OH my god DUDE I LOVED YOUR POST. PERIOD.
I'm not one of those guys who loves or hates DOTA. it's just another game to me but heck man, you really made me teary by how you described all of your journey with your friends!
Really really good writing my dude!
PD: Now I got what you said when you commented on my post about remembering your old glory days with your friends... That really got to me, man...
Ha, been out of commision for 10 days, so I didn't see this until today. But yeah, when I saw your post I got so nostalgic, in fact just yesterday a friend came from Ecuador after a year and three months and we made a LAN party this sunday to receive him back!
A friend of us, a sociologist, said he was really impressed at the bonds we had made, because almost none of us had played dota in a long time, in fact I hadn't played ever since the friend had gone to Ecuador. We all had to copy the client and configure a server for playing because none of us had it, and that friend was like... WOW, you guys really got reunited by a videogame that you guys haven't played in a year? That's AMAZING!
When I was reading your post I felt like I was there, plus you had many pics... unfortunately I don't have any pics of our tournaments... though I would have loved to have some... maybe next time I'll take a few, I just get so focused on making sure the server works, the wifi works, the computers don't freeze, etc... that I forget to take pics.
Treasure those friends (I'm sure you do). You never know when they'll leave and when you won't be able to play together again... I miss a lot these times.
Some of them have already left, but that won't stop us from playing games together! And hey, if they do go, I guess they'll come around sometime back into our lives just like yours did!
I'm just hoping we can all reunite and maybe go to one of those major tournaments we all watch on streams and feel like we're finally part of that thing we've been admiring for so long.