Good news Dota 2 addicts! Valve are here to help end your years of pain and anguish at the hands of its unfairly moreish game, by providing you with a launch option that tracks how long you’ve been playing and slaps you on the wrist accordingly.
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The launch option has surfaced a number of times through Reddit posts and appears to have been implemented on 4 December, 2015, which means it’s probably save millions from the perils of Dota 2 addiction already. Except it probably hasn’t because you need to manually trigger it yourself by going into the launch options page and enter the following command line: -antiaddiction_test.
Upon opening Dota 2 you’ll notice a little timer at the top with your current session time and a little message telling you how healthy that is. It’s at the top of the page if you want to know what it looks like – thanks to Redditor AlinValentin.
We’re not sure what it says when you hit what it determines to be a dangerous amount of time. The feature was likely put in place due to Chinese and Korean laws about online gaming, which both demand that games have timers in place that remind players to stop gaming after a certain amount of time or kill the game temporarily.