one, so it doesn't require a hotkey to use. Depending on the hero you play as, you will want more or less passive items in your backpack. For heroes that lack the ability to quickly disable an enemy or escape from them, more active items are required. An item like Force Staff is a utility item, as it provides an increase in your hero's Intelligence level and health regeneration, and it also provides a movement burst. If you target a unit (like yourself or an enemy hero), you can push them towards the direction they're facing. This is useful for running away from multiple enemies who are out for your blood, or for positioning an enemy to make it easier for your teammates to merrily bludgeon them. Now, I've told you all of this for two reasons. The first is to upload relevant images, and the second is to give you an idea of how many things you need to control for your hero alone. In fact, I'll give you a count:
Hero Abilities - 4~6 Items - 6 (max) Unit Controls - 10 Shop Actions - 3 Chat Options - 9 (including mic controls) Camera Controls - 3 Advanced Hotkeys - ~10 Added all together, you have roughly 40 hotkeys to contend with, especially if you're playing a hero that requires a good deal of multi-tasking. If you're playing a simpler hero, there aren't as many hotkeys, but still. It's a lot to remember. Learning and memorizing hotkeys has been the biggest difficulty so far for me, but I've gotten better through practice. I'm now able to pull off some item/ability combos with relative consistency, like Sprout + Orchid Malevolent. (Sprout creates a ring of trees around an area point, which can trap a unit. Orchid is an item that prevents a hero from using their abilities for a short time. This means that after pulling off this combo, you can sit and wail on someone with ranged attacks until the Orchid or Sprout wear off.) As for my mentor/co-workers being supportive. . . it's not as positive as one would expect. Not to belittle the people I've been practicing with; quite the opposite. Every time someone is coaching me, they point out every mistake I make immediately, and don't bother to act nice about doing so. Despite sounding unpleasant, this method is the most direct you can get and must be with DOTA 2, especially if you want to learn good habits early. See, DOTA 2 is a game centered around a singular, tangible goal, which is to destroy the enemy's Ancient. To do this, you must optimize and use every talent or ability at your disposal to be as efficient as possible reaching this goal. If you do not, you will be punished in more ways than you can count on one hand in less than 10 seconds. You must be efficient for the sake of your team as well. If you screw up, then you screw it up for 4 other people and make it harder on them to do their jobs in-game. Being criticized immediately for every error I make is important, because if I don't fix it immediately, my entire team suffers for it. And I have improved all the more because of it. So yeah. DOTA's pretty fun to play. Link for interview here:
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