Gonzo Awards: Most Irritating Fanboys Of 2023

Esports is filled with the most pathetic fandoms imaginable. This award recognises the efforts of those groups in making the industry an insufferable place.

Previous Winners

🥇 2010: The French

🥇 2011: The French

🥇 2012: 1.6 Enthusiasts

🥇 2013: Dota 2

🥇 2014: Team SoloMid

🥇 2015: League of Legends Community

🥇 2016: Brazilian CS fans

And This Year’s Winner is…. DOTA 2 FANS.

Brazilian fans will be angry that the awards weren’t active during their truly insufferable years as they could have equalled their national football team for accolades in the time between 2016-2022. Think on all their greatest moments in that timespan… Genuinely threatening people with murder over minor criticisms, spamming anyone who calls out that behaviour with pictures of Vampeta’s penis, demanding everyone “come to Brazil” for their events only for them not to even show up themselves. Top that off with a victim mentality insisting no one else in the world “would ever understand” what Brazilian culture is about and you have a fanbase that will always be in contention for this prize.

Sadly though everything related to Brazil in 2023 has been a bit shit. The dull reality about their events is now common knowledge, their biggest streamer has had to wind in what little can be seen of his neck in order to keep his partnership agreements and their teams have been mediocre in most disciplines meaning there’s been little cause for gloating. That means this year’s award will go to a fanbase that embodies entitlement like no other, namely the Dota 2 fanbase.

This year has especially highlighted how utterly spoiled and petulant they are as a collective and it’ll be hard to document it all. Let’s start by pointing out they are so ludicrously entitled that they even complain when they get what they want if it isn’t exactly how they’d imagined it. For instance, after spending a year crying about Battle Passes and how the peasant enclave that plays Valve’s free-to-play game contributing absolutely nothing to the in-game economy whined they couldn’t afford enough levels to get an Arcana, Valve removed them. After being served a Battle Pass that focused not on cosmetics but esports memorabilia and didn’t use FOMO as a marketing tool the Dota community decided that was actually shit and what they’d wanted all along was hats. “Why don’t Valve want to take our money” they lamented about a company they had called greedy for the past ten years.

Their reaction to that was to call for a boycott of the Battle Pass they themselves had requested, a move that only hurt the pros they pretend to care so much about. Recent winners of The International made life-changing money but not this year thanks to a community that have exposed themselves as never caring about the esports side so much as they care about having epilepsy inducing particle effects in their pubs. I also learned the most laughably pathetic phrase in the form of “Dota Christmas” which is what these losers referred to the TI Battle Pass as.

Post TI, probably the best of the post pandemic era due to it being in Seattle and Valve being more hands on, the game was given a modest balance patch to reduce the winrate of problematic heroes. It was understood that Valve employees would be taking a well deserved break after completely reinventing the game, altering the player behaviour system, identifying 90,000 boosted or smurf accounts, reworking the armoury and giving everyone free cosmetics for the game’s tenth year anniversary. In the eyes of Dota fans though Valve simply hadn’t done enough and not getting a huge content patch was again a reason to call for boycotting the free-to-play game. Some even called for it to be sold to Riot, showing how far this community has really fallen from its elitist past.

The response from Valve was typical as it’s no secret Dota is the favourite son and so they brought forward the content patch, a massive overhaul and rework of the game mechanics that reinvigorated the game, as well as launching Frostivus, giving out free cosmetics to people with positive behaviour scores and banning people who had violated their terms of service in quite possibly the most hilarious way possible. That placated the fans for all of 48 hours by which point they had complained there wasn’t an alternative game mode, the cosmetics were bad, that because they had used the word “event” they had defrauded the community and much more low IQ gnashing and wailing. The bottom line is for the Dota fanbase it will never be enough and I have to say I genuinely hope they keep throwing these tantrums to their own detriment. After all, it’s even been suggested by some professional players Valve are so exhausted by dealing with the bullshit around this game they may even consider stopping The International and by extension all that is associated with it. I sincerely hope they do because the plebs that play their games really don’t deserve anything at all