I have this one friend that I met in my college years, somehow he was the only one in my class that played Dota and we went along and started to play together. First time playing with him and he tries to get better at the game. I thought to myself, maybe I found my partner for this game after my highschool friends stop playing dota.

Fast forward a few weeks, met his group of friends that also play dota, some of whom I even admire to watch his replays because of how better he is than me. We played together a lot, this was when Techies had green mines as his ult and I main him and that time, I made them realize how much of a potential techies was and even gained some of their respect. Truly I thought that I could finally have my dream come true of a party of 5 playing dota.

Years went by and me and him graduated, we both went our own path, got work, and became adults. We still talked daily, still as close as ever being friends even tho we lived far from each other. Some of his friends stopped playing dota, fine by me, people come and go but one thing that I hate about this guy is that for some reason he keeps on hating dota, mainly because of a certain dota streamer that influenced him. He keeps saying twitch buzzwords in every sentence, and mind you he’s an adult.

A few months before, still playing with my friend from college, close as ever. We played as usual, mostly me and him, but sometimes we have a 3-man party or a full stack. As of now, my current in-game hours in dota are roughly 5.5k hours, and my friend had around 5.2k-ish hours. I noticed that our game quality had been lower, it started with him doing weird builds on heroes, oh he’s just experimenting and I shrug it off, and then I noticed after many games with him, let’s say he’s playing Jugg he goes full 4/0/4/1 on his skill build, asked him to at least get 1 points on heal. He just shrugs it off and says some clowny shit like, that’s a boring way to play. Fine, cant really backseat him right?. Some other gams later, he was playing PA, enemy was low and retreating under tower, we can kill the enemy but only under his tower, so we dove, PA tanked the tower, got the kill and I noticed PA didn’t even evade a single tower attack. Clicked on him and saw 4/4/0/1 build on him, he died from the tower of course and I asked him what’s with the weird build. Same clowny shit response as last time.

Gonna vent a bit more in this paragraph so feel free to skip this until. One time he played Morph, we were losing lane with so much harras, enemy mid ganked a lot and so I fed them. 25 mins in, enemy sieging high-ground, and Morph farmed as much as he could so we should at least fight once. Spoiler alert, we lost that fight, tried to think what went wrong, sure I fed them, so part of it was mine to blame, clicked on Morph, he had 2 points in Attribute Shift, and that shit broke me, asked him nicely, what’s with the weird build,

“I don’t know how to play morph”, okay,

“Did you follow the guide”, I replied

“No that shit is for losers Pepeg”

What the fuck, what is wrong with him, he’s not throwing the game by any means, but the way he plays, I spend 25 mins just to lose because of this bullshit, like I’m not asking him to play like RTZ or Miracle, I just want him to play properly, 5k hours into the game,he’s Ancient ranked, Im Legend ranked at best so I expect that he should already understand the basics.

The way he plays, he’s really tearing our friendship, I don’t want to waste a 45 min game just to lose to some weird bullshit way that my friend plays, and on top of that he acts oblivious like he’s done nothing wrong.

After this year’s TI, he got inspired with Team Spirit and the meta, so he starts buying midas on all heroes for some reason, even supports, and whenever the game goes on beyond 30 min, he says that “I’m glad that I bought midas” on a support, like Midas doesn’t guarantee you a win, you don’t even have any impact on the game with it.

His friends also became just like him, “playing for fun”, fuck that we ain’t even winning 50% of the time, how is it fun to lose, " we win some we lose some", no we lost because we played so badly and him not even trying to adapt to the game really just makes me think that I’m wasting time playing this game.

Until today, whenever he invites me to play with his friend, I just changed my mindset to we’re gonna lose and hope for the best. That’s the only way for me to not get irritated at him, day by day.
Thank you for reading this if you’ve reached this far. Good night

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