[Megathread] DotA 2

[CaptUntsAhts]

Yeah, or get a group of buddies, the more the merrier. I run around with usually 2-3 other buddies when I play, so we lower the amount of random people in our group. Playing with all 5 of us in one group on skype is awesome too. So much easier to coordinate.

[Ultraviolet Harmonies]

Please don't get Dagon or Lothars on WD. He's a support, you should play him like one.

There's nothing better than to boot up the game and win the first game in sixteen minutes.

[PizzaSHARK]

You can play fucking Omniknight as a pure carry in a pub. Doesn't mean that's how he should be built or played.

There's nothing better than to boot up the game and win the first game in sixteen minutes.

I prefer games where my opponents aren't windowlicking retards :P

[Ultraviolet Harmonies]

You can play fucking Omniknight as a pure carry in a pub. Doesn't mean that's how he should be built or played.

It's like the start of this thread all over again

[PizzaSHARK]

It's like the start of this thread all over again

Because if you want to dick around, go play a botmatch or get a full team of your friends. When you're queuing solo you need to be pulling your weight because it's not fair to the other four guys on your team to ruin their game because you wanted to pretend you were SingSing.

[Kuntantee]

How can we see our MMR?

[Waervyn]

Because if you want to dick around, go play a botmatch or get a full team of your friends. When you're queuing solo you need to be pulling your weight because it's not fair to the other four guys on your team to ruin their game because you wanted to pretend you were SingSing.

Had one of these guys today...went afk after 5 minutes saying: i'm cooking tortillas. Then he came back when he was level 3 and the rest was 11 or so and started bossing us around telling us what to do.

We told him that it was not nice of him to just start a game and just leave and he was like: 'it's just a pub, who cares'...

Well...I care...as I like playing pubs and like to do my best in them :/

[Finear]

Carry
let the flame begins

[Roudene]

Ooh I've played this guy one time. I've liked him. I've tried to build him somehow supporty xd.

Today I have hard time... 2vs5 on bots took us about hour to win >.> due to afkers of course
Then my first out of bots game ... we had score 40:25 at the end but lost anyway because of leavers... (3vs2 when we were 2).
Does it always look like that?

[PizzaSHARK]

Ooh I've played this guy one time. I've liked him. I've tried to build him somehow supporty xd.

Today I have hard time... 2vs5 on bots took us about hour to win >.> due to afkers of course
Then my first out of bots game ... we had score 40:25 at the end but lost anyway because of leavers... (3vs2 when we were 2).
Does it always look like that?

Leavers are pretty uncommon once you escape the doldrums but you're gonna run into idiots no matter what MMR you're at. People that do extremely stupid shit (like an ES that blinked into a furion that was getting ganked by 4 enemies to "help him") and then scream and rage at you and call you bad because you didn't run in and suicide with them. This kind of shit almost invariably loses you a game and they never fucking seem to understand that THEY are the reason the team lost, because they don't THINK. It makes me wish CS was visible at all times so you could fucking point to that and show them that even though your KDA is similar to theirs, you're blowing them away in CS. Maybe also invent a stat tracking for tower kills/tower denies.


Dirge is fun, but a very strange hero... feels kind of incomplete. His laning phase is just absurd, right up there with Viper, Visage, and some of the others. Decay, decay, punch, punch, first blood. Pretty much that simple. He's still good into the lvl 7-10 area because zombies are still relevant vs heroes at that stage of the game. His ulti provides his team with a pretty awesome damage amp and with its long duration and relatively short cooldown, it's got a little under 50% uptime.

But his skills cost an enormous amount of mana, and yet seem to be designed for spamming.

His agility is crap, which means his attack speed is crap. Decay can steal STR to give him more attack damage, but that requires a lot of Decays to make it stick, Decay quickly becomes very expensive, and even once you have three or four stacks it's still less bonus damage than even a single leveled Exort instance.

He's intensely item dependent for almost everything past the laning phase and early part of the midgame, but can't farm for shit. His right-click is pathetic, Decay doesn't work on creeps, Tombstone has a very long cooldown, and Soul Rip isn't really a good nuke.

You're supposed to build him tanky, but he just doesn't seem to get any decent farm anywhere without getting a ton of kills in lane, and intelligent players won't let you kill them more than once.

I've heard people say he's one of the only shit tier heroes, and I can see why. He honestly just feels incomplete. Decay is a great skill and should stay as-is, and so should his ulti. I think Soul Rip and Tombstone are fine, thematically, but they need to be reworked somehow. Mostly, he just needs some kind of way to consistently farm at least as well as your average support can... even CM farms better than he does.

[Lillpapps]

Carry
let the flame begins

If you are American you are one of the 7.4%!

[llDemonll]

Is there a good way to see the matchmaking pool I'm in, or a good way to get my rating up? I feel like I'm stuck in the shit-holes of the cellars.

Was playing last night, was 4-2-xx by the time it was blatantly obvious were weren't going to win (Death Prophet [me], Doom Bringer, Sniper, Invoker, Disruptor v. Queen of Pain, Lycan, Mirana, Wisp, Jaikro) (23 minutes in, they'd pushed all t1 and t2 towers, we hadn't pushed any towers, score was ~32-13, Lycan/Mirana were both fed) and so I just stopped caring really and started chasing, trying to pick people off, etc., etc. and ended at ~5-11-xx. Am I hurting my personal MMR by not caring when games are a lost cause?

bleh..

[Waervyn]

Can anyone tell me what your champions rating is based on?



It says it's not based on win/loss ratio, but most of the games I played as Shadow Shaman I had quite a good score (not all of the games of course).
Should I lose games while still having a good score or something stupid like that?

It says it's standardized for players at my MMR, so that can't be the problem either.

I guess I just kind of hoped my bar would be fuller with a good score on Shadow Shaman (:

[Lysah]

How can we see our MMR?

Is there a good way to see the matchmaking pool I'm in, or a good way to get my rating up? I feel like I'm stuck in the shit-holes of the cellars.

Was playing last night, was 4-2-xx by the time it was blatantly obvious were weren't going to win (Death Prophet [me], Doom Bringer, Sniper, Invoker, Disruptor v. Queen of Pain, Lycan, Mirana, Wisp, Jaikro) (23 minutes in, they'd pushed all t1 and t2 towers, we hadn't pushed any towers, score was ~32-13, Lycan/Mirana were both fed) and so I just stopped caring really and started chasing, trying to pick people off, etc., etc. and ended at ~5-11-xx. Am I hurting my personal MMR by not caring when games are a lost cause?

bleh..

When you join a match, if you really want to know, go watch the watch tab real fast and find what page your game is on. To my knowledge, the games are listed in order of descending total MMR per game. The front page is full of high level team stacks, generally, but after that, it should be pretty close. If you're on page 7 and there are 700 pages, you can theoretically say that out of everyone PvPing right then, you are mathematically better than 99% of them.

And if you're on page 200, well, you're never going to find your game, good luck!

Other than that, I don't believe there is a way to figure out what your MMR actually is.

[Kaynot]

Is there a good way to see the matchmaking pool I'm in, or a good way to get my rating up? I feel like I'm stuck in the shit-holes of the cellars.

Was playing last night, was 4-2-xx by the time it was blatantly obvious were weren't going to win (Death Prophet [me], Doom Bringer, Sniper, Invoker, Disruptor v. Queen of Pain, Lycan, Mirana, Wisp, Jaikro) (23 minutes in, they'd pushed all t1 and t2 towers, we hadn't pushed any towers, score was ~32-13, Lycan/Mirana were both fed) and so I just stopped caring really and started chasing, trying to pick people off, etc., etc. and ended at ~5-11-xx. Am I hurting my personal MMR by not caring when games are a lost cause?

bleh..

"Watch"->"Recent matches">"Filter">type your name and filter by "Skill level"

[Finear]

Can anyone tell me what your champions rating is based on?


It says it's not based on win/loss ratio, but most of the games I played as Shadow Shaman I had quite a good score (not all of the games of course).
Should I lose games while still having a good score or something stupid like that?

It says it's standardized for players at my MMR, so that can't be the problem either.

I guess I just kind of hoped my bar would be fuller with a good score on Shadow Shaman (:

for me 3 is avarage performance so if you are at 3 or close you are playing fine
considering you are new to the game i wouldnt worry too much about it

[llDemonll]

When you join a match, if you really want to know, go watch the watch tab real fast and find what page your game is on. To my knowledge, the games are listed in order of descending total MMR per game. The front page is full of high level team stacks, generally, but after that, it should be pretty close. If you're on page 7 and there are 700 pages, you can theoretically say that out of everyone PvPing right then, you are mathematically better than 99% of them.

And if you're on page 200, well, you're never going to find your game, good luck!

Other than that, I don't believe there is a way to figure out what your MMR actually is.

"Watch"->"Recent matches">"Filter">type your name and filter by "Skill level"

Yea, I did this and all my matches except a select few player with friends are in the 'normal' bracket

i'm just looking for advice on upping the skill level...i would figure it mostly depends on the game as a whole but if it's a individual-based score....i should stock dicking around when the game is all but lost

[Kuntantee]

Yea, I did this and all my matches except a select few player with friends are in the 'normal' bracket

i'm just looking for advice on upping the skill level...i would figure it mostly depends on the game as a whole but if it's a individual-based score....i should stock dicking around when the game is all but lost

There is nothing you can do when people lost a lane hard on top while you're doing okay at bottom. Later enemy top laner rapes you, you leave game with poor stats(kill death assist / cs etc.). Other players directly effect your individual stats which is taken into account when calculating MMR I guess. The calculation of MMR is doomed to fail by the nature of dota. I really don't think I should be matched with current pool of players as they are really bad...enemy team but especially my team mates; bunch of trash who refuse to learn.

I don't know how they calculate it but I believe it's not that great. I wonder if it takes into consideration putting wards etc. for supports.

Quick research on google and found this:

on console write

developer 1
dota_game_account_debug
developer 0(will turn of text on top left)

this will list bunch of information. I saw "rank" information on one of the screenshots but when I try it, "rank" was not in list.

Also I believe hero performance system is broken.

[llDemonll]

^ that console command has been fixed.

Basically the only way to guarantee that your MMR goes up is to group with friends and play classes that will ensure a win...

[Ultraviolet Harmonies]

Also I believe hero performance system is broken.

I disagree. The system was recently reworked slightly, and they raised the cap. The old "5" was between 1.5-1.6x average performance. You can get some neat statistics with the dota_hero_standings_debug command. You can find an old list of heroes and their corresponding ID's here.

The performance bars are certainly a hot topic in the DotA community. A lot of people seem perplexed that their 25-0 Gondar with dual Rapiers didn't push their bar up further. At the end of the day only Valve knows how this is truly calculated, but I read a very interesting theory about how it works, I'll give you the TL;DR:

• Valve is gathering a LOT of information (even seemingly useless stats like distance traveled) in each game.
• To get a performance bar, we need to figure out how much each of these statistics factor into a users win ratio.
• Using the previous example (and Lycanthrope as the hero), we place win rate on the X-axis and the distance traveled on the Y-axis.
• For every player that has played Lycan, we plot a point on the graph where X=that players win rate with Lycan and Y=that players average distance traveled with Lycan.
• We now end up with a scatter plot of all the players that played Lycan. This allows us to look for trends.
• Now, there's a number in statistics called a correlation coefficient. This is a measure of how good of a predictor X is for Y. This number ranges from -1 to 1 (1 and -1 being perfectly correlated, and 0 being no correlation).
• If the number is below 0, this indicates a negative correlation. A simple one would be player deaths. Usually the more a player dies the less likely they are to win.
• If the number is above 0, this indicates a positive correlation. A simple one would be player kills. Usually the more kills a player has the more likely they are to win.
• The question is: "Given a players total distance traveled with Lycan, how accurately can we predict the win rate?"
• For the sake of the example, let's assume the winning Lycanthropes run around lots and lots. Because of this, let's assume that the correlation coefficient might be around 0.8 (check the wikipedia article linked before to see what this looks like).
• 0.8 is a very fuzzy looking graph, but it has a clear trend to the upper right.

Now, why does this matter?

• The correlation coefficient tells us how important a specific statistic is in predicting a players win rate with that hero.
• We can calculate a weighted average using all of these statistics using this formula:

Performance = [(R1 x S1) + (R2 x S2) + (R3 x S2) + ... + (RN x SN)] / (Total Weight)

Where S is a statistic being tracked (like distance traveled), and R is the correlation coefficient for that statistic.

• Some statistics like deaths have a negative correlation which means that as the number of deaths increase, the win rate of a player decreases with it. Thus, a high amount of deaths will decrease a players performance bar for that hero. Makes sense.
• If a player has below the average amount of deaths then his number will be below the mean and his "standard deviations below the mean" will be negative. If the correlation coefficient is negative, and the standard deviations below the mean is negative then the resulting value will be positive which will increase their performance rating.
• Individually, a single statistic doesn't serve as a good predictor of a persons win rate. However, using this method we can determine how important a statistic is to each hero individually, and as a result, produce a unique equation for determining a players performance for that hero.
• The "Kills" statistic would probably be more important for a carry than a support, using this method the equation for a carry hero would place more importance on kills than the equation for a support hero.
• Thus, we can simplify this problem of trying to quantify "skill", an intangible quality, to just predicting win-rate.
• TL;DR of the TL;DR - The game is taking pretty much every possible statistic, seeing if that correlates to win rate, and then combining those statistics into a weighted average. It also appears to factor in your current skill rating.

Another thing that seems to confuse many is how heroes they've barely played are among the top of their performance bars. Simply put, a small sample size skews the results (keep playing for more accurate results).

i'm just looking for advice on upping the skill level...i would figure it mostly depends on the game as a whole but if it's a individual-based score....i should stock dicking around when the game is all but lost

The first step towards improving is realizing how much you suck.

Someone over at Team Liquid once made a very interesting series of experiments on Bronze League players in Starcraft 2. Blizzard hides your win/loss ratio in SC2 to not discourage people from playing. This creates an illusion for the lowest tier of players that they are doing better than what they really are and that they do not need to improve. This person hypothesized that part of the issue with the level of Bronze play was that these players simply don't realize how much help they need because they never figure out that Bronze is the lowest league and their loss ratio is hidden from them. Thus, they flat out ignore most of the criticism they get. Pair this with the fact that matchmaking keeps them playing other bad players, they never get stomped hard enough to realize that they might suck.

It might not be your fault your team lost (it rarely is a single individuals fault), but pretend it is. Watch a replay of one of your recent games, put the camera in player perspective. Watch the game on 2x speed or whatever, but try to spot things you do wrong - where you should have committed, where you should have teleported, where you should have backed off. Don't only watch games you lose, watch games you win too!

Now, I don't know how good of a player you are. Here's some things almost everyone can improve on (and what differs an okay player from a good player):

• Watch the minimap more.
• Buy wards. Know where to place them, and when.
• Pick heroes that resonate well with your team composition. Try to win your lane.
• Gank other lanes! When was the last time you saw someone from the side lanes gank the middle lane? You see it in pretty much every high-rated game, but mid-rated players will never see it coming.
• Don't have a static plan before you start the game. Coming in with the attitude "I'm going to play Lycan. I'm going to rush Vladimir's Offering. I'm going to Jungle. I'm going to kill Roshan asap. I'm going to get BKB and win." is not something you want to do. There's never a set in stone way to spec your hero, neither is there a set in stone itembuild, wardspots, et cetera. Don't be the guy that yells out "I AM GOING MID" before the game starts - that shit is not only irritating, but dumb too. If you want to pick a specific hero, fine. Just try to be a little bit flexible.