Do people even read guides here?

I used to play Smite and had the top rated Xbalanque guide over there at Smitefire for quite a while, but I've since moved on to Dota 2. I figured I'd come back to Mobafire and create a Bounty Hunter guide since he's probably my overall best hero and have a pretty good understanding of him. Within 20 minutes of posting, there's one 1/5 vote already?

There's no way someone could have read the entire guide and then tried it out in a match and come back to vote in that short of a time. Which kind of tells me some troll-ish individual decided to just downvote for the sake of it. The Smitefire community was pretty good and would at least post something constructive in the comments on guides if they were bad, the editors and mods all pretty active and in touch with people.

I doubt it's my presentation, I'm pretty okay at coding. I doubt it's the build, since most of it is very standard and will work very well in practice (I have a lot of 20+ kills matches to prove it), on top of high win-rate on dotabuff, so it's not just me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not here crying about someone downvoting my guide, I don't care if you don't like it, go ahead, that's what the button is there for. But if this community has the kind of *******s that will downvote a guide for the sake of running it into the ground and nothing else, then I just want to know if I'm wasting time trying to contribute.

Well there could be a number of reasons why you got a downvote with no feedback. Someone who also has a guide doesn't like competition and downvoted, an experienced player saw your guide and disagreed with it and downvoted it without deciding to leave a comment, someone used your build and lost and rage downvoted it, or it was a simple miss click. Look at how many guides there are for Bounty Hunter, its a bit redundant and its possible people won't view it. Its also possible that if you give it time it will get views and might get a good rating. Give it time and use your judgement on whether you should stick around.

That's the thing, though. It only took about 20 minutes for it to happen after I published, so I know someone didn't actually use it.

Of course, yeah, it might have just been one of those "window shopper" type people who look at the items and skills and have no idea what's going on, but don't like it anyways and hit downvote without going past that. Other guides have basically every possible item you could think of listed to pick from (not to be critical).

I'm just looking at it like, why try to help people when some random person is going to **** on you for no reason except just to do it? I guess it's the Dota 2 community in general, in a nutshell.

Anyways, it won't take long to counterbalance that negative vote if it didn't bury it at the bottom, hopefully.

To be honest, I noticed something similar a while back, a couple of new guides that got posted got immediately downvoted twice (I think it was a Bane and...something else). I kept an eye out on other new guides, but it just seemed to be the once.

My theory? Haters gonna hate.

They don't actually read the guides. From my point of view they just look if it's pretty enough, item and ability build and nothing more.

That really isn't surprising. I remember there being some animosity between the Reddit and Mobafire sites back when I was on Smitefire a lot, so maybe the trolling has bled over into downvoting guides at random.



That's unfortunate, because there really are some great guides out there with a lot of good information, even "ugly" ones.

It's a bit weird that, but I wouldn't worry too much, good guides like this one should rise to the top over time anyway as more people read them. Personally I do downvote bad/misleading guides occasionally, but generally only after leaving feedback on what the problems are and seeing it refuted/ignored. Sometimes they problem can be a matter of opinion (and that's NOT a downvote), it tends to be more that there's bad/wrong advice in there. Anyone who writes a guide puts effort into it and deserves some credit for that, downvoting should be a last resort.

My imber spirit guide had 2 downvotes just after publishing with no comments :<

Probably, there are some people that just look at the skill and item build and downvote if they don't like it: I think it's kind of stupid because a lot of people accept criticism, so I simply give a suggestion and see if they agree with me.

And then I'm pretty sure there are users that downvote a guide just because they have made a guide for the same Hero and want theirs to be more popular. An anti-sabotage system (maybe preventing people with 2 or less guides or non-DotaFire members from voting a guide of the same Hero) would help in this case, but sadly we can't check whether my suspicions are true or not.

It seems all the Imba Spirit guides get some hate...

#Peppo_o'PaccioNerfingCompetitionConspiracy 8{D

Is it getting to the point where we have to take a page from Valve's handbook and force users to select a reason for downvoting, similar to their Riport system?