I absolutely can't recommend this game to anyone.


It's a skinnerbox designed to make you feel like crap, so the endorphin-high you get when you actually win is higher. Add to that the benefit of most of their player-base not enjoying 60% of the time they play this game and you can understand why the item shop is such a hit. Might at least look good while you lose and watch 50 min of your life go to waste. 


You might say - "Hey, but that's the point of games" Waste time, while leaving a pleasant feeling that you achieved something when you actually just sat on your behind doing jack. Well, I agree. The thing is, a game might be tough or hard, even unfair at some points, but when you gunk up, you can reload and simply not do the mistake. Here, you can't, like in any Multiplayer-game of course.

The difference is, when you, say, crunch up in a match of CS:GO, you lose a round which takes maybe 10 min tops and go into the next round, enjoying the challenge again. 
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Here, you can fight tooth and nail to recover from a mistake only to waste another 20 min on a fruitless game. Even if you analyze your mistakes and go, "hey, I shouldn't do this anymore." "Here is where I clonqed up" you have to enter another match playing with a different set of people who react differently to everything, making your observations ultimately pointless, unless they concern only your farming patterns and basic game mechanics. 


If you absolutely have to play this game, either get 4 buddys and only play with them or get calibrated solo and continue if you got calibrated above 4k. If you didn't calibrate higher than 4k or at least in the high skill bracket, just abandon this and save yourself thousands of hours. 

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People talk about how you can improve even from the lower brackets. How you can get better by watching pros, watch tutorials or even invest money in coaches or numerous paid-for guide sides.

And you can, I won't argue that. But the thing is, at what cost? 

You invest money, time and numerous hours of preparation into a game that will ultimately be pointless. You'll never be a pro. You'll never even come close to a tournament with a decent prize pool. And even if you still invest all that, you might improve even to a higher level of skill, get a stroke of bad luck, meta-changes or simply different mood sets and lose it all. Just to start where you've begun. 

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Why you might want to stick to the game when you get calibrated to 4k and above?

Well, the higher you rank the more reliably can you assume knowledge in your teammates. With more knowledge - this game really is mostly about game mechanic knowledge - you can prognosticate your teammates and enemy's behavior more reliably. You can assume a higher chance they won't instantly break when the game goes rough. You can assume them to react to what happens on the map, even give you or heed your advice for something you might have missed. 
Below that it is literally a 50/50 coin toss on who builds up the bigger snowball. People win, but they don't know why they won. They lose and they know you lost them their game. No reflection, no communication beyond insults and passive aggressive quips. People say CoD is the game for young angry twelve-year-olds. Well, this is the game those twelve-year-olds go on to play, when they grow up a little. 

At least in my experience from the 2k to 3,5k bracket. 

Save yourself some time, stick to watching the pro-games if you absolutely love the game or just play unranked and have a moderately good time if you don't come across one of the numerous "trolls" or people who think it's funny to tank their (hidden/MMR) to bash some noobs. 

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Mobas, ladies and gentlemen, the worst thing since the deconstruction of labor unions. 

When you think about it, you can turn dota 2 into a fun analogy about current day live. Millions upon millions of people trying to improve their rank. They strife to get those 25 fun-bucks by doing 50 min of busywork and are sometimes even close to deep-seated hate when they lose them. Most people have trouble grasping the whole of the game-mechanics and therefore the systems they need to use to accumulate those MMR-points and the status that comes with them. They try and try fruitlessly, spending other valuable resources better spend elsewhere on things they don't and never will need, to get a short-lived distraction from the monotony and crushing despair when you realize at the end of a weekend that you went two steps up and two and a half back. Endlessly running the rat-race, while the wheel keeps turning. 

Just believe! 

In E sports, everyone can be a professional. It's only hard work and the grit to not stop, never stop shuffling those feet. Who knows, they might release a new arcana and you'll look spiffy when you play the new hero they buff, so everyone buys it. 
Anyway, I'm obviously bitter. And noone will read this anyway. But if you do before installing, at least copy it to a txt-file on your pornstash and come back to it when you find yourself with 2k hours spend on a game you didn't enjoy anymore after the first 400.