I'm a very average player, but so far my favorite to play is Poppy, my best is Nunu and I really like the challenge with Esreal, but I rarely win with him.

So I was playing support Poppy with Caitlyn versus Taric and Graves. They had good sustain and burst but we had good poke and better burst if I got a wall stun off. But the reason I'm here isn't to discuss how the lane went.

There was a fight at Dragon. I forget who started it. Akali was in her bubble hoping to kill our ADC, and I was running in circles looking for a wall stun opportunity to let our team tear Akali to shreds. Meanwhile, for some reason, I was getting focused by the rest of their team, so I ended up running away having done nothing but soak damage. (I had the new Aegis upgrade of Solari so I was pretty tough.) By that time, though, the enemy team had lost two or three people to our none and ended up getting aced to our 2 deaths, which I think was at least partly due to their focus-Poppy syndrome.

found myself playing a lot of ARAM lately :)

malphite is the man

I've been meaning to try that, they added it after i migrated to DOTA2.

I find Dota 2/ LOL a lot like CIv 4/ Civ 3.

Civ 3 was more fun.... buuuut Civ 4 added stuff I couldn't do without.  So as a result i didn't play as much of either as i normally would.

Dominion is apocalypse. Players arrive and don't know what to do, bots play better than most dominion players.

Yes, it's free to play.  There are things you can spend money on but not like "buy this gun and you'll be better than the other guys that don't pay".  More like costumes that look cooler than the default stuff or just have a different look.  There is also stuff to buy that makes it more convenient to gear up for the next game. 

(There are things called runes that make your guys a little bit stronger, you can't buy these but they are organized in "rune pages", and you only start with a couple of rune pages to organize your runes into.  So if you want to change what runes your guy uses, you have to either go in there and set them up differently in between games, or buy more rune pages to have a bunch of different setups.  You also get points for free while playing the game that you can buy rune pages with, but people too impatient to build up enough points can pay for them.)

I think that's an exaggeration but I know what you mean.  I get real frustrated sometimes when (for an actual example) I say "we have to defend points better" and they say "grabbing the objective in enemy bot was more important than keeping windmill and our mid". 

I played my first dominion as Kassadin the other day. Our team clearly had no idea what to do including me while their team seemed like dominion experts. Funny enough though since I was OP kassadin I just ran around ganking people and turrets. Ended up losing like 2000-1000 but my personal score was 2nd best on team just because of my OP ganks.

Also smurfed on Poppy a few times, because she was cheap and the wall stun is really fun but I found myself not tanky enough to go charging in and not dieing first.

It must be easier to have a good AI on dominion too.

I exagerated a little, but believe me, when it's the first time people tries, they just run in circle and panic.