When it all gets serious, or at least as serious as DOTA 2 gets

Nine out of ten games of DOTA 2 (Hereafter: DOTA) are kind of insubstantial. This is because five of these nine are 'curb stomps' - i.e. your team or the other team simply wins by skill on one part or lack of skill on the other - and it's all over relatively quickly. The other four are less simple - it usually turns into back-and-forth until one big fuckup, then, over. 

One in ten games of DOTA - again, approximately - is a beast. 

I'm writing this because I just finished a 72-minute (where the average is 40-to-60) game, which was kind of odd, and kind of good, all in one. 

Usually, there's kind of a feel to the flow of the game - which I may or may not have written about in the last column - where there will be a tipping point, a sudden shift where one team gains an advantage or gets a bit lucky and presses a bit. This means they will get more gold and experience, etc, and will generally have an easier time of it. 

I just spent the first forty or so minutes of the last game getting stepped on. 

Seriously. 

Bounced around the map, getting the shit kicked out of me, trying to hold our ground against a team with slightly more co-ordination and slightly more early-game advantages than us. 

It was getting really disheartening, by this point. There comes a time in a losing team where there's usually a cavalcade of blame - i.e. it has to be someone's fault, so start piling on them. We had someone on our team - someone who's a 'friend' of mine, on Steam - who wasn't having the bestest day every, playing with a character picked for them that they weren't fond of, getting kicked in the face a lot, that sort of thing. So they became kind of the whipping boy for a while, which wasn't fun. 

And then, suddenly - or, more accurately, slowly then suddenly - I found myself doing a little bit better. Getting the gold I needed, getting decent items, and, bizarrely, ending up being the highest level on my team through no conscious effort. 

Maybe because of this - I don't know, but hopefully - my team started to pick things up, and work at it, and everything slowly, slowly, slowly started to turn around. 

We won after 72 minutes, forty of which was having our ass kicked all the way back to the base line, and it was one of those one in ten games that feels glorious. 

Plus, playing as the Spectre meant you could irritate the shit out of anyone you wanted every minute and a half, so, hey, that's fun too.