Right - but some people want to play team games. I very much prefer cooperative type play to solo play, and that's obviously the case for a great number of people. Perhaps un-surprisingly, sucking in Starcraft team games (or Call of Duty, or Team Fortress) can be every bit as brutal as in Dota game.

The problem isn't DOTA (though for obvious reasons its more extreme) - its the general format of unorganized online competitive team play. If I'm bad at Starcraft for instance, and get thrown onto a ranked team game - my team suffers, and balance can only control so much of that. The social infrastructure is too limited to be effective at preventing things like rude comments, scapegoating, lack of mentoring, or easy pairing with people you enjoy playing with. Immature young adults + no consequences + people they'll never see again = crap behavior. And sadly, the social features haven't progressed (in some cases regressed) since I played TF 15 years ago.

> You spend the next 10 minutes getting insulted by your teammates and watching your game end painfully slowly.

There is a concede vote option in HoN, it can be called after 15 minute with 5 of 5 votes (which becomes 4 of 5 after 25 min), so if whole team agrees, you can end the misery.

Well. Regarding concede, DOTA 2 chose specifically not to have a concede option. I was against this at the beginning. Then, there was a match where everyone wanted to quit, we were bashing Valve, but we fought anyway. We had a huge comeback due to a huge Blackhole from Enigma. I've changed my mind since.

It sounds weird but I think it taught me to be patient and to fight till the end.

Action RTS. The problem with the genre spawned by DOTA is that it doesn't have a good name. Calling them DOTAlikes offends fans of various games that sport nearly identical maps, mechanics, and rosters of characters. Calling them ARTS games is silly because they're only RTSish in that they originated on Blizzard's games as map-mods. Riot invented the term MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) which could be applied to every online game ever. Sadly, the worst option (MOBA) seems to be the one that sticks.

someone upthread defined it as "action real time strategy"

i would prefer to call the genre MOBA. There isn't any RTS elements in dota, and moba is a fresh new terms without any connotation on what it is supposed to be.