Max posted his introduction so I figured it was my turn,

My friend gave me an invite quite a while back but I didn't try Dota out until July, where my first character was Wisp, then Clockwerk. It was only a practice game but neither of us knew what we were doing so yeah, it didn't go very well . I didn't try the game again until October where Ben had been learning with friends at Valve and insisted I try again. I won this time and actually had fun so I played another game! With Meepo. That really sucked but I still had a lot of fun! Over the next month Ben and I played more and more practice games, and roped Max in along the way. Later it became Max and I, and we started playing public bot games, winning at a pretty good frequency. which brings this fun little tale to part two.

We decided to try our luck in a matchmaking game. I played my favorite character, Dark Seer, and who I was easily most comfortable with. Paired up with two other pubs, it was a disaster. The wrath of the others was mostly focused on me, and threw out words such as "worthless" and "useless". It was a pretty hard reality check on where my skills really were as far as playing and that maybe if I wanted to keep doing this, I would have to stick to bot games or find more people to avoid that situation again. By chance in a Reddit thread I found a link to this site and thought it'd be a great place to play and learn with like-minded people, but despite the length of this post I'm horrible at talking to people, so I made Max check it out first .

Every experience I've had with the people here so far has been nothing short of positive and I hope to have a lot more. I've been harassed a couple more times for mistakes but it's a lot easier to take when you've got scores more people who are going to support you. My skills might not be the greatest right now, but I've got nowhere to go but up. I look forward to climbing with all of you. Thanks for reading!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! welcome <3

Welcome Buddy.. u and MAX are awesome.. lets play again sometime... u guys did a really good job the last time we played

Yay! Hi Lath!

Oh man, I don't know what I would have done if I had played Meepo early on. Scratch that, I don't know what I would do NOW if I randomed Meepo.

Welcome to the group man!

just updating this that i'm still around, i just haven't been on because with three children, it's kind of a busy season for me

Its cool man, only true addicts lock their children in a closet in order to play Dota...