Thank you, Valve, for all your hard work

I just saw a post that filled me with dread, as it was mentioning that Valve/DotA employees might read this subreddit for feedback on the game, and it breaks my heart to think how much it sucks for anyone to read so much negativity about their job back to back. I thought I'd share my experience on the off chance it might slightly brighten someone's day.

I started playing the game about a year ago. I was brought in by the fact my fiance played DotA 2 for years and I wanted to spend more time with him (or at least being able to talk to him about what he loves), and I learned from him, from the in-game community-made tutorial, and I watched videos (Jenkins, Slacks) to learn more.

He loves playing ranked, so he got me to calibrate as soon as I was allowed to, and personally, I really didn't enjoy the process. Playing ranked is a torture for me as it is so stressful and toxic, and I am really grateful that Unranked and Turbo are a thing. 100 hours practice was nowhere near enough to prepare me for ranked games and I am glad this restriction is in place.

I love the fact that Unranked offers the exact same gameplay and features as Ranked.

I am also very grateful for Turbo to be a thing, as it helped me practice with carries even when my farming patterns were less than subpar. It took a lot of pressure off and made it especially fun to experiment with builds and heroes during the Battlepass cavern crawl. While I understand it's not "the real game", Turbo led me to experiment and try new heroes, new roles and new combos, and massively improved my knowledge of the game, and improved my response to enemy items, spells and carries as a support.

Last year's battlepass was my very first one, and while it didn't receive many positive comments in this subreddit, I personally had a blast. The cavern crawl got me out of my comfort zone and led me to expand my heroes pool. I was watching more pro games and improving my reading and understanding of what was happening, I am grateful that I was able to follow a specific pro's camera throughout a game. I was amazed at the creativity of the community for the collector's cache, I appreciated the voting system, and the honesty of the table indicating drop rates.

I like the balancing of the heroes, as I think that at my level, very few are not viable – mostly due to lack of skills/coordination than the heroes themselves. Like Notail said, everything can work. (Compare with other MOBA where some heroes are behind a paywall/need unlocking and are unbalanced or where there is only one viable build on that hero…)

I am grateful that the game is free to play with no pay to win features. I was very pleasantly surprised that the Muerta event was allowing us to spend shards rather than money.

I tend to spend a lot of money on DotA 2, because I can afford to support the game that way. And even spending as much money as I do on hats, it's still a cheap experience when considering how much entertainment I get per hour in DotA, compared with other games, and because it brings me more joy than a lot of £70 AAA games.

I wish I could purchase previous terrains (underwater map, etc) and some creeps and towers remodels. I wish I could purchase previously released personas and arcanas. I am thankful for Pudge, Anti-Mage and Invoker personas coming back. This fills me with hope.

(The workshop lists some but not all workshop items that already were picked for in-game implementation, and I wish I could filter and see what has not been added yet and would need my vote)

Thanks for all your hard work