EPTThis is probably the worst idea ever, to publish this right now, but maybe some of you know that feeling of excitement when you get to publish something to the public, no matter how many bad consequences your imagination brings forth, so you will also understand that to hell with it.
Alright, I have been feeling a little bit under the weather for the last couple of days, so here's my babbling on various things vaguely related to Dota. It's probably going to end up as incoherent rambling, but I'm not patient enough to proof read it and redact it, so whatever. It might end up sounding elitist, whining or trivial, but I suppose that's just how I write and think about things and I can't become a different person without coming to terms with who I am right now. I haven't written a blog in ages and I right now feel about exactly like it's time to write one, so here goes. My goal is to keep it suitable for posting in public, but the general idea is to just help myself collect my thoughts and figure out what's the next step since I'm getting pretty annoyed with feeling perpetually lost.
So the general consensus is that DotA is a pretty hard game. I can bet my ass few people understand what they themselves mean when they say that, but that has never stopped anyone, has it. The sheer number of factors that can skew the outcome of a match is overwhelming and when you start getting into specifics, it's easy to doubt one's ability to comprehend it all at the very beginning. But the human mind (I suppose in general?) has this funny property of having an easier time comprehending things faster the more experience it has with dealing with them. The reason spamming games does not necessarily lead to becoming a better player is that we have the tendency to focus more on some things over others. Technically there's the ability to practice one ability so thoroughly, for so long, that it becomes second nature and you don't have to put any focus into doing it, but that stuff fails when you are distracted. When your mind can't focus or you just think about other things, your fingers slip, you lose patience, you forget things, like the fact that when you see a demon edge on someone and you are playing mortred you are probably about to lose the game, all the bad shit happens and then you do actually lose.
To be honest, I don't even know why Dota is hard at all. I was raised with a deeply rooted belief that there's no limit to human mind (this was probably an effect of extremely egotistic character that I used to, and still partially do, embody) and when I was reluctant to play Dota TFT ages ago, I didn't recognize that this might have been happening due to how hard Dota was to me and how I didn't want to be challenged by it. If you don't take things one at a time, it's easy to be overwhelmed by everything happening at once here and stop improving simply due to the wrong approach to training and learning. In theory, all things in Dota are comprehensible on their own. The goal of the game is also pretty simple - fundamentally, the best clue is in the title - but when you start asking about how to reach those objectives, you come up with a plethora of things to consider. However, I got to play matches where I played so good that I surprised myself and they gave me temporary confidence that there's nothing really hard about it and it's all a matter of focusing, being confident and practice.
Usually though, I look at all these good players just destroying pubs sometimes and I wonder, what's stopping me from doing the same? And I don't know. And it's absolutely fucking infuriating - it leads to a vicious spiral of pointless questions, of the sort of why and how. How to win games consistently, how to carry, what heroes to play, why are things not working out, what am I doing wrong, what should I do better/differently, what's the right decision and all that. This becomes even worse when I lose games, no matter whether they were even or just stomps. I question my validity as a player, my chances of becoming good at it, the sense of playing any longer and committing more time when there's clearly no chance to succeed here or no sign of improvement, whatever. I'm overwhelmed by this sinking feeling that I don't, and never will, understand Dota. But then there comes the realization that, wait, I mean what's there to understand? There's no simple answer to winning, nor a straight-forward scheme on how to win matches, it's all about adapting and approaching each game as a new experience and that's how you improve, right? I don't even know anymore, this approach doesn't help me keep going at all. It's as if knowing things is not enough in life, the key is to have the right attitude. And it is, but how to keep it when there are so many uncertainties, variables and inconsistencies? It's so fucking hard to keep believing in things when everything you do and everyone you meet try to prove you wrong and if it wasn't for Dota, I'd probably have never understood this on a fundamental level. I think some people call this tilting, but I've seen worse cases.
I got to ask EE some time ago if he thought that reaching professional level is possible through perseverance and determination. His answer was pretty heart-breaking to me, as his belief is that without talent you can't succeed in Dota, bringing up all the pros being pubstars at some point as the argument. At the time I fought against this idea, but whatever conclusion I'd get to, I knew that the seed of doubt that this has planted would bear fruit of everlasting poison. For me a talent for something is a tendency to excel at performing a task that stems from the environment and experience in (un)related fields, but is not an inborn characteristic, especially when it comes to cognitive tasks. What some call a talent in Dota, I identify with dexterity acquired from exercises or sports or just a lot of experience in other RTSes. Despite never achieving a lot in gaming, aside from some local victories in Counter-Strike and TF2, for a really long time I hadn't really thought of myself as unfit to compete at video games. For like nine years now I had this vague dream of becoming a pro player and I kept trying to 'become better' at vidya to see if there's any chance of this ever happening. Up until 2010 I had no actual idea what improving means and that playing competitively requires a completely different mindset than the one I usually sported, which was a flawed understanding of 'play hard, go pro'. With some great help from a great friend of mine I started realizing what competitive really means and what to focus on. This experience was an eye-opener in more than one way as I started learning more about myself, my faults, things I had to do to make the dreams come true and how mistaken I was about all those things before. This over the next few years lead me to develop ladder anxiety, realize that i expected things too much to come for free in life, that other people are actually, you know, other actual people, with feelings, emotions, goals, plans, biases, reactions, thoughts, histories and that not everyone is created equal, especially when it comes to systems of priorities or fundamental beliefs (I'm still pretty naive in this regard, expecting everyone I know to be a fundamentally rational person working towards mutual profit). I don't know how to rate this experience - on one hand I had great fun meeting people, competing with and against them, on the other I learned a lot of stuff of questionable value that is supposed to make me wiser, but just confuses the shit out of me in the end.
I still have this silent dream of some day becoming a professional Dota player, like, you know, becoming actually so good so that I will be able to actually do this stuff for a living. I'm 24 now, soon to finish university, will have to find a job and I am absolutely 100% petrified of the idea that I will lose control over my time and won't be able to commit much more of it to making it become a reality. I don't know what to do to be honest, I wasted the last few years not putting my 100% into practice due to either being overrun by anxiety towards Dota or towards people in my environment flipping out (however vague that term is) over me playing so much vidya at this age. It's easy for me to say that I don't really care what other people say or think about me, but in reality I'm all about that and it's actually so stupid. It's actually going to be pretty heart breaking if I will get hit by the thought that the dreams are lost at some point soon. Holy fuck, you have no idea how frightening that thought is. The idea that I will be a slave to bills and money and that I won't actually have the time to commit what I really love doing. Which might in this case be wasting time since I haven't actually played much Dota, right
SC2 was a pretty fun experience all things considered. It was the first game I actually was PHYSICALLY AFRAID of playing. I was at a serious unrest every time I had to queue for a game; it was a new, weird and unwanted feeling that I didn't recognize and couldn't fight. No amount of reason I could apply would make it go away and it was the first time in my life when my subconscious stood in active, strongly felt opposition to my conscious mind. And so, I stopped playing SC2 after reaching platinum in WoL. But that didn't put an end to that particular experience, it haunted me in most games I played since then, including Quake, DotA and most notably Street Fighter. SFIV was the breaking point when I realized that fuck this feeling I can't stand it any longer, if that's what becoming better takes then I quit. I think that was also the moment when my great friend gave up on me, and I can't blame him. I was really excited about getting better and talked a lot about it and it seemed like such a minuscule issue for him that he thought I was just a scrub. I also started thinking that this will be the thing that will prevent me from reaching any notable level of skill. Despite that I kept on taking vidya competition seriously and tried to become better. It took me a long while to fight it in Dota too - at this point I still am rather reluctant to queue for the first game of the day, but after that it's a reflex. Now that I think about this it feels to me like a major success, except that I wish it came sooner and without having to bore a lot of good people to death about it.
What did not go away is the fog, the feeling of burning flames, of some dark weight in the back of my head that makes it hard for me to focus. It's not something that I can sharply describe with words really, it's just there, preventing me from switching focus quickly and fluently, from reacting to things without a second thought, from making the correct snap decisions based on information from the current game and from my experience. I suppose it must be nerves - the anxiety of underperforming, of making glaring mistakes, of making mistakes that I already reflected on in the past, of realizing I'm not improving, I can't give my 100%, that I'm just actually bad and will stay that way. This leads to tunnel vision, making subpar decisions, asking yourself questions that you know the answer to, but which you can't grasp. Lately I developed a belief that if I figure out how to maintain a clear mind, to filter out distractions, to control the confusion stemming from not recognizing the situation I found myself in, or, as some people say, to remain in the zone, that will be the turning point in my road to 7k and beyond. That probably sparked my desire to write this - if I drop it from my mind into strings, maybe that will introduce some silence to my mind. Right now it's just fog and static every day, just a few minutes after I wake up and not leaving me until I fall asleep.
I spent the first eight months of this year in Zurich, on a student exchange. It was awesome. It's a completely different world than the one I'm living in right now. One where I only had to care about studying and practice, where I had full control over what I was doing, where I had to decide what to do with the day, where I had to take care of myself, where I was motivated to take the most out of life and where all things I had to worry about I truly cared about. I also had enough time to play Dota, a lot of it compared to what I played at home. It sparked an idea in me to adopt a fairly rigorous practice schedule, waking up early, playing a few games with a fresh mind, then working or studying until late afternoon, going out for a jog and then playing some more or studying replays. I even got a small notebook where I started writing all the insight, both general and hero-specific, that I came up with. Probably the most important part of all this though was the discovery of Day[9]'s podcast episode on positivity.
+ Show Spoiler +
That video alone put me in a good mood for a whole week, making me enjoy myself when playing the game a lot. It was good times, but didn't last much longer. I couldn't tell why I can't make myself feel this good again or at least clear my mind back then and I still can't now. It does serve as a good pivot for further consideration for me and I hope I will get to figure it out at some point again. I had a similar occasion occur to me later on, but it didn't last long either. I have a hunch that holding onto those good feelings is not what I should focus on, but rather on inducing them when needed and avoiding complete breakdowns, but I'm not really confident in my hunches and it all tends to feel like such a gigantic heuristic that will lead me nowhere that all I'm left with is just 'idk'.
One pretty wise man once said that when everything fails and your chances of winning would be 0% save for one single scenario, no matter how complicated, sophisticated or down to chance, you have to play for that scenario and help it happen. I'm not sure who I heard this from (it was probably Purge or ChaQ, or maybe David Sirlin), but it was something so strikingly right, yet underestimated or forgotten by so many people, that it stuck to me, probably forever. DotA is probably the only game where the importance of this sort of a mindset is emphasized on such a regular basis, so I'm glad I saved myself a lot of time trying to figure it out on my own. While this seems obvious to me now, it's pretty infuriating how random people you get to meet in queue can't care less about actually winning the game. I suppose one can attribute this to their lack of will to try (why play in the first place then?), but holy fuck aren't the persistent losers infuriating sometimes. I have a really awful tendency to care not much more than the rest of the group when I'm assigned with one to a certain task. This has worked against me and my ambitions before, especially during numerous university projects, but takes the biggest toll now in DotA where when people are unwilling to try, to cooperate, are generally negative or outright flaming assholes or just show any sign of giving up early, I lose my cool. I don't usually let negativity spill out from me out into chat (simply due to my fear that the toxic anger will overcome me if I let it rip), but I do lose focus, I tend to wander around aimlessly, doing inefficient stuff and generally not trying to win anymore. Maybe it's me just trying way too hard to win and grind MMR, which in turn introduces more anxiety and disturbs focus, maybe instead I should just let the game play out, enjoy myself and play to improve, but this attitude is really hard to attain for me, let alone maintain. I want to succeed so hard that any disruption of that focus is catastrophic. Imagine trying this hard in an environment where nobody has even a shred of hard will, everybody tends to give up easily, takes zero afterthought, is deeply biased and unwilling to think or try. For you it's easy because you can't care less and you learned how to deal with those fuckers. I take it all with a great dose of concern for humanity, my own mental health and I have no fucking idea how to not have to deal with them. You could say that muting has worked before - if they don't help, at least they won't do harm - but I'd have to do this preemptively and then I lose arguably the most efficient tool used to win in cases when you can't outplay your opponents alone, 1v9, which is team coordination through communication. It's so easy to win a lane with a few well coordinated 2v1 or 3v2 fights, but I'm usually so afraid of tilting my 'teammates' that I rarely ever use the chat or microphone in the first twenty minutes of a match. It's also something I will have to overcome - my bias against retards, and I mean actually ignorant, stupid, anti-social, clueless, irrational people, not players who don't know what the best move is in their situation - if I'll want to succeed in this queue hell, because honestly, my trip to 5k isn't going too well if you still remember about it.
Back to DotA. Back in 2014 Swiftending decided to find a 3k account and boost it to 5-6k to prove everyone at playdota that there's no ELO hell. He succeeded, with a pretty good record, and his efforts established a temporary belief among 3kers that farming will take you further than constant roaming and fighting. 'Analyzing' his replays was a treat and not only have I (overly) focused on csing, I also tried to practice my laning, as the way he dominated his lanes was astounding to me at the time. Then came the rubberband and all the talking about how fighting deals bigger rewards than just farming creeps. And I was, and still am, stuck with farming, because that's what I know how to do best, even if it's still super inefficient and I'm having a hard time finding safe farm in situations under pressure. This is probably be the most difficult skill for me to develop, let alone master - that's to know when to join fights, when to actively look for them, and when to turn back to farming and where to farm. Maybe I'm just too afraid to experiment, but whenever I try to play fighting heroes, like Rattletrap, I spend more time looking at the minimap, roaming and wondering who will be susceptible to ganks when instead of actually ganking people or farming creeps. I see a lot of people do the same in my bracket - they leave their lanes early and try to find fights when they are either not ready or their heroes are supposed to just lane longer. This pressure to not let my team ruin the game by premature and uncalled for aggression is also somewhat off-putting, but much less so when I know what I am actually supposed to do. All this wouldn't be much of a worry for me if it wasn't for this constant amazement with better players absolutely DESTROYING low mmr people. The smallest things matter in fights, the smallest differences in distances, angles covered by creeps, mana, cooldowns, it's insane. And they always look like they have everything under control. If I ever tried that stuff, I'd just misclick twice, die to tower fire and call it a day. The 'gg we lost' doesn't help much either. How do you people do it? It's a mystery to me how you can keep the status of so many variables fresh in your mind and make snap decisions based on the analysis of them. Maybe I'm exaggerating, maybe not, but it's magic to me and I want to figure it out. Fighting seems to be the most efficient, and the most fun, way to play DotA and it bothers me that I can't get a solid grasp on such a fundamental part of the game.
Also carrying is like the hardest part of the game. There's so much shit to take into account - farming patterns, general movements of the enemy, itemizing, both your own and your opponents, power curves, when to fight and when to farm, risk management, stuns and disables, late game survival, breaking highground - that I'm genuinely in awe when I see certain carries just 'get it'. Recently I played the first game in probably a few years now where the term 'carry' has been brought its old, original meaning, which is basically a hero who carries you on their back to victory against the other team after you help him by creating enough space to farm and gain experience to reach his peak power level. It's a great feeling to see the pieces of a match fall into place and have your decisions actually matter and have a sizable impact on the outcome of the game. This view obviously stems from my inability to judge the progress of the game properly and in detail, but I have a feeling I'll enjoy it just as much later too. I think people underestimate how important it is to have a hero in your team whose power curve will allow him to stand strong in the mid to late game, and a player who can play that hero correctly. It hasn't been a good era for carries lately - good safe laners hadn't been very strong or made much impact until very late - but with the recent buffs to some of them, like Spectre, it's been a pleasure to safe lane again. I still prefer it much more than mid lane, mostly because it feels much less volatile. I'm not very good at it - it still poses a lot of challenges that I can't get a hang of - but it feels like there's future there for me.
So yeah, I don't have the inner strength or patience or determination like EE's and it makes me doubt that I have any chance at becoming an actually good, consistent player, but there's one shred of hope that keeps me going and it's that I don't want to quit, because only when I quit will I truly lose. I don't want to end up trying forever and only realizing at the end of the road that I failed, so I'm trying to figure out the way how to not fail. It's actually pretty infuriating to think that there will be people who will hold onto some irrelevant details or inaccuracies here, but writing this has been sorta cathartic for me for a while and I'm enjoying myself right now. I'm hoping, clutching to that hope even, that I will find the way to control my mind consistently and well enough to be able to take as much as I can from practice and appreciate the process of improvement more than looking for clear signs of it so much. I'm still stuck with this idea that help - whatever it will be, an insight, enlightenment, whatever - will magically fall from the sky and that's probably seriously hindering me right now, but I can't put my finger on it well enough unfortunately. There's still so much doubt left, questions like what to do, how to improve, what to watch out for, but I won't get anywhere if I won't truly realize that I have to figure out the answers on my own. There's probably some more that I wanted to write, but I think that will do. Whatever was the reason I started, I don't remember anymore and maybe I will revisit this at some point later.
Shoutout to the two Pororos, Urfaust, Mr. Clock Is Useless In The Late Game, Maishul, number 6.28318530718, carry potm, the missmeister, #ESPORTS, the cast of Friends, the unofficial community manager and the Sama.
