So I recently started playing role queue ranked, and I have no idea how I can get better, or whats the difference between lower and upper MMR players.
I used to play Starcraft, and I always knew in each league what was my problems, what went wrong in the game, and what I could do better in the next one.
In guardian level games I can see players stopping spirit breaker using charge of darkness with rod of atos in the blink of an eye, using tinker perfectly, starting and finishing every teamfight perfectly, and other plays that I don’t know how can get better. And still its only guardian, and can’t imagine what they do better in immortal.
But dota has so much more factors, like games can get decided during picking heroes, there are 4 other players in the team that I don’t always watch / know what they are doing. Is it even possible to judge a players skill correctly in dota?
In my current league (around guardian 2) 90% of the games are about one team absolutely destroying the other. I feel like whatever I do is pointless, because either the team is doing fine without me, or can’t do anything that will turn the game around, because of bad picks or that 1 or 2 players with 0-9-1 at 8 minutes.
I prefer to play soft / hard support. Not sure how much this sound like “everybody is bad except me”, but I’m totally open to the idea, that I’m just bad. But as I said, I have no idea what I’m doing wrong.
So I was wondering what could I do to get involved in better games. I don’t even dream of getting a high MMR (though it would be pleasing), I only want to play fun and close games where the team works as a team. My only guess / hope is that at higher levels games will get better.
It’s incredibly hard, because there are just so many different important skills in Dota. Like you say, players might be casting their spells/items with perfect timing in fights. But that’s only one thing! That player may be good at that, but maybe they’re a terrible teamplayer and don’t combo their spells correctly with their teammates. Or they’re off farming jungle a lot when they should be pushing a lane. Or they tilt easily and stop caring if things don’t go their way.
These are all different skills in Dota that everyone is a varying degree of “good at”. To judge someone’s skill level, you need to know all the skills there are and how good a player is at each of them. Since you’re new yourself and don’t even know which skills are important, and many of these skills also don’t have an immediate externally visible sign that tells you how good someone is, it’s very hard to accurately judge someone’s skill. It gets better the higher your skill gets, but never perfect.
However, it’s pretty easy to judge someone’s skill level in your own games: they’re all just as good as you, since their rank is close to yours (of course, sometimes there’s party queue or late nights where the match finder puts a larger spread of people together, but one you can disable and the other is not too common). So while you don’t know their exact distribution of how good they are at each skill, you know that their total average of all their skills is equal to your average.
There are some skills you’d want to find out about your teammates when playing. There are some that are more important to you, for example how aware they are of their surroundings and how inclined they are to help you.
Those are pretty easy to figure out, for example, if you do something a little off screen from them and need their help, if they come, you know they’re probably not terrible at it. If they leave you hanging you know they’re probably bad at it. You can then adjust your gameplay with that information, if you know they’re bad at helping you, you should play more careful since you know you can’t rely on their help, and maybe be more explicit in requesting their help.