i wish i had a girlfriend to play dota 2 with *hugs knees close to stomach and shoots tears through eyeholes on mask*

sobbing aside, i think playing as a very generous support player on your first 100-120 games might have a detrimental effect on your initial MMR. lets face it: kills drag your KDA ratio higher than assists do, and often times when support you have a high death rate as well. i think its just that that happened to my first account. me and my friend also played together and he often plays carry. after TBD he had 3.6k MMR while i only had 2.6k.

lol i have to get my woman a new computer so she doesnt have to play on a craptop laptop

It's been known for so long time that MMR calibrating system is bullshit. When i made a smurf for fun and abandoned most of my games i still calibrated at 4k+, because of high K/D/A and other stuff like this. Total. Bullshit.

what's your girlfriend solo mmr ?? a year ago, i was similar her (i had no experience, i started ranked almost immediatly after getting lvl 13 and i mostly play support) and i got a relatively high party mmr too (2.8k) because i was playing with good players, but i only got 2.2k solo mmr, because actually i was really bad

im actually picking jugger starte with 4,3k 2 days ago now i have 4,8k juggs works pretty well lmao

This is why "Everybody likes to win, but nobody likes to support" is always legit.
who cares if you are Vengeful Spirit with 2/11/34 (swap to save carry) and win rate 90% total games.
In the end Carries get 4k, you get 2k. ROFL!

It's interesting to me. One thing i noticed in my wide friend base for dota 2 (a 32 member skype group :D).
The people that played in stacks of friends when first playing were often a lot more polite and tolerating of losses and bad teammates, while the ones that solo queued had fanatical obsessions with how "bad russians are" and how it's always the russians fault etc etc.

The solo queuers also tended to play a LOT more core roles, primarily very pub favoured ones such as invoker and sniper, while our stack players predominantly run as supports, we have the issue of a 5 support team far more frequently than a 5 carry team.

Just some shower thoughts, nothing conclusive really.

"lets face it: kills drag your KDA ratio higher than assists do, and often times when support you have a high death rate as well."

Well the first part of that is completely false. KDA = (Kills + Assists) / (Deaths + 1). So an assist is worth as much as a kill.
But yeah supports tend to die more because they don't have escape mechanisms/items.

However I think the real reason people who play support have low MMR is because they don't know how to farm efficiently since they don't practice farming. As a 4.1k MMR player, I have recently been showing my 2.7k MMR friend how to farm efficiently with certain heroes and his GPM and XPM have gone up dramatically ever since.

Yeah, whenever I find a build guide - especially for a complex hero like Invoker or Oracle - I worry about its usefulness if it's older than two months. Hopefully, I'm just being paranoid, but this blog post made me think I really do need to be careful.

is this blog like cut in half or it ends with"..a "one-strike" policy on muting teammates as well."?

cus this is weird as fuck

Так win rate учитывается ?

damn i have now over 1.800 games and my mmr is still lowering almost down too under 1000.
i dont get what i do wrong.

Start by asking yourself what you are doing right.

it seems even i farm the entire game i have less items then my support that died 8 times and the game is already lost
when i go jungle i have to go back like 5 time for regen and hit level 6 at around 15min with only boots finished while the enemy team has already 2 towers and 1 big item

@WOOODEN_FENCES_OP

you die a LOT buddy...

try to play more safely, alternate between you safe lane and your jungle, ward it yourself if need it, go to last hit pratice and don't get out until achieve a trophy.

This is greatly increase your overall gpm/xpm

little note about suboptimal ideas related to itembuild
When i was on 4k level, my thoughts were pretty similar to yours related to this topic, but later on as my skill improved I started to think that itembuilds that do not follow meta and seem really weird are quite good most often, as long as the person knows what he (or she: hello to sexism, i started with male pronoun, lol) should do. For example, refresher on heroes like sf or slark can suit extremely good, but yet considered to be bad choice by most players. So is Shadow Blade on wk or slardar, - you won't usually see it in pro scene neither in middle skill bracket pubs, but several experienced players still make such a build, and it works. More often u may see blink on void or phoenix, for example, etc.
The general idea is that its not very good to say that some builds are optimal, but the way you use your build may be optimal or not.
Well, of course I can imagine undoubtfully suboptimal builds like, meh, sange and yange on Timbersaw, but I guess these really bad item choices are rarely seen in games of 2.5k and above.

I dont wanna hear that bs you win as a team you lose as a team bs. Some teammates are just plain bad. For example check out this game (http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/1020286948). I am the AM and it was a pretty lopsided match where I had to 1-5 a whole party because the carries on my team was just plain awful. Granted supports die alot, some are more effective than other but when it get to the point where the whole team you're facing is damn near 6 slotted the other players who have carry heroes need to step it up. When I hear you are this mmr bracket because your not doing something right such bs and makes me want to punch the person in the face. Its not me thats bad, it is you...

HiddenLion
MMR measures just the average level of your skill. It is easy math though. Supposing you are playing a little bit better than others having same rating. Then your team got 4 ppl of level X and you playing as X+Y, versus 5 X., and therefore you will win more than a half of the games you play. On average and in longrun, your mmr gonna rise untill u reach exactly your level, where your winrate gonna be 50%. Its a simple case of Nash equilibria.
Of course, in shortrun you see a lot of deviation, but I think you shouldnt be mad about that. If you are really better, then ur mmr gonna rise soon; or either its just your subjective perception and you should try to be more realistic in evaluating your skill. In both cases, it is not reasonable to say that you are not on higher mmr because of your teammates.

^ He hit it dead on. The bottom line is that there is just a huge luck factor involved in Dota when it comes to solo ques. For instance... are any of my teammates playing a new hero or a hero that they are not that familiar with, do any of my team mates know how to counter pick? Honestly, 80% of my solo ranked games are actually pretty good games, but for whatever RETARDED reason it seems like I always have a person on my team that randoms. When you have 5 people playing heros they are great with vs 4 people wiith heroes they are great with and 1 guy that might be average with his randomed hero, its an instant disadvantage. It always seems its just one guy that lets the team down. I feel safe in saying that I am the best player on my team 90% of the time. I constantly feel like I am let down, and although i do agree with some of the "find out what you yourself can do better to help your team win theory", the bottom line is that if I had a team that just flat out played passive as shit and did not feed, I would dominate the late game almost every time based off of a solid counter pick + good item choices and efficient farming. Dota is simply a team game, and unless you are in a 5 stack, there is no saying how well those random team mates will perform.

My ex used to play Dota and Counter Strike with me, but she hates to lose and she is very competitive, so i was hit around a lot. :)
Of course i was the one convincing her to play.
Nice article. I am playing dota with my friends, family and everybody literally. From low to very high skill. Biggest problem are players who argue so i usually mute them all and play a silent game.
Valve, fix that. Bring bigger punishment for disrespectful players. I really felt like shit few days ago after one teammate in my team. I almost deleted dota...
If you want good, honest and extremely funny player which joking all around i am your man :P
After all to for me and 98% of players this is just a game, something to pass time and relax with friends.

On the sexism issue - I believe it is a huge issue in RU region that you played in. Games I play in EU West no one ever has offended someone a female.

Ниче не понял,май инглиш из вери пур,переведите плз ребята(украинцы тоже люди).

Если вкратце, то калибровка на саппорте дает меньше ммр. И винрейт не учитывается.
Решает КДА, дамаг, ГПМ и ОПМ.

Samplez +1
As I said there are players out there who are just horrible. But when you get a group of decent players, they dont even have to be great but just decent at their roles then you will win none stop. It's these bad players that keep people in low mmr brackets

HiddenLion
Supposing there is a bunch of these bastards. But if so, you should benefit from their existence, cz u have only 4 teammates and 5 enemies, so in 5/9 of cases enemy team will include an idiot, and ull win aproximately 55% of games. If u r sure that u r extremely unlucky andthese idiots play in your team always, remember that more than a half of dota players have strictly same opinion, and thats just mathematically impossible for them all to be right, eh? 99 out of 100 just lie to themselves. Why are u sure u r one of these unlucky 1%?

All this posts about MMR are pointless just because every sane player should have understood this from the very beginning (when MMR first launched). And players who still dispute - you are not gonna convince that kind of people, they will always complain. This reminds me about Darvin's natural selection - there are still people who deny this and claim that God selected every living being. Exactly like all this kids who claim that it is other players who stop them from climbing the ladder, it must be Gaben who selected top MMR list and not the actual skill.

Remember, even in <2k bracket, where MMR has distribution close to random, this still works, because, after all, you have your impact on the game.

I don't know how bad/good are Russians, but I've been playing with Pinoys, which are arguably one of the worst Dota players IMO. What I meant worst might not only be their skills but it's their attitude that pissed me off. I'm from a country in SEA but I've been forced to play with them, since there's no other servers specifically for Pinoys. Yeap, all 10 of my solo / party queues I've to deal with these people (I played all 10 of my party TBD games with 1 or 2 friends only) . As you've guess, it ended up pretty bad. It's either they would flood the chat / mic with their own language or they'll just ignore you in the game. To me, communication plays a big role in this game and if your teammates are not willing to communicate / unable to communicate with you, you're pretty much screwed. If I were to lose a game that all five members of mine collaborated properly, I wouldn't mind losing the game. Adding on to it, the first four picks of them would usually be carries, leaving the last player to forced to play support. If you were to pick a carry, all 5 of us will be carry.

So what are your suggestions guys? Try my luck by training another new account? Or stick with my 3K MMR which I would pretty much disagree with it since I guess I've the amount of skills after playing dota for 6 years or more.

2hrd 4retard
Well, the way you say it is little bit offensive, but i am totally in agree with the idea.

Я не понимаю что это :C

Over1o[A]dByMe
Это пост в блоге!
Ваш К.О.

I did some a bit more pricise experiments with dota matchmaking when MMR came out. There are two different type of rating - ranked and unranked. Both are calculated with different algorithms. There is another factor that affects your unranked rating apart from k/d/a, damage, whatever... It is called "uncertainity". It is ofter reffered to as smurf detection, but it is not supposed to work like this. I do not know the exact formula, but the uncertainity is a multiplier in this formula which means by how much your rating will change after each match. Uncertainity decreases in progression after each match you have played. You have maximum uncertainity in the first game on your account, and it constantly drops until it reaches minimum value (somewhere after 150-200 games). That is why you can gain more than 1000 mmr in your first game on a new accout, because your k/d/a, damage etc. are multiplied by the maximum value of uncertainity. This is also the reason why it is so hard to raise in unranked after a lot of games. And your calibration in ranked mm is based on unranked rating, where last 10 matches are added with a bigger uncertainity.
Above was true a year ago, I don't know whether it's true now.

On the subject of experimentation--I won't lie about it, I calibrated at an abysmal 1200 Solo MMR, playing supports and wondering why the game seemed so very turned in the other teams favor. Through my first 30-40 ranked games, I found that, by playing carry, you can severely increase your chances of a good game by talking and being freindly to your team BEFORE the game even begins. I lost most games (as everybody believed it was everyone else's fault), decreased to 1020 MMR, and gave up on ranked. I then got much better at the game, learning how to farm efficiently (75 LH per 10 min), learning to use TPs and BKBs correctly, etc. I went back to solo queue at 1020, and raised to ~1400 in 25 games. Sometimes, even supporting, I could manage great KDAs, excellent farm, and exceptional rotation, giving my whole team a slight edge. I currently still have a low win rate (as I mostly play Party Ranked, not solo) but my Solo MMR reflects my increase in both attitude AND actual skill.

TL;DR -- You get idiot teammates, it happens. More often than not, if you know what you are doing (And aren't a dick about it) your team will follow you to victory.

wow this makes a lot of sense. so many 3k players want to carry... almost every game a solo support. and it's because the idiots who should be 2k picked carry during calibration

learn mid-role heroes ..you have the best control of the game...gank and snowball..you have bigger chances to win..than picking carry and wait for good support or picking support and wait for good carry

dude i'm not a na'vi fan but:
"MMR means nothing" - Dendi.
And I use this as an excuse for my low MMR :'(

I've learned that MMR is more as a "grind" as in MMO rather than actual calibration, to be honest, after playing quite some game and have been playing Dota for around 9 years

Why I said that it's more as a "grind" is because no matter how you want to play seriously, there are reasons why it's hard to achieve high MMR, either sometimes you matched with people who ruin match intentionally (I had a player asked for mid, didn't get it, then he bought Obs, drop it and destroy it, then went on a feeding spree) or people who didn't want to work together. I admit that I screwed up sometimes, but it's worse when your teammate playing 1v5 against the enemy team and think he is the "pro" amongst the "noob" teammates, don't get me started on how everyone wanted to pick carry because they think it's the most "skillful" compared to other roles, I rarely see people who voluntarily played support

I gave up solo MMR and only play 1-3 games nowadays after I got calibrated few years ago, I'd rather play with my friends on unraked since I barely cared about my MMR, I never liked grinding, not to mention the matchmaking always seemed to force you into around 50% win rate, unless you always get 4 other players that wants to work together, hence, "grind"

I never liked the idea of playing mid every single game with only 1-3 heroes either, like some pubstars that only plays either TA, SF, or Meepo, sure they had 5-7K MMR, but that MMR is also meaningless since when the enemy team playing actually like a team, that 1 player won't be able to win single-handedly, hence why almost no pubstar actually able to work together as a team in competitive match (like Excalibur, w33, etc. )

Seriiously, you are refusing that someting like elo hell exists, but on the other hand you are saying that you just mute the opposing team every game and most likely at least one of your team mates as well on low bracket. I would not deny this, this is why elo hell exists (one of the reasons), Dota is a team game and when you can't communicate because of people forcing you to mute them.

The problem with elo is, that it does only make sense when your personal performace is evaluated, not a team performance that is more or less random at some mmr border. Of course it is hard to accomplish that, but this is why elo is just a bad system for a game like Dota. Compared with CS:GO where you can actually get out of every bracket and even improve your skill, in Dota you would just have to play some retarded pub stomp strategies. There is no way to accomplish things that you might see in pro games at this bracket. So yes, elo hell definitely exists.

but you have to admit that for every player games played in 4k are much more enjoyable then 1k regardless of skill. Games under 3k are just plain deathmatch teamfights were every1 casts everything on anything and the luckiest hero will stand after and push forward.

let me any 13+ account pls anyone add me FB---> https://www.facebook.com/supafeda

PLS ALL I NEED PLAY RANKED DOTA I LOST ACCOUNT I WAS 4.5k player pls all i need any 13+ lvl account help me ty!

Me and my boyfriend had a very similar experience.

He is a dota veteran with 9 years of experience, I walked in with nothing but FPS knowledge. MOBA games were foreign to me as of May 2014. But he's a 4.2k player and has managed (and continues to do so with the help of friends who are all in the 3.5k - 4k range) to make the initial learning curve really easy for me.

What I noticed in myself was that I managed to catch a serious case of Dunning–Kruger's very early into it. I though I was the shit, but did acknowledge some mistakes and tried to self-reflect, although my view was very very skewed. I really liked to support though, so at about the time of The International I decided to get calibrated. Looking back on it now I think I have an idea on why my MMR turned out the way it did.

For once, my hidden MMR must have been very low. I'd say around 1k - 1.5k. I played support 7/10 games in my calibration matches and lost MISERABLY. Partially because my supporting wasn't very good, and partially because (as I've noticed now) playing as a support in such a low bracket is just not an option.

I actually took a break after these lost matches for about two or three months and played extensively with the aforementioned people in the high and very high skill bracket (still do). Slowly but surely I progressed, and the changes were very noticable. At some point during this time I played the 3 remaining calibration matches. In the end, 2/10 games (not the last two though) were very "out of character", quite different from the rest - I played mid and stomped hard. BUT my final MMR was around 1.9k which was disappointing, but definitely a wake-up call. It did put me off playing ranked though (my win rate is piss poor in that department). I continue to play very high and high matches with the same people and don't find myself struggling 70% of the time, be it because I've improved or because my teammates can now make up for my minor fuck ups.

In the end though, I'd say my initial MMR was accurate. I was salty about it being so low, but in truth it's where I belonged. Can't say it wouldn't be interesting to see what the outcome would have been if I played a carry in all of them though.

Solo MM is the only accurate MM.

Sampson
Solo mmr does accurately reflect your average impact on the game, and not your skill. Thats the point where many players get confused: these things are very, very different.
One of easy examples can be comparison of two players, one of which abuses one hero only (most common example in high skill ranked games is earthspirit), and the other guy constantly picks random. The first player's signature hero gonna be stronger than any character played by 2nd, but yet overall player 2 can be better than player 1.
You can see it in the very top of mmr leaderboards, for example (y0nd, etc.).

I wish my girlfriend was playing Dota. Oh wait, my right arm, in fact, is already playing it!

I played 7 of my 10 calibration matches as support (even viper support because no one bought wards or courier!). I got 9 wins and 1 lose and 1.5k mmr.
Some time before, a friend got 4 wins and 6 loses (playing all as matches as carry) and 2.5k mmr.

my waifu will only play FarCry 4 =/ but at least she now acknowledges the PCMasterRace.

i calibrated a smurf on solo 4600 last summer, with only 55% winrate so its not imposible to be gud

TLDR: Game stats affect party MMR drastically during calibration. People in higher ranks (3k, 4k) become more sexist.

girls are objectively bad at video games