I'm starting to legitimately feel fear at the dedness of this game. Not personally. I still love Dota. I think it's one of the best video games ever made and I love it to death. My problem is that I play Dota with a specific group of friends and they have all but abandoned the game. Some of them wont play unless others play. Some are just completely done with the game and don't ever want to return. Some can be talked into a game but quickly leave after a single game because they just don't enjoy it the way they used to.
This was a thing that started around TI5 and we never recovered. I thought dumpstering Techies last patch would draw us all back but it never happened. We played HotS for a month really hardcore, daily, the way we used to obsess over Dota 2 (a few of us even spent money on it). After that honeymoon month, even HotS fell off. MGS came out and 90% of my Dota crew abandoned for that and have just never come back.
Since this drought has taken over, I have jumped into single queue a few times and it's just not the same game without some level of strategy that I never get from the pubs. I don't know if I have it in me to try and warm up to a new group of people to play with, so I haven't gone out of my way to try and play with people from GAF, Giant Bomb or Reddit or anything. I don't want to have to re-learn how to talk to a new group of people, especially in a game that can get so heated. It's not that I'm a toxic person in Dota, more that I'm just abrasive in general, and the handful of people I've been playing with understand and accept that. I'm not sure there's a way back for me in Dota. It will definitely never be like it was that first year or two. Makes me kind of sad, really.