DOTA 2: The Game and the Mind

What Happens when you lack proper understanding and how it affects your MMR?

Lack of perception makes you blind and you never a war without seeing what needs to be seen

DOTA is the most complicated MOBA game ever created. It is not easy to learn DOTA. I love this game to bits and pieces, and after having over 10K hours, I will admit that DOTA 2 has a very steep learning curve. Even after you figure out the tidbits, you have to keep exploring. The opportunities are endless, and your progress in this massive multiplayer depends a lot on your perception of the game.

What happens when you lack an understanding of a game? It confuses you and eventually leads you to wrong beliefs which pulls you down even more. You can only find a solution to the problem you know; if there is no problem, there is no solution. This is the part where you need your perception and understanding so you can figure out the root cause and fix it.

If you don't have the right perception, you can't figure out the problem, and if you can't fix your problem, then you are never going to progress, no matter how hard you work. If you are not working in the right area, it's not worth anything. To fix a leaking roof you have to find the crack first. You can plaster your walls as much as you want, but roof will keep leaking.

Here is a small example of how the right perception helps you win games.

There is a mid-lane PA with Battlefury at the 12th minute mark destroying everything:

A Noob's Perspective - This game is done, our mid failed, GG end.

A Pro's perspective - We let the PA free farm, we should have ganked mid earlier in the game.

Here the first person will always lose a game whenever there is an enemy mid that plays better than his own mid laner. However, the second person will now work on his mistake; he will gank the mid laner and not let him farm.

Even if his mid laner is a noob, he will have a backup, and he will eventually win the lane by hook or by crook; thus the 2nd person can win a game even with a noob mid laner, but the first person will lose every time an enemy dominates the mid-lane.

This is not even about being right or wrong. This is about having a proper perspective of the game and what happened. With proper perception you find out your mistakes and stop repeating them. With the wrong perception you stay unaware of what went wrong and repeat the same mistakes; as a result, you lose more games and MMR. This was an example to show you how the perception of a player ruins his game from the inside.

One prominent example of how perception ruins your game from the outside is - tactical feeding. While you are happily killing your opponent position 5 in the bottom-lane, their position 1 is farming freely on top.

The position 5 is barely losing any gold, and you are barely getting any XP after sharing it with your team but the enemy position 1 is free farming at the top, and you will realize that as soon as he joins the ganks after his items are done. And people with the wrong perception will cry out - "He is too fat." He was not, now he is because you let him.

---