[Dota 2] MMR production. Just play more games. by etofok
I hope you guys forgive me for this horrible title, but there are many points I want to personally address in this one. Many statements might look out of place, but they serve the purpose of building up an overarching structure.
Let’s assume my current mmr is 4k but I got coached and played unranked a lot and now I’m skilled enough to play at 5k. It’ll take me quite some time before I eventually reach my actual real mmr.
Dota is a 5v5 game and players are part of the machine. Though every part is technically 20%, the tools at your disposal are different from the other guy and thus can’t be equal in what they do. The map offers limited resources per time, which means there is not enough room for everybody to progress economically. As Dota was shaping itself up as a strategy game, clear farm priorities have been developed and nowadays we have cores and supports. “Core” just implies it’s meant to take up the farm, because there is not enough farm for everybody to take. With more farm you can acquire more tools to do more things and thus each part of the machine has a different impact on the game.
So naturally, the potential impact of a hero that has a farm priority position is much higher, because he has access to things that other heroes on his team do not have (items, levels). I think this doesn’t need much explanation, and you can just take a look at the fact that every single booster there is plays a hero like slark or tinker and not crystal maiden or warlock as a position 5.
Which means, as a support hero, it’ll take significantly much more time to climb because your impact potential is significantly more limited as you have less ways and tools to outplay your opponents with. To be fair here, it goes both ways: it’s also much harder to throw a game as a support, as there is a better chance that you’ll get carried by a competent core.
That was quite a long, but required wind-up.
Boosted accounts is a plague that eats dota right now. Alive. Super inflated MMR, stomps in low brackets, low bracket players infiltrating higher brackets, ruined experiences all around - we’ve got it all. And this bothers me, this bothers me, because I really want to play solo mmr games to climb the ladder, but I also don’t want to play solo mmr games because I already know from my own personal experience, as well from the experience of other players, how many of these games WILL be completely ruined by people who bought their accounts to play the bracket they aren’t capable of playing at.
“Well, eventually you’ll climb man. They have 5 potential retards and you only have 4 assuming you aren’t one. It’s fair. Just play more games.”
I mean, okay, the math checks out and this statement is technically correct, however it’s not fair to my time. I’m not playing an infinite amount of games per day and a huge chunk of these games is merely damage control games. Winning a game feels like a chore you have to do at that point.
Account buyers typically take up a core position which they naturally suck at, because they suck at every position. However because of how the game works, a core is naturally a more impactful part of the machine, so your chances to win drop by a more significant amount which correlates with the impact potential being wasted away. And now let’s say you play mainly a support, like you are a support player. Therefore every single game that has a buyer on your team, is going to be much harder because the buyer occupies a core position and a guaranteed decent player occupies a support position.
People who buy accounts cannot accept their 2k mmr reality - no, that would crush their ego completely, but the dissonance of their delusions reaches the point where they feel like actually purchasing an account. And they do. Because they can. And because they have fragile egos and most likely zero self-awareness ON TOP of their shit ability to play the game, the very second something within a match derails from their “understanding” of the game, the moment something strays away from their perfect envision of a gameplan they have had in their minds - they start to tilt, they start to feed, trashtalk, flame and just throw the game in general.
And because this is a core role they are occupying, with all that farm and all that space devoted to them for the entirety of the match, what happened here is you essentially threw all these resources and space and your own time right outta window, because the buyer ate all that space and now doesn’t utilize it because he’s afking at fountain at best. At worst he’s just feeding couriers.
To them it’s somebody else's fault that they didn’t get to free farm. If you are truly a newcomer to strategy games you might miss an extremely important fact that you aren’t meant to farm uncontested. It’s like the whole point of the game being multiplayer in the first place! If you are laning against a person who is 2, 10, 50 times above your skill level you won’t get any farm and if you can only farm a completely free lane you aren’t much better than a medium bot. That’s why your typical buyer gets crushed - it’s not hard to outplay a medium bot.
Obviously fuck these people and fuck the people who boost and sell accounts. However I can’t put 100% of the blame on them because they are operating within a system where this activity and behavior is not punished by the authority. Unless we get a monumental change to how matchmaking works - unless you can’t play ranked without logging in using your passport identification or something along these lines, the only way to prevent this kind of a plague completely overthrowing the matchmaking legitimacy is to actively ban these accounts.
Right now people boost, sell and buy accounts on factory production scales, because they inherently know, they understand there is LITERALLY zero risk of losing their money, they understand there is zero risk of wasting their time and they understand it doesn’t affect fucking anything. Aside, of course, from ruining thousands and thousands of games per week to the point where people who are actually interested in improving at the game just quit dota.
People are really talking a lot about account buyers lately. I don't know if it's as big as people make it out to be.
Doesn't matter what mmr you play in, you'll have bad players.
I went from 3.5-5.1 over a few years playing support and occasional offlane. This patch, you can easily have an enormous impact as a support and compete in xpm/Gpm with cores
It's not rocket science you just have to be consistently the best player in the game
I don't really notice the boosting problem. Those players are a so small part of the player base that it doesn't really matter. I make more mistakes than any boosted player can account for over the games. Smurfs are a much more relevant problem since new players run into them their first 10 games and might be put off forever due to the 30-2-15 players.
Just had a game where a person was 1-7-2 mid and I considered if it was a boosted account. The person then just kept farming on OD and then more or less went godlike once the items started coming in. Was just a bad start to the game. Most cases where I think somebody might be boosted they play better in mid game and so on. The only case in the past 40 games might have been an invoker that was the same level as me playing a low impact support that game.
It is impossible to read this and not just feel like you're making excuses and blaming (as belisarius appropriately puts it) imaginary problems.
Imma look at some numbers:
The only company I have ever seen advertising dota 2 account sales has a dozen accounts available for purchase.
Another source found with a little googling has 14 accounts above 4k MMR available for purchase.
Let's be -really- bold and assume that they sell 25 accounts per month, each, and that there are 10 other companies that sell on an equally impressive level.
For no reason whatsoever, let's assume we're super wrong and have only produced a -quarter- of the actual number of account boostings and transactions.
Given those numbers, we've got 1000 "misplaced" accounts per month above the 4k bracket that will all presumably decay and ruin games on their descent back down to their actual MMR.
Right now, on a monday night, steamstats tells me that there's approximately 400,000 people playing dota 2. Previous statistics revealed about a year ago put about 12% of the games played in the "very high" skill bracket, and the beginning of that bracket at around 3700 MMR. This gives us enough information to loosely guess that, if we're queueing into very high, we're probably queueing into a pool of roughly 48,000 players.
In our optimistic account sales data, we concluded that perhaps 1000 players each month were fresh account buyers, who presumably haven't decayed to their actual MMR yet. Let's assume that there are still 2000 account buyers from previous months that are wildly placed outside of their actual MMR. That gives us a pool of 3000 account buyers to work with.
10 players go in to any game. Presumably, we're mostly concerned about our own team having an account buyer on it, so we're only concerned that 4 players out of a given 10 aren't account buyers. Given our 3000 account buyers of 48,000 players ratio, there's a 6.25 percent chance that any given player is an account buyer.
Here's where I brick at math and someone makes fun of me, but unless I'm mistaken the chance of one of the four players on your team being an account buyer is uhhhhhhhhh 20-ish percent? The probability of zero of your opponents being an account buyer AND one of your allies being an account buyer is fuck actually I'm just too bad at math.
My point is this : I'm horrible at statistics and math, and even airing brutally on the side of optimism and there's a 1/5 chance of you getting a game with an account booster or buyer on your team, and that's discounting the chance (about 24%?) of there being an account buyer on the other team and whatever the hell math dictates that overlap to be where you get a game in which your ally is an account buyer and the other team does not have any.
It isn't many. It isn't more than one in five games. It isn't worth calling it an epidemic and declaring the impending death of Dota 2 as a competitive game.
Besides, fuck MMR anyways. The day I play a game and realize I no longer have fun playing that game is the day I stop playing that game.
Account buyers are irrelevant unless you are playing at 7k mmr and hardly find a balanced match(an account "worth buying" ).
Other than that what you have are - Late night drunks - Smurfs (given account or given keyboard/mouse) - Party players with significant difference playing opposite roles(low mmr player plays a core role, out-positioned, outplayed, out-farmed in every way) - Opponent team stack is trying hard(synergy heroes etc..) while your team is composed of random guys - Tilted players lost a few games. Like played support, lost with bad guys and decide to cliff jungle NP. Tilt pick into dual mid, then feeds. Tilted to a teammate he/she played in previous game and proceed to feed. A move to mid since min 0. Spits random tilted language and feeds etc... - Wild variance inside the MMR system with infinite combination of heroes. Like played only cores and decide to core 5th pick support. Never played a hero. Having a bad day. Bad match-up. Distracted by his/her cat. Decide to do a challenge. Saw Dendi played wisp mid and thinks he is Dendi. Blah blah
Statistically all of them can happen in your team or the opposite team, you need an absurd amount of games to show your difference, assuming you are in average matched in your MMR also means you are not significantly improved in very short time.
This is why few people quit dota and most people frustrated by the matchmaking.
Also, unless someone seriously distruptive, like intentional feeding over multiple consecutive games, ruining a game here and there doesn't have any consequences. Some of what I put above are not even ruining the game per se but ruining the experience for others.
Long story short, accept the facts and try to enjoy. If you don't really enjoy, it may be time to switch to another game.
It is impossible to read this and not just feel like you're making excuses and blaming (as belisarius appropriately puts it) imaginary problems.
Imma look at some numbers:
The only company I have ever seen advertising dota 2 account sales has a dozen accounts available for purchase.
Another source found with a little googling has 14 accounts above 4k MMR available for purchase.
Let's be -really- bold and assume that they sell 25 accounts per month, each, and that there are 10 other companies that sell on an equally impressive level.
For no reason whatsoever, let's assume we're super wrong and have only produced a -quarter- of the actual number of account boostings and transactions.
Given those numbers, we've got 1000 "misplaced" accounts per month above the 4k bracket that will all presumably decay and ruin games on their descent back down to their actual MMR.
Right now, on a monday night, steamstats tells me that there's approximately 400,000 people playing dota 2. Previous statistics revealed about a year ago put about 12% of the games played in the "very high" skill bracket, and the beginning of that bracket at around 3700 MMR. This gives us enough information to loosely guess that, if we're queueing into very high, we're probably queueing into a pool of roughly 48,000 players.
In our optimistic account sales data, we concluded that perhaps 1000 players each month were fresh account buyers, who presumably haven't decayed to their actual MMR yet. Let's assume that there are still 2000 account buyers from previous months that are wildly placed outside of their actual MMR. That gives us a pool of 3000 account buyers to work with.
10 players go in to any game. Presumably, we're mostly concerned about our own team having an account buyer on it, so we're only concerned that 4 players out of a given 10 aren't account buyers. Given our 3000 account buyers of 48,000 players ratio, there's a 6.25 percent chance that any given player is an account buyer.
Here's where I brick at math and someone makes fun of me, but unless I'm mistaken the chance of one of the four players on your team being an account buyer is uhhhhhhhhh 20-ish percent? The probability of zero of your opponents being an account buyer AND one of your allies being an account buyer is fuck actually I'm just too bad at math.
My point is this : I'm horrible at statistics and math, and even airing brutally on the side of optimism and there's a 1/5 chance of you getting a game with an account booster or buyer on your team, and that's discounting the chance (about 24%?) of there being an account buyer on the other team and whatever the hell math dictates that overlap to be where you get a game in which your ally is an account buyer and the other team does not have any.
It isn't many. It isn't more than one in five games. It isn't worth calling it an epidemic and declaring the impending death of Dota 2 as a competitive game.
Besides, fuck MMR anyways. The day I play a game and realize I no longer have fun playing that game is the day I stop playing that game.
A 20% chance of having an account buyer is actually pretty high. I doubt it's that much, but I guess it could be. You're assuming the buyers are active 24/7 in addition to your other generous estimates, plus maybe math stuff I'm too lazy to check, so who knows.
The thing with account buyers and other game-ruiniers, though, is that even if there is one in every single game, they are a net positive to your chances of victory. If account buyers are a nontrivial issue and you are not an account buyer yourself, the enemy team has 5/5 potential slots for a buyer, while yours has 4/5, so they help you.
No amount of blaming, selective reporting and posting in the QQ thread gets around that.
Yeah no part of what I did was actually math and/or reasonable, and even then the numbers weren't "Oh dear god its the apocalypse" worthy. The point is it's the blogger with the shitty mindset, not the sudden zombie account buyer doomsday.
I've noticed maybe 3 of them at 4k that really had no clue. But then again if you play below 6k there will be a ton of players that play well but are inconsistent, tilt easily and have awful off games and you think they are buyers.
So yeah no big deal, you are probably shit focusing on the wrong stuff as even if 40℅accs were bought the chance is almost the same of getting one on your team as the opposite
why cant valve implement role systems? like you check boxes that say "i want to play offlane/support" then the game matches you to fill the other roles in your mmr range. you can still pick whatever hero you want and play retarded if you really like, but at least the team knows that people have committed to roles. would that help? or is that fucking dumb? it works in mmos, but you generally have a very specifically defined role in those games and are restricted from performing another one without fucking your group at minute 1. hmmmm
also please god region/language locks of some kind. i will wait 2x longer for all english speakers. please valve. please.
On January 19 2017 03:40 Ayaz2810 wrote: why cant valve implement role systems? like you check boxes that say "i want to play offlane/support" then the game matches you to fill the other roles in your mmr range. you can still pick whatever hero you want and play retarded if you really like, but at least the team knows that people have committed to roles. would that help? or is that fucking dumb? it works in mmos, but you generally have a very specifically defined role in those games and are restricted from performing another one without fucking your group at minute 1. hmmmm
also please god region/language locks of some kind. i will wait 2x longer for all english speakers. please valve. please.
I'm honestly not sure if this is really necessary because where I play at (around 4k) the roles are nearly always divided quite well. 9/10 games we have a support, a roamer and mid, carry and offlaner. I honestly think this is quite impressive considering you are matched up with complete strangers.
Secondly implementing something like this would make queing times even longer than they already are. Im in 4k and Im usually waiting 3-5 minutes for a game at peak times. I cant imagine what its like at higher mmr levels.
There is a vast difference of skill between players in any given bracket. If you've nailed the fundamentals of DotA, then what you evolve on top of that becomes a niche until you become well-rounded. I've had a team where we lack core initiative because the players on the team don't know the intricacies of farming and fighting as a core. I've had a lot of teams where people are unaware of how to support because they're too used to playing core heroes - this all affects the game.
Everyone might have the same MMR, but they attained it in different ways and this shows extremely well. I have a lot of people whining about account buyers in my bracket, but they themselves play equally well. I have games where I've been accused of it too, it happens.
EPT
