DOTA 2: The Game and the Mind

Train your mind before you train yourself
Train your mind before you train yourself

I have written a few guides for the beginners and a few which can help you improve your gameplay. There is even an article dedicated to solo MMR grinding but honestly, even though you read a lot of guides and follow the instructions it's still very hard to keep your calm sometimes and that is the reason I decided to step up and write this guide.

I am going to unravel things that are related to your mind. Mechanical skills are something you can't be taught. You can be told what you need to achieve but that's it, it's your journey. You pour your time and practice, and through practice, you improve your mechanical skills, but other things are as important as your mechanical skills.

Things like decision-making ability, the ability to understand the map, the ability to read your opponent or their movement, are things you don't need to practice to achieve but are as important. All you need is a calm mind and a proper understanding of the game and your mind.

This guide is supposed to make you a rational, positive player who understands the game and work towards winning. There's no easy way out of this one, but it is not something that needs years to achieve, you can work on it from this very day and start changing from your very next game.


TLDR

TLDR for all the wannabe singsings in the PUB
TLDR for all the wannabe
singsings
in the PUB

DOTA2 is a game that depends a lot on your perception or how you see the game. We are going to talk about different perceptions, mindsets, and outcomes. Some situations make you want to throw and start a new game, but those are the exact situations you need to handle to win the game. With a negative mentality, you can throw these games, or with a positive mentality, you can win a few of those.

People talk a lot about luck, but here is a simple example. People complain about being unlucky with teammates so let's say you get idiotic teammates in ten games, you throw the ten games, and now you have ten lost games.

With a positive mentality, you stopped your tilt and did not throw, instead you stayed until the very end and tried hard. What happens mostly is when you are going to lose a game you lose the game, but if you extend these games, do not tilt and think straight, your opponent might tilt and do something stupid, and you might end up winning.

There are a lot of things that can happen, but there's nothing worse than throwing the game, and you already are losing the game, so it either gets better or you deal with something you prepared for. Being positive might not win you thrown games, but it might change one of those thrown games and that way you will have at least one less loss.


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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
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.


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What is Confirmation Bias and how it ruins our game?

To unravel the mysteries you need to know them first
To unravel the mysteries you need to know them first

Confirmation Bias is one of the fruits from the tree of the wrong perception, and you are the one to feed it to yourself. They say people looking for an argument will always find one. Confirmation bias is something similar.

Confirmation bias is blaming a particular reason for your loss and using it to confirm your claim. "The PA was over farmed because our mid lost to it, and that's why we lost the game" - Pointing PA's farm at 15th min mark will confirm this statement as a fact and this is confirmation bias.

If you dive deeper, you will realize that the PA was over farmed, and your midlane was weak. But how do you win a game with a weak mid? How do you stop your enemy mid from getting overfarmed especially if your midlane is unable to stop him?

You realize you could have ganked the PA in the lane. If he comes back to the lane you get the kill on the PA. If he is smart enough to avoid the gank and go to the jungle, you can be smarter and ward the jungle, gank the PA anyway and delay his farm.

Another example, according to confirmation bias, Void is an OP hero with an OP ultimate because he can catch all five of you in a Chrono and that will lead to a team wipe. According to proper perception, you weren't spread enough to avoid the Chrono, you did not have the vision to keep an eye on the Void. With wards and proper positioning, a Void can never catch all five in a Chrono and if all of you don't die in the Chrono it will not seem so OP.


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How the right perception can help you win games

Do not let your enemies shatter your sanity
Do not let your enemies shatter your sanity

This is really a very simple question, but the process is not simple. Perception affects how you act.

Perception leads us to analyze. We analyze a situation before acting upon it. We can either analyze it right and act right or we analyze it wrong and act in a way that does not help the situation.

The chain goes like this:

Perception - Analysis - Awareness - Adoption of strategies - Execution.

You analyze a situation with your perception, that will make you aware of the situation. Right perception gives you the right analysis and awareness (Example: PA is fat. Analysis: she is free farming in mid. Awareness: we need to gank mid and stop her from farming), and wrong analysis gives you the wrong awareness such as "I am aware that my mid is noob and we will lose the game".

This awareness leads you to the stage where you adopt a strategy. In this scenario the right strategy would be ganking the PA and stop her from farming, or if she is already fat, the plan would be playing around her or focusing her while the wrong strategy based on wrong awareness would be "throwing the game" or blaming your mid laner.

In the end, you will execute your strategy be it negative or positive. The only thing that was changed in the entire process was the perception, and it changed the whole outcome. So now you know how your perception affects your game.

One more advice would be to never play on tilt. If you are tilted, take an immediate break. Tilting or being angry or being frustrated clouds your judgment and focus and you end up making the wrong decision and as a result, you lose your games.

Always judge your mental state before playing ranked. Do not play ranked if you are drunk, sleepy, tired or unrelaxed. You need your body to work as much as your mind to judge the situation properly. A bad mental or physical state can cloud your judgment and perception.