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Last time I wrote a post about why people should be blame their allies less for the games and look to coordinate more. This time, I'm going to provide some context from my own experience.
The account I play with most is in very high for probably 80-90% of games. The DBR I was given was ~97% and platinum (whatever second highest was). I have ~ 53% win rate. I am by no means good at the game. But I would say I have experience and would consider myself decent. I wrote the above just to show that I'm not a completely awful player.
I recently made another account because I have a few new friends starting to play and didn't want to force them into a match making level that they're not used to. But on the side, I decided to mess around in some of my own games. After a while, I got the account into h/vh level. Was pretty easy too.
Then I started losing. A lot. Some of the games, I would be awful. I mean I had a game yesterday where I swear i started 0-7-1 as DK. I give up first blood more often, my kda swings from very positive to wayy less than 1. I had become a shit player. When I play on my other account though, I'd still win about the same percentage.
What happened?
In my mind, it's all about coordination. I had played with a certain type of player on my main account that led me to have high expectation of teammates. So when I play aggressive, I could expect a more coordinated effort. On the smurf, I found that I could count on my allies to a much lesser level. Expectations can kill.
The other is the team composition. I play mainly supports on my main and I think I do a good job of warding/supporting. In addition, the team composition is generally well balanced. But when I played on the smurf, the team composition could be wild. I would have games where there would be 3 carries and not-support intel hero. The last pick would be sniper. I mean really? But it's not just team composition, there's more lack of tps, item builds that prioritize late game (say no to upgraded boots).
The third, and in my opinion the most important (or most painful) difference is that people tend to pull apart instead having higher level teamwork. I'm guilty of that too. Whereas on my main, I will try hard to get everyone more organized and playing as a team... on the smurf, I'll go ahead and bad mouth people for being (in my perception) bad. Pissed off allies do not make good teammates. They tend to then say screw you guys, I'm going to farm by myself. The game wasn't going well anyway, and now it's 4v5.
Those are three of the most obvious issues I've seen in lower level DotA play. I'm at a loss for solutions to this. I don't think it's a skill issue, I think it's a solo vs team mindset that players come into the game with. I swear when I play these games I don't think, how can I make my team better, I think how can I farm more so that at 35 minutes regardless of how my team is doing, I can win the game. Sadly that's actually worked a few times...
Anyway, perhaps y'all could post about any experiences and ideas on how to make normal/high level play a more team oriented experience. Or maybe we just resort to spending all of our time in the qq thread.
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Complete side note, anyone else think this game shouldn't be f2p? This game currently houses the most awful human beings (I have my doubts on the human part) imo. The only mechanism to prevent the poor behavior can be circumvented by simply creating a new account...
Valve should create something that adds a cost to poor sportsmanship. LoL did this by not making all heroes available and making the more serious scene only at level 30.
  
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There are three things that happen when you create a new account (Attention, totally arbitrary points made up by me coming up):
1. It is more likely that you play with other people who have created a new account and have <100 games total.
2. Your MMR is all over the place and adjusts very quickly, so you could win or lose only one game that has unbalanced teams and your MMR shifts from being kind of right for you to way too high.
3. Smaller amounts of games means MMR isn't as accurate as it could be, so new players might hit a lucky win or loss streak and make the whole team MMR invalid which leads to your games feeling weird in terms of skill level.
So because people shift from being in (relatively, in smurf low game amount MMRs) higher MMR and lower MMR all the time they learn that they can't really trust their teammates in a large portion of games because they aren't on the same skill level, so what they do is that they go into the game with a different mindset than they would otherwise. That doesn't necessarily mean they are worse players just because they support each other less, it just means that they made bad experiences in their other smurf account games (because whatever you do, the first 5-8 games will always be with bad players if you are at a decent skill level and another 30-50 games afterwards will always shift from being kinda good skill level to being pretty bad) which led them to take a more solo approach in their games. I mean you did the exact same thing and you just said it.
Once you played 200+ games on an account your MMR will adjust slower and it will be more likely to play with other players who have a large amount of games, so in my opinion it makes a lot of sense that you have more stable games on an account that has already established the right MMR for you, which means the skill levels of the players aren't all over the place.
And you have to realize, you going 0 - 7 doesn't mean you are a worse player than before, just like 20 - 0 doesn't mean you are a better player than before (and you just proved it by saying your games on the other account didn't change at all). It just means that this one game went good or bad for you, which can have many reasons, one and the most important being that you are just outclassing your opponents or your opponents are outclassing you in terms of skill. And blaming your own deaths and fails on teammates or lack of teamplay is the worst thing you can do in Dota, especially if you are playing on a relatively fresh account.
I think team oriented play has nothing to do with the skill level, the only thing that matters is that low level players have no idea how teamplay works. If a higher level player watches low level players he will always think that they don't have the right mentality and aren't teamplaying properly, when in fact some of them are trying to do it but because of their skill level and lack of knowledge of the game they have the wrong perception of the right teamplay. Others are just soloplaying all the time, but you could go into the 0.999 quantile (which is 99.9% percentile but that doesn't exist technically I think, my statistics knowledge is horrible) and you will still find the same differences in attitudes in public Matchmaking.
And everyone knows Dota is full of a**holes, but that doesn't change significantly within different MMR pools.
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You are right. Blaming teammates is awful and that wasn't my intent. I was trying to compare the different mindsets and expectation of players playing in different levels.
You're absolutely right about mentality. I find that in lower level play, it is far more common to see a team full of carries (lack of synergy) or absolute refusal to buy courier or wards (lack of team orientation).
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I just started Dota 2 and managed to get my brother and 3 other friends to start playing. 3 of the 5 on the team have some MOBA experience (SOTIS and LoL), but no Dota 2. Two of the guys never played any RTS at all. Our first night, we went 6 and 0 on games, just roflstomped everyone, simply by being on skype and coordinating everything. Two of our players didn't even know that you have to get the last hit to get gold (even though I told them....). It was tons of fun.
Last night (night 2) we went 0 and 4, even though everyone had actually been practicing on their own. The difference? I think matchmaking.
My whole team is noobs and uber-noobs, but because we are all RL friends, it's amazingly fun. Hopefully though, our MMR will even out, because it got kind of tense toward the end of the last game--I don't want my friends to quit :D.
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On February 14 2013 09:50 Mr. Black wrote:
I just started Dota 2 and managed to get my brother and 3 other friends to start playing. 3 of the 5 on the team have some MOBA experience (SOTIS and LoL), but no Dota 2. Two of the guys never played any RTS at all. Our first night, we went 6 and 0 on games, just roflstomped everyone, simply by being on skype and coordinating everything. Two of our players didn't even know that you have to get the last hit to get gold (even though I told them....). It was tons of fun.
Last night (night 2) we went 0 and 4, even though everyone had actually been practicing on their own. The difference? I think matchmaking.
My whole team is noobs and uber-noobs, but because we are all RL friends, it's amazingly fun. Hopefully though, our MMR will even out, because it got kind of tense toward the end of the last game--I don't want my friends to quit :D.
I would agree with your conclusion. Your success in the early games probably caused the mmr to increase to a point where pure skill was overcoming your coordination.
For my games with newer players, I try to keep a positive atmosphere so that they can enjoy the game. Keep giving them confidence and advice. I wish y'all good luck. And I hope they don't quit either. I get a sense that this game loses too many people to rage.
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often times one of the best solo tactics in low level MM is to pick a hero that can control the game very well by not only split pushing but farming as well, simply because you cant always trust your teammates to do the right things so you shouldnt always go off and help them.
it doesnt always work out for various reasons but yeah, its a mental playstyle thing as well as a draft thing.
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On February 14 2013 12:48 rabidch wrote:
often times one of the best solo tactics in low level MM is to pick a hero that can control the game very well by not only split pushing but farming as well, simply because you cant always trust your teammates to do the right things so you shouldnt always go off and help them.
it doesnt always work out for various reasons but yeah, its a mental playstyle thing as well as a draft thing.
Essentially this. If you're top 5-10%, suddenly thrust into the dregs of society, you have to be Batman. Work alone, control the flow of the game, and possibly help your allies. Your teammates are essentially the cops in arkham, they are on your side and helping them can get you to the goal, but sometimes things just work out better if you stay solo and be the motherfuckin Batman.
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EPT
