Valve's approaches to community in DOTA 2 are still mostly under wraps, but hints show an effort at a different kind of MOBA community. See what the RTSGuru.com editors have to say about it.

No, this is not a MOBA community.

no there not and if they are trying the have failed.   LoL has the same type of community.

Sounds like an interesting idea, actually. I was enjoying LoL for a while, but the community really killed the fun with me. Rage quitters on both sides were a pain in the ass, if it was on my side suddenly we were outnumbers, on the team's side and now I just feel bad for them. Then of course are the cyber bullies and smack talkers. It's easy enough to put people on ignore...until you're on their team, and now they're making you look bad. It's like guilt by association. The whole thing just made me very uncomfortable, I was glad to be away from it once I got over my momentary MOBA addiction.

I play Dota2 every day for at least a few hours, gonna play when i get done surfing these forums. The community in Dota2 at this very moment is like the community in LOL when it first started getting real bad. The community as a whole isn't bad, just sprinkled with some really bad people, kids, children, whatever they may be. It will not be a different community, in the end, all MOBA communities will be the same when you get down to it. The only difference will be in the tools given to the players to deal with these "annoying" issues. Off to grab a beer and fire up DOTA2, catch ya later!

Its too early to make a real claim, but a lot of the tools they're including give the impression that they do care about the image of the MOBA community, and that they want to make as prestigious as possible.

The community is very similar to LoL, fortunately not as bad as HoN imo at this time.  However, once the game is released as a full f2p game, it will be same, regarldess of what Valve does.  It's always going to be somewhat hostile community, I do not see how they can escape it.  It's very hostile towards new players and players of other nationalities sometimes.  You just have to have some thick skin or just don't bother.  Personally, while I love the gameplay, I got sick of dealing with 14 year olds yelling at me for making a mistake.  Of course it's not always like that and do have fun with the game, however for some odd reason the moba community seems to have a higher percentage of dbags than other online gaming genres, and Dota2 will be the same.

I have played HoN, LoL, Dota 1 and Dota 2, all of these communites sucks as it is equal as the Call of Duty Community, full of assholes, kids, douchbags, and evil people thoughout the web. League of Legends suffers from Rage Quitters, Leavers, and Trolls. The report button hardly do anything great as i feel this Tribunal Systemis corrupted and don't ban the people who does these. I've reported alot of people for griefing and feeding (stupid people), the game fails to make a tutorial for newbies, and people tend to use OP characters (Dota 2 the same, I don't know how many times I see Zeus, Ursa, Pudge, Involker, etc).

Dota 2 is filled with the same thing, but with more kids and people who don't speak english in US servers, people always use the same heroes because of how powerful they are, mic spammers,  ping spammers, you named it.

I honeslty wish the game developers sieze making MOBA titles as MOBA games community is nothing more then shit from hell. Every game and on Every round is filled with bad people who pisses me off all the time, I finnally just say fuck it and wish that I never was invited to DOTA 2 and wish my account in LoL was deleted, but sadly the LoL customer support is full of apes who don't know what deletion means and twist my words.

It's the right idea, but I'm not sure rewards are the solution.  The problem may be a systemic problem within the MOBA game genre.  Without a design change to the game genre, the problem will probably continue to exist.

I've discussed this in terms of LoL because the punishment system doesn't work.  The rage quitting is not the problem.  The underlying problem is that MOBAs require a competent team to be successful and one weak link ruins the experience for everyone.  The question then becomes much like pug'ing in a true MMO, do you want to continue on with a bad group or just drop and try to find better players?

So, if the rage quitter isn't the problem, what is?  It's weak players!  MOBAs, like many games and especially many MMOs, either don't teach players well or don't force them to get better.  They instead try and force the comon denominator to the lowest skilled player rather than raising the bar to a higher level.  Punishing rage quitters didn't solve this problem.  Rewarding people who stay in losing games isn't the solution either.

The only solution is setting the expectations higher and accepting the the player community may not be as large because of it.  Games need to focus on better players rather than catering to the worst.  That's the only way to create a better game and a better community.  As long as games choose to value the $$ higher than the quality of its player community, each new game will continue to have the same problems as previous games in terms of bad and often abusive communities.

I understand that guilds fix many of these problems, so there is one solution.  However, as long as MOBAs let players who have 100+ matches under their belt do dumb things through stupidity, ignorance or general trolling, communities are going to get angry and be abusive.  I don't want to keep playing a game where one or more of my team members go 0-6, 1-8, 2-10 in the first 10-15 minutes.  It's not fun and 9 out of 10 times, it just results in 30 more minutes of wasted time to lose the game.

It's too easy to blame others for your failure in a MOBA community.

I realy don't understand people who think that lost game is a waste of time, then don't play MOBA . Also every community has it's bad sided minds (trolls,feeders,ragers, etc) And i will say one thing,  try to +++ every good player and invite him as a friend and soon you will have at least 5 great people to play with and you will not suffer from twisted people :D And after some time you'll see angry people on the other side of the team. :))

Also ++++ and more for mentoring idea. Great stuff...

Games like LoL and such hate new players. Or at the very least are unwilling to help anyone new and just rage endlessly. The moba games are not bad but I will never play them again just because of the community. 

Have a great day :)

/meow

I keep hearing how terrible MOBA communities are but honestly, so far, it doesn't seem any different than any other community.

I am a new player to the genre and I haven't had anyone RAGE on me yet...I have had a couple of really helpful m8's but most of the time chat is very silent.  And, when I say new I mean it, I had never played any MOBA games until I got the Dota 2 beta invite.  I will say that I was a little scared to try playing people at first because of what I had read regarding the way they treat new people so I played quite a few bot games, found the 2 characters I wanted to learn first, read up on them and practiced a little before I joined "real" games.  Now, I still suck, my record is 3 wins with 4 losses and for some reason about 10 games that didn't count as either (maybe from people leaving the game) but again, not once has anyone said "oh look a newbzor" or "OMG dude you fu*cking suck", etc etc; and I hope I never do.

http://i.imgur.com/vgk0p.png

(nsfw!)

I've been playing LoL for a little over a month now, and yes, sometimes I'll get "emotionally hurt" by what others are saying.  It's worse when I attempt to talk back or defend.  I've learned now, how silence is really powerful in these types of communities.  I don't say anything, and actually, over the last couple of weeks, I haven't run into any crazy situations.

Then you can meet people who are good players and don't rage and add them to friends, and group with them as often as you can.

Also leading by example.  It's pretty much a darkness versus light type thing, so if I can own my darkness, it's all good, I won't project it onto others.  So like, in silence, the mirror reflects back to them what they don't want to see in themselves.

Or something like that, whatevs.  Heh.