Well Played!

Russians players have a reputation for being bad at Dota - at least on the Dota 2 subreddit, which is English based, so maybe a bit biased. I don't know if it has just become a meme, like how people will start a chain of "Hodor" comments, or the tree-fiddy stories, but there are so many comment threads complaining about them. Whenever someone calls them out, and points out that it's unfair to lump a trait to an entire country of people, the usual reply is something along the lines of, "It's not that they're bad, it's that they don't speak English, and it's really important to be able to communicate with your teammates in a game like Dota, so please stop downvoting me, I'm not racist". I agree completely with the communication aspect of it - playing is so much easier when you can talk to your team, especially with voice chat, rather than typing.

But Russia isn't the only country where Dota 2 is popular, but English isn't the main language. It is ridiculously popular in China, but Chinese players don't seem to have the same stigma. While some people do complain about them, the complaint is almost always about the lack of English speaking skills, not their skill at the game.

I've played 841 games, and I don't get raged at very often. So I thought I'd see what life was like as a Russian. Although my Steam profile says that I'm from Kenya, I don't think anyone would really bother to check. I changed my name to Андрей (Andrei) and restricted myself to the chat wheel options and "ty". I think my numerous blog posts are enough to say that I understand English, and so any rage that was directed at me for "being Russian" wouldn't be able to hide behind the excuse that they were only angry because I didn't understand English.

I didn't want to go overboard and have some stock Russian phrases to paste into chat, because that felt a bit like entrapment - "Of course I assumed you don't speak English, noob, because if you did, why would you be talking in Russian when there are English players on your team?"

To be honest, that was the hardest part of the experiment. I couldn't even say the other team has a gem, or my ultimate is up in X seconds, or any kind of helpful info. Everything had to be communicated via chat wheel or pings and lines drawn on the map. I actually started to feel sorry for the players who have been muted from being reported, but then I remembered that they got reported for being dicks in the first place.

Here's the summary of my 28 games as Андрей:

Game ID	Outcome	Mode	Hero	Kills	Deaths	Assists	Comments	Party Size
293128419	Defeat	AR	Qop	6	7	13	Some abuse from Slardar and Naga, although that seemed more to do with how I played QoP than to do with being Russian	1
293164350	Victory	RD	Tide	3	1	13		1
293190815	Victory	AR	Batrider	4	4	12		2
293218817	Victory	RD	Kotl	5	6	10		2
293546861	Defeat	AR	Shadow Shaman	3	7	10		2
293596156	Victory	RD	Dazzle	5	2	16		2
293648248	Defeat	RD	Warlock	6	8	10		2
293735223	Defeat	AR	Pugna	2	11	5	Lots of abuse from Alchemist, but no R word. He kept asking for wards even though there were none in stock.	3
293789098	Victory	SD	Darkseer	3	0	11		3
294438705	Defeat	RD	Treant Protector	1	3	3		4
294464318	Victory	SD	Timbersaw	17	3	18		4
294495964	Defeat	AR	Rubick	4	8	11		2
294540176	Defeat	RD	Bane	5	10	17		1
295844788	Victory	SD	Witch Doctor	12	4	11		2
295930079	Victory	RD	Slardar	4	5	13		2
299015107	Leaver	AR	Anti-Mage	1	0	0	Sand King left during the picking phase.	3
299032634	Victory	SD	Nature's Prophet	5	6	15		4
301521856	Victory	AR	Lina	8	6	15	Razor and Luna raged at “Team China” (me, omni, es), though to be fair, we could have played better.	1
302220050	Defeat	LP	Darkseer	2	3	15	Rage from Drow (non-Russian rage). Complained I didn't use my mek even though I did (it was on CD)	1
302255230	Defeat	AR	Outworld Devourer	6	7	10		1
302290480	Victory	AP	Crystal Maiden	6	1	12		4
302314816	Victory	AP	Rubick	5	4	19		5
302355250	Defeat	AP	Drow Ranger	12	10	17		4
302694860	Leaver	RD	Disruptor	1	2	6	Zeus abandoned mid-game	1
302977800	Victory	AP	Slardar	7	4	11		1
303037167	Victory	RD	Warlock	5	4	12		2
303096721	Leaver	RD	Windrunner	1	1	2	Riki left early game after calling his team a “fider team”	2
303123201	Victory	SD	Puck	1	1	10		2

I recorded party size because friends will rarely rage at me (I think Charles is the only exception), so larger party means less likelihood of rage. :( I recorded the party size 5 game, because I was playing with a co-worker's friends, so I thought they might rage at me, especially because we were in the low-priority queue. But my co-worker dropped the G-bomb, after someone asked who "the Russian dude" was, and they were all super nice to me after that.

Out of the games, there was really only one game (301521856) with rage that wasn't based on me playing badly:

For some reason, despite the Cyrillic letters in my name, Luna (brown) was convinced that I was Chinese. ES (pink) and Omni were speaking in Chinese, but I didn't say anything.

I kinda wished that I played carry rather than support, because I'm thinking one of the reasons there was so little rage is because I did what supports are meant to do - ward, stack, pull, gank, buy the courier. You don't really need to be able to communicate to do four of those things. Whereas carries need to be able to say, "GTFO of my lane", "Stop stealing my kills", "I need to farm a little longer". It seems like a silent carry is more rage inducing than a silent support since they'll go off and do their own thing and it'll look like they're ignoring everyone else.

The Pugna game (293735223) nearly made me break my vow of silence. Alchemist kept saying "We need wards!", but there were none left to buy. I wanted so badly to just tell him to look at the shop and see there were none left, but I couldn't. He kept getting ganked because he would walk out with no river vision, and that just made him spam "We need wards!" even more, and start abusing me over voice chat. :( Although, in my defense, I think some of those deaths were his fault. He didn't put any points into his stun until level 10.

Olek and Julian say that I probably didn't get much rage because there aren't many Russian players on the Australian servers. I was tempted to try my luck on the US West servers, but after a game we played with Sumeet, I don't think I could go back to that kind of ping. So any rage that came my way might be because I played badly, not necessarily because of the Russian name.

Time to retire Андрей for now. It was kinda fun pretending to be someone else.