General DiscussionHelp to Improve.

Well, you kinda answered the question yourself. "There are games when i perform awfully"

There is also games where your team-mates perform aswfully, which leads to the answer of you question. You have your MMR because of poor decisionmaking or lack of skill and mapawareness. Try to improve these and look at your own replays/watch progames/youtube-Purge. That may help you a lot.

Ok but what about the games i am losing when i am not performing awfully?

Did you see any of the games or are you just assuming there is a lack of decision making or lack of skill?

If you did then thats fine and i can accept those comments, i appreciate i am not an amazing player, but i believe i am 3k+ going by reading some of the posts on here.

Last few losses:
OD game - Played a 5 man stack, Brood killed the mid T2 tower (within 7 min iirc) and i got ganked over and over. Got so fed i made so stupid decisions - not a great game for me but all in all, it was horrible since they way outskilled our 5 man stack.

Clinkz game - Not really sure what happened here, lack of willingness to push by team, had an early advantage and didn't capitalize but equally, i can't control 5 characters and make them push. Jugg eventually got Rapier / Gem / Aegis and we couldn't stop him

Bounty game - Had a half decent game, other lanes fed making Sven invincible. Tried doing all i could to help but all in all, not much i can do vs the Sven

Pudge game - I am not a great Pudge admittedly but i think i was the lesser of evils here. OD was purposely dropping items off the courier, saving the enemy by imprisoning them when we were killing and picked OD after i had gone Pudge. Somebody sold all of BH's items when he DC'd and made it impossible for us

Sniper game - Ember spirit fed them early kills and PA got out of hand very quickly iirc, no teamfight here at all and just a horrible game. Managed to finally farm up an MKB to counter PA's evasion but too little too late

Games before that i can't really rememeber without watching them but while they aren't the highlight of my Dotabuff....they certainly weren't the worst games for me.

Perhaps i am being naive but i refuse to believe that i am equal in rating to some of the people in these games.

I watch a lot of tutorials, pro grames, and a ton of alan / Purge videos covering the basics and such. I am decent at controlling lanes, i go ganking, i do everything i should do when i pick that Hero. I dont really play support because i dont enjoy it as you cannot change the outcome of the game and i hate relying on the noobs that can't farm.

Is it better to play a large range of different hero's or repeatedly play the same one to get better and better?

rating is win/loss so it doesnt matter your skill level, you are in the same bracket as idiots because maybe they win a lot and get carried who knows

You should not play a large range of different heroes/roles. DotA is a hard game and if you want to be specificially good you shouldnt practise 100 heroes at once.

How can your team-mates win if you're a let-down to them. How can you win if your team-mates are a let-down to you.
When you improve as a player you'll make bigger impact on the games ---> Matched with better players --> Get better rating.

Stay calm, it's hard.

play alot
try to check where do u make mistakes and try to avoid doing them in future

its better to stop picking pudge
i am serious
go earth spirit and just crush every game until u get out of there
if u drop again or cant stomp with earth spirit the rating suits your skill

If you want MMR to go up then you need to play only your best heroes and perfect them. No one is anywhere near equally good at all heroes. Its not possible. In your case it looks like you should be playing more Drow, Clinkz, and Viper. These heroes have a similar skill set and playstyle that seems to suit you.

You won't have the same MMR as people in your games. Some people will be much higher and some much lower than you. If you don't like it the only way to control who is on your team is to que with 5. Valve will give you some games that are very easy to win and some that seem impossible to win. In part that is because player skill is vastly different on different heroes. In part its because Valve really only cares about getting everyone close to 50% win not finding and weeding out matching errors where sometimes there are lopsided games. As long as everyone gets some lopsided wins and losses they cancel out in aggregate. If you want to win more, then you have to win the close games.

http://blog.dota2.com/page/3/?l=english

"The matchmaker seldom achieves all of those goals" "we do try to ensure that each team has a 50% chance of winning "

"when a party with a wide skill range is matched with a solo player, the solo player will have skill and experience near the average of the party"

"Measuring success in matchmaking is difficult"

" It’s not critical if the metric misidentifies some edge cases (a game that it measures as close was actually a blowout), since we are typically are ONLY CONCERNED WITH THE AGGRAGATE RESPONSE after making a change."

Some games will be unfair. Some games will be matched with and against players at much higher and lower MMR. Valve only promises that these errors will be equally in your favor and against you in the long run. Try to win the winnable games. Use the impossible games to practice playing from behind. Don't give up and hide in the fountain. If you don't learn and practice what little can be done from way behind you will not be able to win games that seem lost, but still can be won.

@ShyGuy

"Try to improve these and look at your own replays/watch progames/youtube-Purge."

Watching Purge will just make you a worse player.

Some great advice there so thank you Shy and Relentless. It seems that anytime i play Drow i get flamed so i feel bad in the next game and try something different.

Been playing a few bot games with Earth Spirit yet and only just moved into real games with it. So far 2-0 but after the 15-20 minute mark i seem to lose my impact, need to try and decide how to transition into late game with him.

I think i will stick to the basic mid characters. When should i look at increasing my "Hero Pool" and how? Smashing bot games with a new char 10 x or waiting until my overall knowledge has gone up then just dive into a real game with it?

@Inspy - i don't tend to find Purge that good either, he is better than me no doubt but i find he makes some stupid mistakes

I will only comment on the BH game because pub BH players annoy me

poor item choices

Battlefury is a trash item (if you want the regen turn it into a linkens orb) *it is not that great of a item but I do get it in pubs because they are not that organized*
buy drums for early to mid game dominance
buy BKB if or else you will lose to anyone with a stun

after you hit level 6 97% of your gold should be coming from track so you should ALWAYS been hunting for kills

My last 2 BH games where not my best but it shows how aggressive you should be playing

Sampson, i am guilty of not getting BKB when i should and perhaps that is one of my crucial mistakes that i need to fix.

I do just go full retard mode and buy items like Bfury (and lack of in my last AM game) but in that game it was a genuine choice to stop the lanes pushing into our towers so hard. Looking back i should have done it differently but Tiny wasn't doing what he should by pushing and such. It was pretty hard to go ganking when the guys i was Skyping with (Abaddon and Wraith King) managed to go something like 0-8 or 0-10 even against Sven + Venge so it made those snowball like crazy and be unkillable for me. When i did go for a gank top, Tiny ran from middle with a Haste run, through the river to top, which of course made them go back and mess up every gank. Sounds like excuses now i guess lol.

Looking at your stats you seem to be good at BH, what advice would you give when they go all out to counter you? Dust / Sentries / Gem etc?

Some games it literally feels like 2v8 or 3v7 the majority of the time, like even when we kill the gem carrier, people wont pick it up or anything like that

cleaving down a creep wave slightly faster is not worth the gold put into battlefury, it is one of the few items I would be 100% against picking up (I have built sheep stick, orchid, pipe, heart etc and battlefury is one of the lowest items on the list). Pick off their weaker heroes til you can get a BKB, a decent venge with detection will destroy you before you can ever reach him. Now onto the issue of detection, each form of detection has its own weakness

dust - offensively great but sucks sometimes because never know where the BH is at. To deal with dust I like to bait it out when I am close to trees for cover and quickly escape in fog

sentries - best way to deal with BH BUT they can be counter warded and they have limited range. To deal with it I will keep track of their supports inventory and keep track of when they use it to know approximately where they put them

Gem - risky item that forces them to 5man so abuse split push. (if the gem holder is ever alone just smoke gank him)

Overall you job as BH is to get track up. When there is alot of detection being used just stay in the back and keep track up. Majority of the time you dont even need to be in the front lines of a fight because with track speed given to your allies it is fairly easy to micro around the opponents right clicks

First things first when it comes to getting good: Play lots
You have very few games played, don't worry too much right now, you will improve over time.
You see my 469 wins? That's nothing. I have at least 600 more full hard mode bots matches I have done to practice with and who knows how many ESP inhouses and IXDL league matches I have played in that don't count on DOTABUFF. It takes TIME AND PRACTICE to be good.

Now, things you should be looking at to to improve: Item choices, map awareness, hero choices

Item choices: Before playing a hero, spend 30 mins looking up as many guides as possible for said hero, most of the time you will see stupid ones, like the ones that say BFury is good on Bounty Hunter (which it isn't, there are so many better items out there for him with regen in them). Do not build Dagon. Ever. Unless the game is pretty much decided already, or you are playing semicarry Nyx. Also Vanguard, it's THE worst item in dota. The regen and health you get can be acquired from other items that give even better bonuses than a chance to block a tiny bit of damage (drums of endurance comes to mind).

Hero choices: Do not play: Drow, Sniper, Riki, Skywrath, Pudge, Axe, Medusa, Antimage, or Phantom Lancer
These heroes are all either low tier or super weak in general, you will not get a good MMR by losing 1000 games on AM even if you have a 50-0 score each time.

Try playing support in pubs, keep wards up at all times. If the map is dark and you are supporting, you aren't supporting well. Sure, you may be broke, but that's when you get a little bit of gold from neutral creeps or just steal the ranged creep last hit from your carry and say "sorry this is for wards". Supporting is the best way to win and get a good winrate in DotA 2. "Everybody wants to win, yet nobody wants to play support".

Map awareness: Always have an eye on the minimap for enemy players. If you don't see any enemies, guess where they are going (that's right, they wanna gank you or your teammates). Too many X's in one spot = bad news, no X's on map = worse news

Practice dude, you will improve.

Play a lot...I don't even need to check your profile to see you're awful as you still perform (stated by you) awful some games (2k mmr). In other words you're not even close to 3k mmr

What I really learned about dota is, everyone thinks they are better than their teammates, extra true below 3-4k. Sometimes when you stack, you know your friend is better, but thats all. So as long as you are just ~500 below your "I think Im that good" rating, you are where you belong.

I disagree that watching Purge will make you a worse player. He helped me in a lot of ways. Now, I still have a long way to go, but his vids were the first were I really learned about last hitting, for example.

Now I just need to work on my aggression and team communication. Those seem to be two of my biggest issues, and #1 seems to tie into the "getting caught in a bad position" the majority of the time.

@Wink - to quote you if you dont mind:

"Hero choices: Do not play: Drow, Sniper, Riki, Skywrath, Pudge, Axe, Medusa, Antimage, or Phantom Lancer
These heroes are all either low tier or super weak in general, you will not get a good MMR by losing 1000 games on AM even if you have a 50-0 score each time."

Conflicting information here since my highest Wins is Drow Ranger but you are saying to not play it while someone else says to play it? Also i am not sure PL is considered weak is it?

Again about Vanguard, is it personal preference then because i see a lot of high tier players going Vanguard on many tanky heroes, is that actually a bad thing?

Sorry, not meaning to sounds like an ass, just trying to get a better understanding

Drow wont take you out of that tier, dont play drow between 2.5k and 4.5k, while you dont know exactly when its a good situational pick and can position yourself really well.
Also dont play Riki/Sniper if you want to get to higher rating for a while.
I dont think PL is weak, but he needs a certain play style to be effective, if you lose with him, you dont do that correctly, dont pick him.
Someone here did some calculations about AM and other carries, decided that low pubs shouldnt play AM, believe him, plick other carries.
I just hate Axe in general, I dont know why.
Sky, Pudge, Dusa are good in their games when they are good, but you cant figure out which games are those, dont pick them.

Its mostly what i learned from others, Im not good myself, feel free to correct me.

riki and sniper are fine to pick if you actually look at game impact vs kda. Alot of players will pick drow sniper riki bh etc and think "well my kills is higher than my teammates I am carrying this game" and neglect the fact that they are playing heroes who can be damn near afk and still have a high kda

"Also Vanguard, it's THE worst item in dota. The regen and health you get can be acquired from other items that give even better bonuses than a chance to block a tiny bit of damage (drums of endurance comes to mind)."

"Watching Purge will just make you a worse player."

aiaiai dotabuff is so funny sometimes

Dorkly: I think Wink's point is well accepted. I think by 'the WORST item' he means the bang per buck for the item is low.

See Merlini's analysis of it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=fbbgdm1sgWA#t=80

He argues that damage block is calculated before armor calculation which means it does not scale well into the game. On the other hand, he claims, Mekansm's +5 armor and team heal is almost always better mid to late game in terms of scaling.