Below you’ll find all the posts by Juice from his Elo Hell experiment thread that either relate to his games, MM or the experiment. As much context as possible has been provided. No plans to keep this indefinitely updated but you’ll find 3542 posts (2014/04/07) have been sorted through.

Its still several pages long but its much better than wading through 89 pages.

pls dont give me links to random dotabuff matches where you think you played good dota [Emphasis Added]Quote:

If I can't go up in MMR because supporting at these levels is less effective due to these people, I'm not ok.

Then you should complain to icefrog, not me. Support being obsolete in the trench is the way this game works, the intricacies of smoke ganking, roaming, warding the proper spots, dewarding, efficiently pulling are all irrelevant in games when 1 good player can exploit the opposition so much that he can win purely by himself. This isn't my concern and you need to climb a higher MM rating to enjoy playing support (heh, not even then is it guaranteed), so I can't help here

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If this "experiment" is going to show us how the MMR only partially because he doesn't want to use other heroes/doesn't care/the matches last less, I call bullshit.

You're saying like I'm spamming earth spirit to go up or something similar when I'm not, I'm playing an array of different heroes that have a couple of things in common - they're independent on their allies in lane, they can influence the game greatly by themself, and they stay relevant throughout the whole game. As a competent player that's the best and fastest way for me to prove this and to minimize losses as whole so it's obvious I'm gonna do that and not intentionally handicap myself.

You can like it or not but everybody who wants to improve their MMR at this level should do the same since it's the best thing to do

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Hey Juice, wanted to ask you how do you handle communication with these players.

Do you try to avoid it so it doesn't start unreasonable rants and flame? Do you try to ''lead'' your team and tell them what to do? Do you ask for wards or cour upgrades, etc?

I just say mid pls or safelane pls depending on what I picked and mark it on the map. I basically never ever flame them or tell them what to do, only stuff like ''go rosh'', ''def this tower'', ''push mid'', ''go back'', ''gj''. I ask for courier and it's usually me who upgrades it, wards are not really relevant here and I get stuff like dust/sentry/gem/smoke for fights or solo ganks.

I don't depend much on them and don't get upset when they do stupid stuff since the enemies do so as well. If they'd start arguing between themselves (didn't happen yet) I'd probably tell them to relax and calm down and keep playing etc. Basically keep the morale up and don't try to guide people since they won't like it anyway.

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As a sidenote, could you maybe write some short keypoints what you think players in this MMR are doing wrong a lot?

Would be interesting to see since you actually got to play with them, which you usually don't.

Well there are a lot of things - bad at last hitting, out of position a lot, slow reflex time (not capitalizing on enemies out of position), unaware of what enemy heroes can do (staying on low hp in a lane against 2 stuns etc), overextending in lanes and their own jungle etc etc etc. There's a ton of stuff and I can't just pinpoint one single thing

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Edit: what i'd like to ask juice is about his decisionmaking about when to tp for a fight and when to ignore it and keep farming. I've watched almost all of these replays and I can't really see the logic.

This isn't something I can explain as it comes with experience. If my allies are getting destroyed in a 2v4 fight I probably can't do anything (if im not fed already) so im just gonna continue farming and pushing towers. Vice versa, if theyre destroying enemies 4v2 or something then they dont need me either. If a fight is breaking out close to a tower and im sure i can save somebody or get a kill, then im going there

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A 40 minute pipe on a 4-14 axe who is too busy dying randomly around the map doesnt influence my item choices at all

Bkb would be terrible in this game since they dont have any hard disables and looking at their heroes its pretty obvious weaver most likely wouldnt kill a single hero in bkb duration and then would get squashed by one lightning bolt the moment it ends like the 1200 hp hero he is. A bkb deso weaver wouldnt do anything here and would even have to waste bkb duration running

away from sven or abaddon. Linken against only a stormbolt which is dodgable and stuff like goo/arc lightning/abaddon nuke doesnt make any sense either. This is a pretty old weaver build but it's a perfect one for a game like this

I also didn't get mid this game because sf was insisting on ''weaver not being a mid hero'' and just refused to cooperate so i had to offlane and there i meet the unkillable dazzle abaddon lane. A couple of dumb mistakes early on and games can get pretty grim, however people at this rating don't know how to seize their advantage nor deal with getting outfarmed and split pushed so it was perfectly winnable even after the early game score being something like 5-20

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Hi, Juice,

rumours about you are spreading through DotA community. You are also well-known on one russian local forum about moba, which I'm from. Lots of 2900 mmr whiners there already shitted their pants.

So, I want to ask a couple of questiones, sorry if they already were asked and answered, I'm just too lazy to read all 33 pages or watch all of your matches Many players keep whining about teammates - which game would you mention, where you was playing with most retarded retards (speaking only about games on this account, ofc)? Was it hard to carry them through the game 1vs5?

Also, so far we could see that you mostly pick mid characters. Didn't you get in a conflict with other teammates? I'm not sure about how it's on EU, but on russian server in AP many players will just instapick Pudge (or Invoker, or SF, or any other character they can't handle at all), will say 'mid or feed' and then will hook trees and won't do shit. Is it much harder to carry the game as hardcarry/hardliner/support with roaming abilities etc? Also going to watch this last Void game of yours. Void is considered as one of the most farm/support-dependent hardcarries in the game. Were you playing on easy line with support, can you say that it was also his contribution in the victory? Thanks.

P.S. Sorry about probable English issues.

The weaver game was the hardest because they failed in early game and so did I to some extent, so it was pretty hard to come back. However in none of the games have I felt that my team is actually weaker than the enemy team, they seem pretty near skill-wise, make similar mistakes and farm at the same speed.

I don't get any conflicts since I instapick the hero and call the lane and usually people aren't that retarded to try to force somebody out of mid, however a couple of times that happened too so I just went offlane/safelane.

I don't think it's much harder, I'm pretty sure a good offlane earth spirit/timbersaw/clock or a safelane carry that is good early game (clinkz, gyro, luna, slark, ember) can also win games pretty easily. Idk about support since I don't play it

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Summary: Going from 2930 to 3506 took 24 games, a 24 win streak (24-0) and that's around 24 x 25 = 600 rating, still there's no streak bonuses whatsoever so I'm 99% sure there aren't gonna be any regardless.

Last game was annoying, nyx comes mid with me and doesnt say anything so im forced to offlane with viper and i get slain like a retard 2-3 times because im already annoyed and dont pay attention. Then I've got a feeding crystal maiden whining her heart out in team chat about how dazzle is bad (id say he did better than her, at least he didnt feed 14 kills)

So far even if i overextend in the laning phase and feed and set myself back games are still extremely easy to win since nobody farms properly and they dont know how to seize their advantage so they just wander around the map cluelessly while i catch up.

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Then you have to admit that "Elo hell" does exist. It's when you are ARE better than your teammates but not by ENOUGH so that you can reliably (say >= 60% of the time) carry them even if they all play very poorly.

If that's the case you're maybe 100-150 away from your true rating and will get there in time, not to mention it's a very minor difference. ''Omg I'm a 3600 player and my rating is 3500 these games are so bad compared to my skill!!!'' - said nobody ever. Furthermore there's no such thing as a ''6000 rating player'', a player rated 6000 is somewhere inbetween 5600-6400 depending on which hero he plays, his mood, concentration etc. So basically if you're 100-200 rating under your original rating then that's the same shit really

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Do you sometimes feel the need to really force a kill in mid or are you always just focused on getting farmed rather than killing the opposing hero at any cost?

Is there ever any situation in which you will gank a sidelane before lvl 6 even without rune?

if i get something like a haste on a lvl 4 TA and the enemies have pushed too far and their support is something squishy like a rubick and my offlaner has mana... why not

i usually check for stuff like that

no need to force anything mid if youre farming well, what you can do is try to gank the sidelane that's failing (however even that is terrible sometimes, if you want to see that in action check the

TA game from today where i try to gank a trilane that my allies have managed to feed to level 6 while theyre level 2 themselves)

just be sure to secure your farm, pick up bonus easy kills on the way and you'll be fine

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i dont see how the lose streaks on my main acc correlate in any form to what im doing on the other one

the story at my rating is pretty different, how games look like are im blue/pink slot every game getting matched with 4500-5200 people and im usually expected to carry them

however thats not the story anywhere below 5k rating since there are enough people to find a decent match with 10 people of around the same rating where you aren't always the highest rated therefore you can expect of your allies what you would of yourself

whats expected of me is to carry most of these games, sometimes i make stupid mistakes and lose what couldve won if i played a bit better (thats a 50 rating difference there for every game like that), sometimes i play just for breaking lose streaks and play like shit tired and aggravated

about 50% of the games i know are lost from the start (orange player wants to take mid, nobody wants to play support, people random stupid heroes etc), however thats really not what mm system can fix by itself, furthermore the limited player pool at this rating makes games more imbalanced

this lose streak might be just unfortunate and i bounce back, however there are people with 5800, 6000, 6200+ rating and theyre probaly doing something im not and carrying their games out better

your analogy at how i needed to pick some other account makes absolutely no sense as the rating gains are +/-25 for everyone in solo queue and the people you get to play with are the same regardless of their number of games

i mean just implying that im being able to get win streaks and raise this one ''but maybe not some other special account with bad luck on it!!'' makes as much sense as telling me about voodoo dolls and black magic keeping you from winning dota or whatever

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The games he lost was some of the games where he plays a role/hero that can't win a game basically alone

There you have it folks. The only way to get out of elo hell is playing heros that can win a game alone.

no its not its just the fastest

i had a 30 game winning streak with close to 30 different heroes

youre just in denial like your ''im stuck lols'' brethren

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Oh well when my team is full retard I just go for dagon and try to steal as many kills as possible and watch them rage at my killsteal skillz

i mean im pretty sure that if i watched any of your games id see a typical thousand mistakes in 10 minutes performance just like every other ''retard'', as you like to call them, in your bracket does

but everyone thinks theyre a special snowflake

in your case that is the ''if i play with puppey and kuro support, dendi mid and funn1k offlane i play so good lol'' argument which is pure comedy

also people in that bracket think theyre the holy saviors of mm system when they pick supports when in reality they sit behind the carry on lane in full vision every game, leech his exp for 10 minutes and deny creeps (wow such impact) then wonder why their team isnt winning the game for them

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I hate going mid. I absolutely hate it, because I hate competing for last hits.

But... it seems it's the only way I can climb up the ranks.

I know I'm not as good as Juice, so the reason why I go mid isn't to stomp the piss out of the opposing team by being so much better than them, but to remove the high chance of some random retard going mid and losing the game from there.

Hell, I pick Zeus for the exact reason to avoid being that random retard myself. I can quarantee I get some last hits regardless of my opponent's skill. Zeus is also quite straightforward, so there's no "oops, I missed my arrow" kind of crap.

You see, you hate competing for last hits at 4000 mmr... where a good player would outcs your opponents with ease. You're going for easy mode cop outs such as zeus in order to guarantee some farm for yourself. In fact if you can't compete with 4000 players in last hits then you are surely missing A TON of cs even in empty lanes/while freefarming which then again puts you at the mechanical skill of a 4000 player and showcases you're there where you need to be. What I got out of your post is ''hey, I'm playing against people at 4000 mmr and picking heroes that will make it a bit easier since I'm not sure if I will fuck up or not''. Isn't that just the real clue that the mmr put you right where you are equal to the other players and that it works well enough? I'd

say it is, since I experience the same thing on my real account

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Do you think there's anyway you could go over some of your games and go through your thought process.

I could do that at some point but you need to notice things by yourself too in order to improve. For example, I was watching a wagamama stream yesterday, he was playing TA. So he puts a trap on some slope that I actually don't trap at all, and I'm like ok fine. Later on, his trap spots a SF, he is able to slow him in order for his shadow demon to get in range for disruption and his team proceeds to kill the SF and they take a tower. That trap of his just gave his team a kill on a core hero and a free tower, that's a trap I wouldn't have in that place.

I was watching merlini like a year ago and saw some ridiculously efficient jungle farm patterns that I wasn't using on heroes that can pull multiple camps at once, so I incorporated that into my play.

Remember, you can go 5-5 on storm spirit mid and finish not feeding while your team fed and blame them for the loss. However, that doesn't mean you did good, that doesn't mean you're fine. Because a better player would go 13-3 and possibly create enough space to win the game. A better player might have farmed 50 cs more on his luna than you at the 25 min mark and have his bkb up for the fight where you got stunned and died, he would've killed 2 more people with eclipse and survived.

Another great player to learn from would be liquid tc, I'm currently trying to catch his stream whenever possible. But you need to turn your brain on and see what he is doing that you aren't. Watch actively and think what would you do in that situation and what he did. I can also spot mistakes or missed opportunities easily, but good players will make it up with something beneficial that I wouldn't do. And that's why there's no perfect player and there's always room for improvement

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have u noticed that most 6k players like arteezy liquid tc ee actually play very selfishly and just farm and hoard goald and acquire a big enough macro advantage to solo the whole enemy team

ive been in countless situations where i end up underfarmed with 90 cs at 20 min with storm for trying to fix my teammates' lanes and then watch people win game with a fast bloodstone orchid 150 cs @ 20 min storm even if theyre extremely behind

your ''this is team game lols'' argument is just dumb shit that makes no sense especially in drool-ridden sub 4.5k pubs where one player can basically solo your whole team with appropriate heroes without breaking a sweat

oh yeah, ive heard enough of your kind about how storm spirit is broken, i guess ta is broken as well, sf too? ive played like what, 35 different heroes over around 50 games and had 90%+ win

its like somebody is stopping you from picking good heroes. no, the experiment is invalid in your head if i refuse to gimp myself by playing a jungle ogre magi? well let me explain - there are heroes with big game impact and then there are heroes with shit game impact, all in their respective roles. you can go and play your carry medusa game after game after game but dont come here slobbering all over the thread about how its unfair when i pick something like luna and actually carry the damn game

its your choice if you want to play impactful heroes or random some trash every game then not have enough skill to carry with it. but dont come here crying about how your rating isnt going up when you dont want to actually contribute, lol

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i dont give a damn about ur clinkz game without a link, i can make up fancy stories as well

ure confusing micro and macro and sc2 macro =/= dota 2 macro

im using macro as a term that refers to strategical choices, vision awareness, resource advantage, decision-making in order to win etc

how come? for my standards ure playing the game wrong until a point where 1 player cant solo ur entire team in 90% of the games. and im going to find out where that point lies for me, and its not under 4k for now ill tell u that

pro team play comparing to ur pub team play is like... comparing champions league to a football competition in ur village and trying to imitate what theyre doing

none of the heroes that arent in cm are particularly broken right now, earth spirit was fixed and all of them are counterable

im telling u that u arent a master of anything, let alone of an array of heroes on that rating. i can play most of the heroes myself but for ranked pubs narrowing down is essential because some heroes arent as impactful as others, idk how to get through that thick skull of yours. i can be skilled at playing sniper and PA, but im better off taking naix in most cases because its simply a better hero with more game impact thats more likely to carry the game and help my team

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Selfishness is the best. If you are truly better than your teammates and deserve to gain mmr, it makes perfect sense to try to remove them from the equation as much as possible.

Seriously, I have played all the way from 3.8k to 4.5k, and let me tell you, the biggest difference is the fundamental misconception that helping your team and killing the enemy is conducive to winning.

Fighting is shitty. Kind of a waste of time, to be honest. Every creep wave you kill is nearly worth an entire hero kill in gold, and towers are worth even more. By farming optimally, you get way more gold than you will running around the map killing people.

Sure, your shitty teamates are going to feed their lanes, and they will cry for ganks. But why would you bother ganking when you cannot be sure to get anything out of this, aside from making some space for teamates too terrible to avoid repeatedly dying? Farm. Farm everything. Play heroes who can farm well and benefit from farm.

One of my favorite heroes is TA. She is an absolute boss in most mid lane matchups, able to both farm incredibly well and deny incredibly well. Killing the enemy mid is not NEARLY as crippling as denying 30-40 creeps in the first 10 minutes. Chances are, the enemy mid will just abandon the lane, try to gank, but be poor and underleveled and fail. On top of her awesome cs potential, she can use good trap placement as free wards to prevent ganks, solo roshan with nothing more than a desolator and treads, and scales well all throughout the game.

Many people seem to be under the impression that TA is a ''ganker'', whatever that means. Most of these people are probably peruvian, but the fact of the matter is TA is a hero which does everything via auto attacks. She needs items to function, and that means farming.

Another good example is puck. Puck is a mid who is quite good at early skirmishing, but to truly play the hero to his full potential, he requires a 2150 gold item (blink dagger). Getting that from kills is kind of unlikely, unless the enemy team is so terrible that you could have done anything with anyone and still crushed them. This item and bottle + boots are easily farmable before 10 minutes, and yet many puck players are compelled to leave the lane before finishing this item and attack the enemy. Then, when the ganks fail and the puck is even more behind, they blame teamates, when in fact if they had a blink dagger winning those fights would have trivial even with minimal teamates participation.

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This is kind of rambly, but the point is that farming is your friend, and the sooner you learn to farm instead of fight, the sooner you will be on the road to mmr gains.

i rly cant keep up with all the walls of text and maths on the previous pages but ive read this one and its spot on

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if i failed to win over half of my pubs i would probably consider myself the treebark and rock and current of water and try to see why im dragging my team down more often than helping them win

how silly isnt it

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Quote (Originally Posted by soslick):

It is amazing to me the power of our own delusions, how it allows a human beings to ignore such glaring realities.

This "elo hell" delusion is something I have experienced in another game with a win/loss, skill based ranking system(Halo 3). In Halo 3 there is a 1-50 skill based ranking system based off the same principles as the math behind ELO/MMR. Basically a level 1 would be 0-1000 MMR in Dota and a level 50 would be 5K+ MMR in Dota. The main difference is that a new account does rank up much faster than an account with experience, which from reading this thread that is not the case in Dota. So it is even harder to take a level 30 with a ton of games played and rank it up to level 50.

However, any good level 50 (which would be like a 6K MMR player) can take ANY account with ANY amount of experience and rank it up to level 50, it just takes longer for an account with experience. Still, people believed that they were stuck in elo hell(we called it "rank locked" in the Halo community) because of bad team mates.

I think this delusion stems from 2 realities that those under the delusion ignore. The first being that humans have selective memory. Players will only tend to remember the games where they performed well, but lost, as this angers them and makes them believe the ranking system is unfair and that they "just owned all these level 30(3.5K MMR) players" so they should be higher than level 30. They ignore all the times they got owned by those level 30's(3.5K MMR). The second being the statistical odds that for every game you get team mates that lose it for you, you get a game where the OTHER team has team mates that lose it for them, thus winning it for you. I mean how absurd to think that you never win games because of the bad players that go 0-15 on the OTHER team. With a random match making system the statistical odds of wining because the other team has bad team mates is the same as you losing because you have bad team mates.

What allows people to rank up, despite all these seemingly random variables, is if a player remains consistent throughout every game. If you consistently do the "best" in every game you play, you will still lose games because of team mates, however, you will WIN EVERY game that the OTHER team has bad players, which will raise your overall win percentage until you rank up. Now no player can ever do the best in every game they play, and once you start "not doing the best", that is when you are at your proper skill rating. People just refuse to remember the games where they didn't do the best(back to that selective memory).

The other thing I wanted to touch on was the misunderstanding of what MMR is supposed to do and what it represents. There are a lot of posts in this tread saying that you(Juice) should have played support roles, or played random champions because that is how players stuck in elo hell play, or that elo hell is real for support players because of their inability to carry.

MMR represents one thing, and one thing only. Your ability to WIN GAMES. That is it. For my halo analogy, it would be like trying to rank up, but only using 1 gun because that is the gun you like to use(for those that don't play Halo, there are some weapons that are just not viable to use for 95% if scenarios), and then complaining that the ranking system is broken because it doesn't reward your playstyle. If you want to rank up, you have to do what is most likely to win

you games. If you don't like that reality, then don't blame the ranking system, blame the games mechanics/balance.

This elo hell phenomenon is a fascinating look at human psychology/behavior, I understand why people would blame the system and use it as a scapegoat, but I don't understand how anyone can look at what the OP is doing and not come to the conclusion that "elo hell" is a myth.

Good luck on the rest of your experiment.

Post by Juice later: (Purple text is being quoted by Juice and is not from soslick)

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I think this is impressive and I've kind of been watching this as you go along but not really watching the games so much, which brings me to this question?

What was your plan for these games if you had one at all? How does someone with your ability single handedly carry games like this? Is a lot of it down to the hero picks i.e play a lot of snowball mid/offlane carries? Do you think you'd still do as well playing hard carries or supports nearly every game?

I just take mid if possible, if not I'm likely to take carry, if not I'm likely gonna offlane. No matter what I play in these games it's still a breeze and I'm not focusing on counterpicking and stuff like that at all. Yes I'd do equally well playing hard carries (I'm raising my MMR on main acc by playing carries mostly), but supports probably not.

Also that's an excellent post by soslick

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If Juice, a fucking 5,6k rated player whose primary role IS mid/carry, can't win a game where 2 lanes are lost in a 4k rated game, how can you expect me, a support player who has already admitted not being as good as Juice, to do so in a role I'm not as comfortable with.

Now now, that's 1 game out of 30. The chances of an imbalanced team winning aren't ever 100% (in reality this is 16k mmr on 1 side vs close to 18k mmr on my side in every game), the chances are closer to 90%+ and some games are obviously going to be lost.

The thing is I couldn't salvage that game because I had an unfortunate hero, sven isn't a very good standalone pub carry regardless. If I knew I'd have to solo top I wouldn't take sven but something else like viper or weaver or timbersaw etc and it would be a completely different game, possibly even winnable. Picks do influence the game and if you don't guess lanes correctly and end up playing a solo PA vs a trilane and your other lanes fail, well no matter how good you are if you aren't playing against complete idiots you're gonna lose. And that's completely fine with me, the expected outcome

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Juice, as a mid player, what do you recommend doing to improve at that role the most? Mid is my weakest role (I can still play it, but I won't go something like 15-1 where I'm at now) and I would like some tips. I know there are a million guides out there but they won't have the same insight as you have.

Do you 1v1 people of similar/higher skill sometimes?

If you're in a disadvantageous matchup, what do you do to maximize your ability to farm while still helping the team? (cuz presumably you'll get outcsed in lane, unless you've practiced the lineup a million times like arteezy)

Yes I do, basically chaq's guide (google it) covers most of the theoretical knowledge you need to know about the mid lane, now the next step is putting it to use. Practice your mechanics, don't miss free cs, always try to pull aggro tricks to outcs the other guy, build a farm advantage etc. Most of what I'm writing here is just empty words that you can read anywhere, simply because mid is a complicated role composed of a thousand of things you need to keep track of and it can't be explained enough, you need to play it enough and watch better players and then you'll improve.

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Sorry for offtopic (but it's not the only post with offtop lol)

Juice, why don't you build radiance on terrorblade on your main acc?

I prefer a more early game oriented build. Radiance terrorblade is completely horrible to play against as he can cut waves and stall for so long even if his team is losing he can farm at a pace of close to 10 cs/min while being locked inside his base, it's ridiculous. However I fear the sacred relic farming in pubs, your team can get steamrolled real hard and you got no real power until radiance. Radiance is amazing, but getting it is tricky

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http://dotabuff.com/matches/542387313

Juice, tell me what I could have done differently.

I thought I should outfarm and then outcarry... so I pushed the top towers. But then I saw that my teammates were doing nothing but dying, so I tried moving to help, but it was too late. Can't win early against a fed invoker + NS, and can't win late against a fed PL.

In any case, these last games were a wake up call for me. Regardless whether I suck or not, this is not enjoyable.

gg valve MM.

4 cs/min on terrorblade is terrible no matter how much your team got shut down

you also have 1.4k tower damage which is like what, 1 tower?

from these stats i dont see that you've done anything to help your team this game - didn't farm, didn't split push, hero damage done is naturally low due to tb not being that effective in fights so yeah

i might watch the replay if i have time but stats already tell me plenty

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Juice,

Forgive me if this has been asked already but that's a lot of posts to read! What has been the biggest difference in your opinion from the bottom to your main account? i.e is farming easier or more difficult lower down due to dual lanes being more dominant? Or the lack of well executed ganks, team play, support play etc?

Farming? Way easier. I can outlane most of people here absurdly, I would guarantee farm for myself even in sven vs viper lane so it's never an issue. The difference? People still don't know how to block creeps on mid/safelane here, buy rubbish starting items, don't spend their time efficiently (ending up with 0 farm), slower reactions, unable to realize when they're out of position (which i abuse the most pretty much) etc. It can't be summed into 1 thing, they're just 1500+ units of ''dota skill'' weaker than the players im used to facing.

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quick question for Juice, i've noticed that in your last Storm game you went for overload over vortex, in which cases would you max it first over the "classic" 3 points in vortex?

also nice rampage min 9

Well there's a lot of theorycraft about the build but it's just another viable storm build (and better than 3 vortex here). It has similar kill potential on level 6-7 as the vortex one, however it's much better in laning due to better harassing and farming, it also makes you jungle quicker. It's worse if somebody who needs setup (lesh, lina etc) comes to gank mid since you don't have the disable. I go for this build against heroes like invoker, timbersaw, TA while I go for the 3 vortex against mobile heroes like puck and qop that you won't kill without a disable. 3 vortex is best against squishy heroes that are likely to die in that combo and the overload build is against heroes that should not die to storm in lane at all. (if he doesnt have a dd rune or something)

What I do with this build is use it to harass invoker/timbersaw into kill range and then jump on them, the 3 vortex build has low harass potential and can't kill them 100->0 so it's less likely to work. Even if they're playing smart and you can't kill them you will simply farm better with this build while not having the chance to kill them with the other build either

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Between 5k and 5.4k is the so called ''elo heaven'', i believe. You get in games against 6k players who have a worse team than you while you have a decent team. You are not permanently blue/pink and can relax in some games and try out something you're not that good at. Your allies are at the nearly the same skill level as you, which makes for better game experience. But I wouldn't trade my rating for that, carrying the games single-handedly and messing with the enemy team who is chasing you around the map and then winning in the end is some of the most satisfying experience ive had in pubs.

And that's because I absolutely hate losing games like that, basically to 1 player

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For the terorblade games (both of them) your farm looks solid, you both pushed well from what i see from tower damage, skill builds are on point (only that i take stats after lvl 1 reflection in 90% of the cases). Animus you did your best I guess, the game looks pretty hard and you've had solid impact - can't win them all sadly. krsd3 why the both sny and manta? Get either one or the other. I don't have the time to watch replays but this is what I can draw from the dotabuff page.

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However, I truly believe there are players that are wonderful players at doing their job, but just suck at making up for the slack that others create. Then there are great players who can do both (great at picking up the slack of others) however; these two players are equal in a high skill game where everyone is doing their job.

No, this doesn't exist. You're telling me you can do good in a game where your mid kills the other guy 2 times, your offlane kills their carry and you get freefarm and a tower in safelane? Wow, who can't? What are the players that are ''doing their job''? These wonderful miraculous players that always win the early game simply don't exist and if you can only win when you're ahead then you're going to sit at 50% win.

When I wanna watch replays and learn a hero from good players, I pick the tough games, not the 40-15 team score stomps. Afterall it outlines pretty well what your impact is, and what's the impact of your team. Good players aren't riding on the coat tails of their team every game, they're swaying the game in their favor.

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What's your reasoning going Daedalus over 2nd Butterfly or HoT/Satanic on TB? Lack of damage or is just that you don't need more survivability.

You build according to the game. 2 butterflies against stuff like puck, magnus, lina, balanar, PL and similar heroes means you can send illusions (that hit like trucks) into their base and

hit towers while they're absolutely unable to stop them. Usually only the carry will get a mkb in the other team, and if he's not there defending they can just pull their hair out as illusions plow through their base and they don't have enough spells like say phoenix to wipe them out or slow them down

Lifesteal is worthless in 99% of the cases on TB. http://dotabuff.com/matches/541057667 - I had a choice between satanic and daedalus this game (6th item), and daedalus won me the game. You know what happens? You take 0 dmg until bkb ends and then you die in a 20 second chain stun, forget about lifestealing or hitting anyone. So what's the answer? Kill 3 heroes in bkb duration or lose the game. And that's exactly what happened

Heart is usually better as it gives your illusions absurd bulk. Listen, if TB can hit people in a fight, then he can use sunder too. Outside of sunder, 40 armor and 3000 hp if you can't survive then it means you died in 3 hexes and it's better to have 500 more hp than lifesteal you can't use. Furthermore he can farm indefinitely without any regen so it's not even a farm investment like you need to make on gyro/luna.

http://dotabuff.com/matches/549449866 - heart and 3600 hp ensured that tinker can't simply kill me in 2 hex rearm combos. It was impossible for them to burst me down no matter what, so they simply lost once they ran out of cooldowns. Now the 2 butterflies are a mistake - xin has a mkb and every other hero has tons of spell damage with negligible right click, so when I reviewed the game I realized I'd probably get an EB instead of the 2nd butter or even a second skadi

http://dotabuff.com/matches/551823366 - a game from my smurf today, when your team sucks but you had a good early game nothing will save you like a radiance. Score 31-14 for the other team? Who cares, I'll just cut lanes, get 10 cs/min, make sure they can't push even if they kill 3 people and make them waste time until I'm 6 slotted against a no carry team.

TL;DR everything depends on the game and you need to analyze it correctly

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if ember is underfarmed and meepo has blink hex agha he can slaughter him

however its much more likely that ember gets 2 furies and meepo dies in 1 sleight

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Hi Juice (or anyone who has 5+ mmr).

It was fascinating reading about your mmr adventures.

I hope you will find a min or two to answer several of my questions.

1) How do you understand such terms as "game sense" and "positioning"?

2) Before and during the game do you make an conscious effort to construct and predict game scenarios ( Oversimplified illustration say: hero X will try and gank sidelane in next 30 sec so I can rotate top and gank their carry ). How much of the game do you plan for?

3) Do you estimate the damage your hero can does and can take before the gank/teamfight. Can you do it for other 9 heroes?

4) Do you think it is a good idea to try to memorize all or parts of the game mechanics. For examples the spells, their casting range/damage, duration of disables, attack animation/casting animation etc?

5) How good are you at tracking the movements/actions of your opponents when they are not visible on the minimap?

6) Is there such thing as the most important skill to learn if you want to improve at dota? Some of the people say it is last hitting/denying do you think it is the case?

Thank You.

1) Game sense is a pretty broad term that includes knowing how to move on the map efficiently, realizing when you can take a kill and get out, gauging whether you're stronger in the fight or not, predicting enemy movement and overall awareness.

Positioning is... being able to position yourself correctly not just in fights but generally in the whole game.

2) Planning comes with experience, it's more of an automated process than me thinking actively about that. You can't plan before the game, you can only assume. Until you see that the enemy nyx bought 3 smokes you don't know he's gonna gank mid, for all you know he might be a retard and just pull camps the first 10 min. Before the game starts I mostly predict what I need to build against those heroes, who will I need to shut down the most and the overall gameplan.

3) Well of course but no you don't calculate the damage for other heroes you just have a general clue who is stronger in a fight and how to make it advantageous with your actions.

4) You don't need to know the exact number, but you need to know the approximate values.

5) With slight vision you can predict their movement when they move through it, with no vision at all and no map control (aka losing the game) you can't really know anything and can only farm safe areas, extending over those areas is more of a gamble and making educated assumptions.

However it also depends on the heroes. If I'm playing naix and enemy beastmaster is dead, while the other heroes they got are kotl, linkens qop, shadow demon and luna well then i couldnt care less about where they are since i can farm most of the map regardless of that. If I'm playing ember against orchid storm, riki, skywrath, hex furion and legion commander then I pretty much need to be extremely cautious even if im dominating the game. You need to know how many heroes they need to surely kill you, and that will dictate how much you can move freely on the map

6) Mechanical skill will take you extremely far, however knowing how to always be effective on the map will take you even further (for example ganking all the time with storm and still managing to get 120 cs in 20 min; stacking camps with cm and still managing to get some items up, get levels on time, gank and ward the map; managing good farm on prophet while taking free towers the moment the opportunity shows, and still being there for ganks/scouting with treants and killing roshan etc)

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i got -5 points for the loss against wagamama, it was a heavily skewed game tbh

not easy to play ember against a competent ta who maxes meld plus a rubick roaming, most tas are retarded though and just die around level 3 but wagamama is trully exceptional at the hero

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do you think there is a real mechanical skill difference between 5k to 6k? I think at some point demon was even below 5k and hes pretty fucking amazing mechanics wise. Past 5k i think it just involves how tryhard you get.

oh there definitely is, however id argue that past something like 5600-ish it doesnt actually matter all that much

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I've played pretty lousily today, relaxing from the grind on my main acc

I'm going to be picking wraith king for the next X games and trying out the hailrake aka h-god's build of radiance bmail mjollnir refresher

But who's the H-God? http://dotabuff.com/players/163075690

A 73% win rate solo queuer with 6400 mmr who instapicks skeleton and doesn't give a fuck about nyxes, invokers, lions, anti mages and other heroes the top MMR crowd will hurry to counterpick him with. I've played the build before and I can tell you it's crazy fucking good, fun to play and it tops the hero dmg charts every game as you're basically killing their whole team while being a pain in the ass to get rid of

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pl had nothing to do there it was a won game until the only player worth anything in my team dropped and didnt come back and made it a 4v5 like 30 minutes in

like pl before 3 items cant even think of coming near the teamfight and if you get a bkb he needs heart butter at least

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Summary: 4017 - 4509 within 29 games (24-5, 83% win rate), some minor upsets but nothing drastical. I'm really starting to dislike this rating range because people are defeatist, egotistical, they think they're very good at the game and try to tutor everybody else (why do they all think they're smarter than the other people at their rating, sigh), they whine and cry from beginning, try to force their item choices and opinions onto others (which are wrong most of the time) and generally are their own worst enemy and the reason they sit there. Games are generally unenjoyable, everybody seems to be fed up with dota here and while people can get annoying at higher ratings I can assure you it's nothing close to this. People who random heroes are generally -1 in the team as they won't repick even something that they can't play (earth spirit from my slark game) and then will just proceed to feed and be useless all game long. People also tend to tunnel vision a lot and die before using their spells or in extremely dumb ways, laning and farming ability slowly starts to get decent, however game sense is still low.

I've had a pretty interesting game right now, void and jakiro BOTH went 0-6 on the safelane and I've had some early game misplays with puck. Later on in the game luna after running her mouth in caps lock in chat all game sells her items (after me telling her that she's worthless, remember to behave or you might spark this boys), buys travels blink force, steals my dagon recipe from the courier, steals void's hyperstone and goes around the map blinking into trees and just farming woods endlessly. However we still win as the other team is as awful as them running into 4 man coils and silences and eventually losing the game.

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Indeed, road to 5k, considered to be pro/semi-pro level. Congratulations and good luck. I can see that you start to lose more oftenly, yet rarely, and, judging by your words, it gets harder and harder to win. So there really is a gap between 3k player and 4k player, which is another proof that RMM works.

Would be glad to hear more from you about those five lost games, and if there is any difference you can make in short terms between 3-3,5-4-4,5k players. Ty.

The amount of mistakes top level players make is not that small, many decisions can lose a game quickly. The amount of mistakes that happen to 3k players can't be counted since they happen in 10 second intervals literally. The 4.5ks are somewhere inbetween

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Great job, are you going to stop at 5k, or try to to get to 5.5k too? Would love to see that.

I might (don't hold me on this one) go to 5.4k because that is the lowest mmr that I've had on my main before going to 6k. I've counted my ranked games recently and had a record of 50-27 going to 6k (~65% win) and what's interesting is that i had 35-14 score up to 5950 (71%) at which point i got hit by a 5 loss streak and needed almost 30 more games to grind 50 rating

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I said a long time ago that I think it is after 4.5K that you will slow down. Prove me wrong!

Well that's true, as I approach my true rating I should be winning less and less games

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I'd like to show you this game, http://dotabuff.com/matches/571496785

Now yes I made some mistakes but I can't make up for the fact that our team fed Phoenix to 4-0 before 10 minutes and I believe he was 8-0 at one point while 30 minutes into the game our potm was 0-5 and constantly doing stupid shit. Or through out the entirety of the game I'm telling my team hey I'm pushing this tower put pressure somewhere so they can't commit 4-5 people to defending it or they will lose something else, but that never happened. And we did flub it at the end after we took 3/6 racks and lost 4 of our own. I can try to tell my team, "hey this is what we should be doing." But that doesn't mean they will do it and you're forced to play through that

Oh but you can, and you did, didn't you? Afterall it's a 60 minute game with close to even score and you took half their base out! Not like you got stomped in 20 minutes there. The game looks winnable, now go back and think about it. Could've you farmed more in that time frame as tb and had another item? Yeah, and it probably would matter. 8 deaths, was there any time you got picked off stupidly in the lategame and it made you buyback/cost you a rax? If yes, that's another factor that could've been avoided. And so on.

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http://dotabuff.com/matches/570727825

Take this match for example. I was anti-mage. I got my bfury around 14-15 min mark. From then on, my cs should be going up exponentially right? But it didn't. Ignore my dagon and stuff, it was only bought during the end game. My main point is that I feel like my cs is pretty crappy especially on AM. Looking at my end score. I only had 166 lh in a 30 min game. Should it be a lot more? How do I force myself to cs more?

Yes, you should've had way more. On most carries it's worth farming more instead of searching for fights because it gives way more gold and doesn't have the threat of you dying. On AM who farms at 2x the speed of most heroes and is 2x less useful in fights before he has like 3 items? Farming is EXTREMELY better. Now you won this game because it didn't matter as your team was stomping, but in the other games it will. This doesn't mean you sit in woods and farm for 40 minutes, that makes you lose, you need to ''make space'' for your team with every carry as well.

But how do you make space if you're not joining fights?

1) Farm the enemy jungle and pushed out lanes to deny them resources if it's safe enough - then your team can farm lanes close to your base and your jungle

2) Push a tower whenever you see an opportunity to do it, this is one of the biggest things

3) TP in for free kills on tower dives or close fights that you know you can change

4) Solo roshan by yourself if you can/force your team to take it

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I would like to ask two things to juice.

As a carry, how do you deal with a hard lane ( i mean against a dual lane with stuns ) ?

Another thing, what should i do when our team is losing and i cant really farm because of how easily i can get killed, should i try to farm or i should just play safe ?

Was my cs low this game ? http://dotabuff.com/matches/568378425

Its 6.5 cs per minute what its probably really low for terrorblade, any tips about how to improve at farming with illusions heroes ?

nothing, try to not die and farm what you can, then transfer to jungle

the not dying is the most important thing, as long as you get exp and minimal farm you'll be able to come back midgame

as for tb farm jungle with your hero and the lane with illusions

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I do want to ask though: what is the usual item progression with the H-god build?

Also, I hate to make one of those [posts shit gameand ask for advice in a vain attempt to harp at the MM] post, but I'd like to know what H-god would've done differently in this game (aside from the dumb death in lane). And would he have made other items? Could H-god actually have won this?

http://dotabuff.com/matches/572612365

I'd like to know so I can get a better picture of the build. Since this was a (nigh) impossibe game, I think much can be learned from it regarding that build.

Idk about that one but if you want to watch an impossible game - http://dotabuff.com/matches/566120220

From what I recall he had like 20 cs at 12 min while mort and clinkz had freefarm, his team fed and so on. It also includes farming gold with an illusion rune for buyback that he otherwise didn't have, a pretty interesting game

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http://dotabuff.com/matches/579862677

now id like to touch on this game and why id like more to play in a 5 carry team than a 2 supports team (and im pretty sure ive won more games in 5 carry teams)

when you're playing against 1 support while being 2 supports and:

1) their tb is allowed to rush a naked radiance

2) their mid doesn't get ganked/gets ganked incompetently and doesnt die

3) their offlaner has the exp of a solo lane

4) their lycan has complete freefarm for the first 10 min

5) chicken isn't upgraded at 3 min

then what's the point of it? i understand all of you little puppets who love calling yourself a support in pubs, but i can count the number of good supports ive met on the fingers of my 2 hands. usually theyre incapable of doing anything around the map, end up underfarmed underleveld and just overall complete food due to not being efficient

now compare that to a lycan who watched a 10 min long youtube video on how to pve his way to vlads medal roshan towers

if you're not confident you can make an impact on your support hero then don't even pick it and go with some greedy doom jungle, you'll win more games because people aren't efficient at moving around the map in groups that aren't 1 or 5

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I hate to sound like the bandwagon cuz im such a damn rebel. I think blink, phase, drums, deadlus, surivival item is pretty legit. I like blink + X + wave/boat initiations xD

if u need blink to initiate with a 950 range spell ure probably initiating on somebody who is sitting in their t3 tower 3000 range from ur team

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ive just lost a pretty interesting game

http://dotabuff.com/players/166774799

i was forced to jungle and all 3 lanes lost which is pretty much a guaranteed loss, but there's more - potm lost her lane to a pudge + lycan lane and later solo lycan killed her like twice and had insane amounts of farm

now you'd flame that potm and blame valve mm for putting her with you in the team, right? who can possibly lose a lane like that?

however if you take a look at that lycan, see he has ALTAODA in his friends on dotabuff, check his first couple of games and the calibration he's done with ember (these ember games are against first page people) and you can easily conclude it was one of those 6700+ rating accounts that valve reset and made them recalibrate

those accounts are leveled/played by 5.5k+ players and his rating was TBD which confirms my assumption that that's a 5.5k+ player recalibrating his account (valve made them play like 30 games in calibration this time) and he's around the bracket im in, obviously making imbalanced games as much as i am

so on one side you've got a 6k guy jungling a doom, on the other side you've got a 6k guy freefarming the best solo queue hero there is in a solo lane - but you don't know that, and just like i didn't know, it's entirely possible people like this are between 4-5k right now doing work again

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What do you think about Huskar, Juice? Do you find him legit to pick often (including to "climb MMR") or is he too situational?

I barely played the hero at all but found him quite fun after using him in a recent match, also had the impression that the skill cap is pretty high with regards to being optimal in understanding how much you can take and what you can kill, managing your HP often on "edge" while avoiding dying and such.

dont think he's very good right now, he's obviously broken if they have limited physical damage and he's a great phoenix counterpick

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So, Juice, judging by your Sven matches on your main, you are not a big fan of Sven. Is the hero simply outdone by the likes of Lifestealer and Lycan these recent versions? He's one of my fan favourites but he's never suggested as a hero to master for pub play.

Do you think it's better to wait for Ice to buff him some more?

Well, besides that, your match history with him shows that you don't believe in armlet on him? Your build seems to be Threads, Drums, Daedelus and Mom. Is this still the build you would advocate?

i am a fan of sven but hero is just garbage right now and subpar compared to the top tier/popular pub heroes

armlet is optional but i skipped it since sven has enough dmg already

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[WHEN ASKED WHY SVEN IS “GARBAGE RIGHT NOW”]

not that good in lane

easy to counter/disable/play around

requires farm but not that good lategame either

mana issues

slow pusher without blowing ult

he's mediocre in the sense that even if he gets farmed he's not guaranteed to be impactful in a fight unless you have a specific team built around him, he's only got 2 seconds of stun on long cd to help him hit anybody and he's one dimensional regarding builds

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Juice just a few quick ones -

When picking at the start are you actually thinking about what works well against that lineup or is it more 'I feel like playing this hero this game'? Also considering the kind of heroes you like to play I thought you'd pick up QoP but you don't pick her much, not a fan of this hero?

ive got a pool of around 10 strong heroes that i use for climbing rmm and i pretty much play what i feel like playing from game to game

qop is pretty terrible currently, storm invoker puck ta ember morph naga alch dp sf tinker zeus are all better mids to have at the moment

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I see, thanks for replying. What do you think about Ursa then? They seem rather similar regarding the "easy to counter/disable/play around" part. I also don't know how good Ursa's late game is compared to other carries, but am inclined to think it's not exceptional.

ursa is way way way better and one of the better safelane carries

1) can solo wreck most melee heroes

2) free roshan (this is huge)

3) counters phoenix ember

4) useful at all stages of the game

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UPDATE 5 - THE 5K

Summary: I've had a rough day today and lost some games here and there, still got to 5k relatively quickly. 36 games, 28-8, 78% win. I can't say that people after 4500 are bad. They can lane decently, farm well, I can't pinpoint any huge mistakes yet I'm still winning a lot and being able to get out of control in most games. I guess it's when small things start mattering. I'd say people still have issues with overlapping disables/running around the fight like headless chicken/throwing the lead. Picks matter, people who random are a burden in most games I've played and I can tell how hard the game will be from picks alone. There also seem to be some people playing like complete utter garbage in either team, maybe it's the account selling but when your maiden is level 5 in 16 minutes and autoattacks the creep wave with 2 enemy heroes 400 range from her in daytime... sigh.

The end point will be around 5.4k, which is the lowest point I've reached on my main account.

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I have a q for Juice :

In most of the games I lose I usually dominate my lane and in like min 7-8 every enemy hero throws their shit at me while my team is jungling or missing creep kills and not pushing. What must I do in that scenario ?

i find this hard to believe but just go farm an empty lane or jungle or ask ur team to 5 man? lol

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you'd figure people would stop arguing how there's elo hell at 3k rating after i won 30 games in a row there

all i get is some guy linking me his games where he buys point booster on windrunner, skills focus fire on level 6 and has the least hero damage and close to no tower damage in the furion games where he thought he did well

at 3k people are pretty clueless about dota and not even close to decent so their performance is completely random and that includes you as well

going 10-5 on visage while your team did badly doesn't mean you deserve a higher rating at all

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Oh there is a plausible way to improve and most people who want to improve do so regularly, either by watching streams/their own replays/practicing a certain hero/testing out new builds etc.

[EDITED OUT] You want every single 3k baddie to be thrown into games with 5500 people so he ''might improve over time''? I don't want you feeding excessively in my games. Valve certainly doesn't want you either and the purpose of the MM system is providing balanced

games, not good players coaching bads every game.

The resources given to you in dota 2 are vastly superior to those in dota 1

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ive got a total of 16 losses so far in this experiment

2900-4000 was 3 losses

4000-5000 was 13 losses

everybody with a shred of intelligence can conclude what would happen in the 2k bracket, not to mention that even 3k bracket felt sadistic with 40+ kills on storm and what not

as xp nicely said:

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It's clear that any sort of basic logic isn't your strong suit.

Which game is easier to win:

5k+2k+2k+2k+2k vs 2k+2k+2k+2k+2k

or

5k+3k+3k+3k+3k vs 3k+3k+3k+3k+3k

i really hope im getting april fooled here or it's gonna be depressing

the problem ive noticed that 2k-3k players have is that they think they play ''decent''... they're gonna go on and have 20-0 pudge games and 700 gpm on some hero once in a while and shit since they're playing vs people of their own skill... but there's this delusion of ''unwinnable'' games they have, since they've never seen what playing good actually looks like

they go and watch people on page 1 on dota tv, but most can't draw the line between those games and their games, they think they're similar, and that not even dendi would win the games where ''their team fed so bad''... where dendi would have a 30-0 score regardless of what his team is doing around the map

it's like people who never saw a weight lifter claiming that 100kg is impossible to lift for a single man

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I don't really need them I just want to compare the amount of 5k+ players on EU west and how often would you get matched with them.

Also I'm interested in your take on those games.

I see you already won 3 and lost 3, it may just be a coincidence or it is already really hard to carry your team at this point.

its not hard ive just had complete garbage teams in all of my storm games today and they managed to lose the early game all 4 times

i also start playing like shit and get aggravated when for the 3rd or 4th game in the row people in my team are arguing from min 0, doing nothing and just generally playing terribly

you have a 2-5-2 balanar blaming me for not ganking (at which point i was in like 9-10 kills compared to his 4) and his argument is that balanar loses lane to lich and that's my fault because i didn't win the lane for him from mid (?)

then shadowblade dooms having 0 impact as usual

then a ember spirit with 0-1-0 at 15 minutes in still trying to farm his battlefury against a 3 core team (who all farm faster than him) and flaming his team for farming the jungle so he cant farm a damn bfury into another 3 bfuries 7 rapiers and 4 crits so he can have a dream game on his 30% win ember once he joins the game 50 minutes in

mostly just getting mechanically skilled people with no intelligence of what they're actually supposed to do and me playing on tilt

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Originally Posted by Animus2280 View Post

quick question juice

i asked a mutual friend of ours what one of my greatest problems was, and he said it was not moving around the map well. he also said you were one of the best players in terms of dodging ward spots

assuming ur supports don't get counterwards, and ur not playing slark, is there some "trick" you use or are u just experienced enough to know.

most people ward the general rune spots, jungle entrances and it's pretty easy to stop trying to gank people while walking through 3 wards, either get a smoke or take another route

it's also easy to conclude where their wards are off of their reaction if you can see them on the map

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ive got flaws in my play every match, most of the deaths you get are player error and could be avoided, missed kill opportunities don't even appear in stats and can't be measured

i do forget about it, but im allowed to vent like everyone else, im not some divine being and i do get frustrated with dota often

im never going to blame it on mm system handicapping me or how im playing with people ''undeserving of rating near mine'' (nonsense) or any other dumb factor though

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How often do you execute a really good move, but your team fails to follow up because they don't think conceptually on the same level, and then you all end up dying? If so, a few replays/examples would be nice, if u remember any. It seems not being able to adapt and making "non-independent" errors could affect players' MMR.

mhm, you can only do so much by yourself which is also why it's safer to just farm in pubs when you can't depend on people to dive towers with you and know how much their hero can do

the most recent example is this game http://dotabuff.com/matches/592067297 around 22 min when i chase veno and doom and skywrath don't follow for whatever reason - 2 heroes are dead, ive got reincarnation, veno would've died and DS would've either died as well or wasted his tp and cancelled it, bane tp wouldn't even happen at that point because he had no ult and nobody else was there. What happens is veno escapes on 5% hp, ds runs away from me on 200 hp and i die due to getting slept in their tower for 7 seconds. This wasn't a bad play from me, this was a 100% safe play which ended up being a bad play due to my team not following so basically if you're not yelling at them over voice comm or playing in a 5 man stack of people you played a lot with you're just gonna have to give up some opportunities like that.

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Lets flip the coin and see the other side - I see that valve made a system that makes you LOSE 50% of your games, some times the ppl you play with make that 50% lose chance a lot higher by playing badly and if the enemy team put 100% effort in the game they have a bit higher then 50% chance of winning and there is nothing a single person can do to change this.

Valve fair mm system put 3 russian speaking feeders in my team all of them were like 0 5 0 7 2 8 and 1 normal person + me having +5-6 kd ratio against a full 5 man party , guess what I lost that game and I lost -35 mmr fair ?

i might lose a couple of games like this, the number of the ones i win still greatly exceeds the number of the ones i lose

pretty sure you've won games due to people on the other team going 0-15 as well so it evens out

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My experience is almost always: Team is useful = win. Team sucks = lose. And the very RARE occasions where your team was good, but you lost because the other team played better; and the counterpart: when your team is complete shit as a whole, but you win because the enemies are far worse.

its like that because it gets harder and harder to win with a bad team the more you climb, good players will just 5 man or focus you down or hold map control and stop you in your tracks most of the time

my last ember game was a case where i dont think a 5100 player would've won, if i had a couple of deaths more it'd be an easy loss and i had to be pretty careful so id say its a good one to watch http://dotabuff.com/matches/592543894

a very interesting spread of skill: 5500 invoker who i'd call a 4300 player for his laning ability, one of the easiest lanes ive had recently (which i feared as i assumed hes very competent in fights and using his spells overall to compensate for it - and he was)

then a dazzle i felt was overall the best player in my team, dewarded a fuckton, used spells competently, sentried the lanes once invoker got orchid so he cant walk around in ghostwalk and just get free kills, some crucial decision making later on (killing invoker with heal before he got out of stun and popped cheese) - and no wonder, he was a 5800 player

then a tb with 100 games of tb already struggling to keep 50% win in his last couple of games meaning he's probably like 600+ points above his ''real'' rating (and he was like 5k) and just climbed due to playing tb which obviously shown in his overall movement and farm efficiency, he just couldnt keep up with the game

then lone druid who instapicked the hero and went midas, pretty low impact. he depends on his team to hold the game 4v5 for the first 20 minutes (which is hard when you already have a not so competent tb) and that translates to winning around 50% of the games where that happens, id say he's sitting around this rating for a while now

no special comments about anyone else

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if you're scraping 50% win with lycan and tb, there's a fuckton of stuff you're doing wrong, you might not notice it but there is

the sf complaint is meh, ive died to a viper as TA on level 2 recently which also should never happen, had a ton of blunders like that, hell in the most recent ember game i saw axe pick haste

up and still gave fb because i thought im too good and that i'll dodge his call with SoF and then kill invoker when they commit - guess what, didn't happen (and my dazzle even pinged the axe, boy did he think that i was a retard when i died, but of course id think the same too)

people fuck up horribly at any given rating

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hey juice.

How about the prevalent issue of game dynamics that is evident on all public game, but more so on those <5k mmr?

Going into the game, you have a mindset of builds, who you can pick off, understand mechanics. But what about the key based objective of games to destroy the throne?

Currently at 4.5k but even with 1.5k games, I am having issues with the dynamics of the game. And in an non coordinated pub game, everyone just plays their game without truly understanding when to push, to keep the pressure, to gank, and to wait it out.

When you were at that 4k-5k range, did you ever had a looming feeling that after tier 1's were down on the opponent that you felt the urgency to keep pushing or keep the pressure up to prevent said opponents carry (AM/TB/Spectre) to ever come online? Often not, they take down tier 1's and 2's really quickly, but then saunters off to farm without exerting the pressure allowing games to turn around.

I suppose it's easier when you play heroes that dictates the game and you can solo gank if need be, but what about the games as a pure carry on that range?

pretty easy to keep up the pressure when you can pick people off then ping your team to take towers or roshan, furthermore playing building destroyers yourself is kind of a insurance as well (as opposed to playing zeus and timbersaw who can still win games but need some1 else to break the highground)

if im the carry then the pressure is on the other team

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Quote:

You mentioned how picks become very important and can decide the game at upper 4k rating, also how you don't just pick whatever you feel like (iirc). How do you decide your pick and what do you base it on? Do you decide beforehand if you go mid or safelane and then make a calculated pick or do you calculate your lane choice too? And why do/don't you pick the heroes you did/didn't? Like, why did you pick TA in the games you did and not storm (and vice versa) for example?

i do pick whatever i feel like from game to game, usually i instapick heroes, sometimes i wait for a bit and pick but getting countered forces you to play better so im not too flustered if that happens

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its interesting how i made an ultra kill with ember something like 15 minutes into the game on 150 hp and immediately thought of that thread ''lol who needs drum mana and hp and dmg worthless stats''

tb game pretty much every death was me making dumb overextensions, if i played better i couldve finished that game with a x-0 or x-1 score

yes the blink was for sniper but i abused it more for farming than that since sniper was dumb anyway

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Quote:

Hi Juice,

What do you think about 3 or more stacks in solo queue?

What I feel is either the stack is uncoordinated and bad(random picks, random lanes, yolo mode) or much more organized than other solo queuers and stomp with multi stun/3 lane etc.. picks(give a point-shoot stun to the lowest MMR guy and pick a sick snowballer for the highest MMR guy etc..).

What is you experience on stacks in each MMR cluster?

meeting stacks is extremely rare, even the 2 stack + 3 solo is pretty rare, ive had 3 stacks and above in maybe 5% of my games

Quote:

Is there a big diference between 4,1k mmr players and 5k mmr?

mhm

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i think jungling tb is bad and laning him is better

of course tb is tb and a good player will win a fuckton of games with him no matter what he does

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who cares about their pings

suiciding into the 5 man train with them would probably make them happier but would also 100% lose you the game

orchid storm has decent right click for split pushing, as long as they're not retarded to get wiped 4v5 you'll be fine

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UPDATE 6 - 5400

Final summary: 22-6, 79% win. This is the lowest rating I've had on my main before I climbed to 6k and that concludes the experiment after something like 3 months. A total of 2500 rating, 122-22 overall score (85% solo queue win rate wow forced 50%!) and moving the account from 47% win to 60% win. 16 out of 22 losses were in 4500-5400 range. Playing from 5000-5400 for me meant meeting the same players that i meet on my main, except i got teamed with 6k players instead of playing against them. The skill difference is noticeable only in 1v1 lanes, otherwise I'd say consistency and decision making are the real deal that separates these players from the leaderboard's top dogs. I hope you people enjoyed following this experiment and learned something from it, the MM system seems to be more precise than what most think and it's proven that it certainly puts people where they belong.

I've been muted for the past 20 or so games and had only 3 pings to communicate due to not binding chat wheel, however i felt it was enough, it just made games less enjoyable.

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like how does somebody say ''just play mid and ez'', do you realize there's been another mid against me in every single game? and that he won only 15% of his games somehow despite being an invoker or ember or storm or whatever you deem ''ez rating''? or do you think both mid players get +25 after every game just because they're playing mid or something

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how do people have such huge issues coping with their rating? do you think support players are nonexistant at 5k? do you think it's all carry games there? or 3k players on support and 6k players on carries?

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your argument is that it's not valid because im 6k. my argument is that it's valid because that way i can go through all the brackets and i ended up at my original mmr anyway. i didnt stop at 4k, i stopped at 5400 therefore your argument ''ez for 6k'' doesnt make any sense, along with most things youve written. if i was a 4k player you'd argue there's elo hell at 4.5k but this way you can't do that so your brain spurts some other nonsense as a defense mechanism

your argument is that i didnt play even half the hero pool. my argument is that 99% of players can play ~20 heroes they played often at the top of their ability and they should use them if they want higher mmr. if you come back claiming that you or people who random can play

everything, ill tell you that you can't actually play a single hero well by my standards since you're below 5k. if i played heroes that im not good at i wouldnt be at this rating, and if admiral bulldog didn't play what he's good at he wouldn't be in alliance. loda and xboct can't play supports as well as they play carries and egm and akke can't play mid like they play support, and they won't ever need to. if you went and took a mid that isn't braindead like zeus and had to actually use player mechanics instead of killing creeps with 10 clarities and arc you'd drop rating (because all you play is heroes that don't have to last hit ever), the same as if you didn't play one of the supports out of your most played or played a carry, idk how is this concept foreign to anyone

believe whatever you want, influences me in no way in the end, just how i shouldnt be upset over people believing in ghosts and black magic

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bhshawon, the original acct owner will keep playing on the account so you will be able to see the ''reverse experiment''. Brace yourselves, high rated SEA players!

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there's no need for nonick to grind anything he's already got similar rating on his smurf to his main and i've already provided the experiment for everybody non-delusional

i would be the first to tell him to not grind 100 games just to get the same dumbass response ''but y u no babysit carry for 15 min like me???'' and similar

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me going from 5.6k to 6k had to do only with picking my best heroes instead of playing whatever random hero i feel like and trying hard to win, sure i think ive improved a bit when ive noticed that games became pretty hard and that even 1 death only 15 minutes into the game can dictate the whole outcome so i had to push myself to the limit when i was playing those games

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pls dont give me links to random dotabuff matches where you think you played good dota i couldnt care less [EMPHASIS ADDED]****************************************************************************************************

why would you be dying with tb at all? good laning phase, get the tier 1 towers down asap and hide in your jungle while pushing the lanes out and farming them with illusions

this creates so much map control that it's virtually impossible for the enemy team to kill you unless:

1) your team is feeding so terribly that your towers are down, enemy cores can solo you and you can't even farm your jungle

2) they manage to sneak in a 3 man smoke gank into your woods (unlikely)

3) you're joining dumb fights and dying/overextending in lanes or forest

not to mention killing this retarded hero is a hassle by itself - if his illusion spots you you're wasting time, if you don't have enough disables he will sunder and kill you, you have to go deep into enemy territory since he doesn't even need to be in sight to farm and put pressure therefore the chances that you trade 3 for 1 are pretty big in an even game

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Quote: Originally Posted by Alyosha-

Quote: [Alyosha- is quoting another user and Alyosha-’s response is below the purple text and in pink]

Even if MMR hell didn't exist, this points out that MMR progression is too slow. I don't need 5 months of 21 weekly hours to improve, I am a fast learner but I think common people doesn't need that amount of time to improve. Two months just for 500mmr? 90 hours??? And this in the best of the situations and being optimistic. I think it probably would need even more time.

I think you (and other people in this thread) have some confusion regarding what the MMR system is supposed to do. MMR is only a measure of the consistency with which you manage to beat increasingly difficult opponents. The basic premise of these kind of systems is that in an ideal situation if you play against a perfect clone of yourself (or in the case of dota, of your team) you have a 50% chance to win. When I say a 50% chance, it is meant in a statistical sense. In statistics for this number to have meaning you need to smooth out the randomness of the particular cases. It's the same when you flip a coin. If you flip it 3 times you might even conclude that tails has a 100% chance to come up. If you flip it 300 times however, or 3000 times, it is far more likely that you have a rate close to 50%. The bigger the sample the less noise comes from the randomness of it.

Now back to dota: Let's imagine for a second that dota is a 1v1 game. Say you have a friend who plays worse than you and are both stranded in a desert island somehow with 2 computers that run the game. You play aginst each other hundreds of games. You will likely win more than you lose. If the system consisted of just you 2 playing, and neither of you improved (imagine you both reached the limits of what your bodies and minds can accomplish), you would gain MMR indefinitely and your friend would lose MMR indefinitely. This is because you will over time always win more than you lose against your friend.

Now let's imagine more people become marooned in this desert island. There are some that play worse than your friend, some about the same, some play the same as you and a few who are amazing and destroy every one else except each other.

Now, in this scenario there would not be much point to you playing against your friend over and over after a bit, since you had established that you are better than him. So you play against the next guy that also beat your friend. Turns out you beat him pretty handily as well. If you played this next guy also for hundreds of games, you will still gain MMR pretty much indefinitely, although you notice that your series against that guy wasn't 500-0 like with your friend but 400-100. You're still miles ahead, but that guy took you down 100 times. Again as there's not much point to continue playing him, you play against the guy that beat that guy, and so on. Every time you notice that it is getting *increasingly difficult* for you to beat your opponents.

At some point you will reach a guy with which you split something very close to 50%. This is a guy that is almost exactly at your skill level. If your split against that person was even enough you might still gain or lose MMR but it will be at a much slower rate. This is normal, you have reached your peak performance. If the system gives you someone harder than this person you will likely lose. Maybe not by much at first, but if the system continues to give you harder opponents eventually you will reach 0% winrate (or very close to it anyway).

How does it know when to stop giving you harder opponents (or conversely when to start giving you *easier* opponents)? It will take your MMR number and give you someone close to that. How close is close? That depends on how has Valve set it up and how many people play the game (there needs to be a pool of players that happen to be online to chose from, etc).

So the ladder is run for 10,000 games and sure enough, your friend and that other dude ended up at the bottom 2, the prodigies ended up in top 2 and the rest of you are about tied in the middle.

When this is projected to 5v5 games, naturally there will be more noise introduced. Sometimes you get good players on your team, sometimes feeders. However, what does one do in statistics when there's noise? increase the sample! If you play thousands of games, in the end it matters not that in such particular game someone was awesome or someone fed. With enough games everyone will reach their exact same spots in the list. If you project this to several hundred thousand people playing every day the noise becomes lower and lower over a series.

One thing people also need to understand about these systems is that these numbers are also approximates. This is an issue for people of course because every single rung on the ladder we had to toil for and it has cost us blood, BLOOD I TELL YOU, but the thing to keep in mind is that what's important is the *ballpark* of your rating, not the exact figure. This is because of the noise mentioned before. Streaks happen, etc.

Notice one thing. The only condition that will make you gain or lose MMR is winning or losing the game. Let me emphasize: ULTIMATELY THE ONLY FACTOR IS WHETHER OR NOT YOU WIN. All other scenarios are subordinate to this one condition. Did you farm 500 creeps? cool, did you win the game? Did you win your lane? cool, did you win the game? Did you ward and did all the supporty things? cool, did you win the game? Let me reiterate because this point is what people seem to have trouble with when it comes to roles: THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES YOU GAIN OR LOSE MMR IS WHETHER OR NOT YOU KILL THAT FINAL BUILDING.

Now some people will say this is an outrageous broken notion. Win/Loss is so black and white. how will the system know about all the subtle ways I helped? The system CAN NOT. And it's a good thing because the system also SHOULD NOT care about those things.

Let me elaborate: The winning condition of the game is to destroy the other team's final building. EVERYTHING ELSE in the game is subordinate to that. Creeps are resources for that end, lane creeps or the jungle or roshan. Same with towers. Same with rax. Same with heroes. Your hero is a resource with the ultimate goal of punching down that building. Your build, your items, everything serves that purpose. All these resources can be used to execute a strategy that hopefully will destroy that building before yours goes down. Naturally as with many a game, multiple strategies can be viable but let's not lose sight of what is the purpose of the strategies: TO WIN.

Now let's examine ranked solo queue in this context: In ranked solo queue your MMR will be a measure of the consistency with which you manage to cooperate with 4 other strangers to beat *increasingly difficult* groups of 5 other strangers who are trying to do the same. Many strategies can be executed to win the game, some are more easily implemented by groups of strangers than others. Ultimately the successful ones are those that make you win more than you lose, CONSISTENTLY over a (long) series of games. As one advances, the opponents become more difficult and so do the strats, be it because they are more complex or because they require some mechanical prerequisite in order to perform.

Here comes one thing about the desert island scenario that is importat to note: For simplicity's sake I left out something. The capability of a person to learn from past mistakes and improve. This is where the real MMR 'climbing' happens. This is the number differential that actually matters. Laddering until one reaches that stable rating that is close to a 50% winrate is actually a boring prerequisite. It's just one grinding games to reach the real STARTING POINT. At this point one has been CALIBRATED. 10 games is not enough to truly calibrate someone, it's actually probably hundreds of games, but obviously it would be unacceptable to grind 300 games just to see a MMR number, people are more impatient than that.

So think about this: You have reached the point where your rating is stable? Congratulations! you are now TRULY calibrated. From now on, if you climb 100 rating after 2 months of playing many games, then that's your 100 rating! You climbed that by IMPROVING. The system is not slow at all. After all, look how fast Juice got to his true calibration despite starting some 2500 rating below that. If the system seems too slow to you, it means YOU are not improving as fast as you thought you would.

All your points about how your performance is awesome and so on: that's cool, did you win? if the answer is no, then you did not do as awesome as you thought, despite what your score says. But wait, you might say, I wanna play (riki, support role, midlane, the clarinet, the tuba) but when I do I don't win as much! Well, that's because like I mentioned some strategies are more effective than others depending on a few factors. Usually strategies have tradeoffs. You gain an advantage by cutting corners somewhere else. Sometimes you can cut those corners successfully (you play riki and your low pushing power is offset by the fact that the other team is all dead) sometimes the other team exploits those weaknesses to make you pay (ie they buy

detection, they don't all die, and you slowly lose all your buildings because now YOU are the one dead). Think about it, this is what makes a game awesome. To have multiple solutions to the tricky problem of blowing up that last big building.

Bottom line: if you play enough games and are climbing to slowly for your taste, your personal improvement is the only factor either holding you back or propeling you to the sky and beyond.

Read this, it's EXCELLENT. Good stuff

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