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The Goof
Hi guys I'm Goofy! I've always been really competitive and finally found another outlet when I got started with the amateur NA scene just 3 months or so ago and I'm not very good at networking so I'm sure not many of you know me yet. My plan when MMR was released was to quickly reach 5k and then go look for a team. That quest was easy enough with my prior Dota and Hon experience so you could say that my journey actually started on reddit's find a team forum. I happened by chance onto some people who were, by my standards, extremely well connected. A few team iterations and tryouts later I finally found my home with the Infernal Dong Lords and we've since competed in several tournaments including Cevo and of course Secs and Tecs. We were really solid at making semi-final finishes but we'd always get knocked out by the same four or five teams every week. SNA Vas Avi No Earth Spirit etc! That was okay for me, and with each game I felt like I learned a lot and just playing against these guys was a really cool experience for me. Anyway my team has fallen apart and all of that is in the past for now so I'm on to my next adventure!
The Preface
There I was in between tournaments sitting on a 5250 party rated account. Queues with my friends would take 20 minutes off prime time and yield 5 point games or even games where we lost points for winning. I decided smurfing for the benefit of my party was a good idea and that's where this new journey all began. This new "Smurf" account was quickly ruined for its intended purposes and now sits at 4800 party mmr. Far from excellent but now certainly useless in lowering an entire parties average mmr down any significant account. I considered switching back to my main, but then I had this thought. What if I could start my next journey back to competitive with a leader-board run on this new account from the 3600 or so MMR I received the account at. Could I do as well as Juice or whoever? Has my time playing competitive made a shitty pub player? Is there even a difference? Three days ago I decided to answer this question the only way I knew how and I'll be documenting my results here! Hopefully... unless I embarrass myself and go into hiding!
The Beginning
Here we were at 3.8k or so from the odd game or two I'd play solo as sniper to shoot people. I started with a simple strategy to get out of this bracket. Select a pushing mid that can have a high impact and end games quickly, we don't have all day for the 3k bracket after all. My first choice would have been my love Jakiro but we'll have to save him for later for fear that I would get trolled for picking Jakiro mid in this bracket. So... I decided on Death Prophet not the most noble of hero selections, but we're out for efficiency in this bracket and I'm no Arteezy.
So here is my first page, I wish I had the discipline to only play solo DP to make these easier to read, but I'm a moron so you'll have to bear with me!
Okay so this isn't the very beginning, but lets face it I'm fucking disorganized. It started out strong no solo losses yet with a few more solo wins on the page before! I tried to focus on winning my lane. I didn't gank much and my build focused more on me than my teammates. What I mean is that I think I've purchased mek maybe once in my 36 or so games up till this point. I definitely am not a professional and some of these games were extremely hard to carry. Finding the right balance between helping your teammates and using them as bait, or even just resigning yourself to the fact them some of them are going to be useless is difficult.
Here's the most recent up to date dotabuff page:
Now I'm aware this probably wont be very impressive to most of you as I know juice went basically undefeated to 5k. What a freak. All toll I'm something like 30:6 right now. I'm not here to tell you it's easy. I think maybe 50% of my losses were winnable by a superior pub player but I just couldn't spin them to my advantage. 3 of these losses intentional feeders -> abandons and in 2 of them I managed to lose my lane trying to secure a sizable enough lead to balance out the things happening elsewhere on the map. I'm not sure if this is even the right mentality. Perhaps it's just best to wait for the other team to make mistakes and capitalize. In the end I'm still not really sure and I feel like I got through it too quickly to even have any solid insight on the matter. What I do know is at this rating to increase your rating quickly you need to take the game into your own hands and win before your teammates have the chance to throw. That is not to say that this is how improve at Dota, but to quickly remove yourself from the bracket as someone who doesn't belong I think it is entirely necessary to play this way.
This morning I decided to sit here and write this before playing and this where the account currently stands:
The Wrap Up
All in all I think the most discouraging part of this journey so far was getting flamed in the low 4k Bracket. I feel like this is probably the flamiest trolliest bracket I've encoutered so far(4000-4300). I really hope people can learn to get along there but I think the problem is there is a lot of overlap between naturally skilled casual players and super tryhards aspiring toward esports who just aren't where they want to be yet.
Anyway excuse my formatting and writing skills this is my first time blogging on TL and I just recently passed retard English at my university. Just wanted to share with you guys even though writing may not be my forte.
The Plug Not sure I'm allowed to plug my stream, but If you guys have any questions about anything at all ask em here or check me out www.Twitch.tv/Goofy_dota
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opterown
Australia54649 Posts
wow, nicely written and illustrated haha. good luck!
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I admire your persistence, multiple accounts at 5kish. I mean, I'm somewhere around there too with solo rating at least, but when you only get +25 points per game it really gets to me... you need 40 wins NOT including losses to climb 1000 rating. Those 40 wins equal around 40 hours of game time including waiting, and that takes about 2 weeks of grinding. Well, it's not for me lol.
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Yeah man, Its something like 40 wins straight from where I'm at right now to hit leaderboard!
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United Kingdom14103 Posts
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Did you already have a bunch of games played on this account? It seems like 625 wins on a 'smurf' is exceedingly high. I have like just over 1000 on my main and I've been playing since a few months after TI2. Does it take 625 wins to get to 4.3k ish MMR? Or do you have those actual numbers somewhere else?
Nice post.
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On May 27 2014 01:27 fire_brand wrote: Did you already have a bunch of games played on this account? It seems like 625 wins on a 'smurf' is exceedingly high. I have like just over 1000 on my main and I've been playing since a few months after TI2. Does it take 625 wins to get to 4.3k ish MMR? Or do you have those actual numbers somewhere else?
Nice post. I would assume he acquired that account from someone else. Anyways, gl, sir. I somewhat envy you because I'm still trying so hard to reach 5k lol.
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The Account was acquired pre-calibrated with hundreds of games. In addition many of the games I've played on it were Party Q in stacks that averaged over 5k mmr. So those games were difficult in spite of the fact that I was smurfing cause we'd still Q into the same 5 or 6 stacks all the time and games were hard.
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As someone in the 4k-4.3k bracket this gives me some additional motivation to get better and get out of that range. Or maybe get worse?
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United States12181 Posts
Very interesting to hear that the 4000-4300 range is extra trolly/flamey because I've always thought that was the case, but I didn't have anything to compare it to.
Fun blog, thanks for sharing.
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While I can't say anything like that with certainty Excalibur that certainly seemed to be the case for me.
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The flaming persists until at least 4.6K in my experience. The play does get better but oh boy don't you dare make a mistake! Afterwards people realise that 1 mistake doesn't cost you the game and game quality is so much better.
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On May 27 2014 03:04 Laurens wrote: The flaming persists until at least 4.6K in my experience. The play does get better but oh boy don't you dare make a mistake! Afterwards people realise that 1 mistake doesn't cost you the game and game quality is so much better. im around 5k and the flaming usually starts before the creeps spawn. might happen because of the weekend thou
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I'm currently doing the same, but in reverse. Started at about 3K MMR, and I'm slowly working my way downwards. Sat at 2.3K right now.
... help me!
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5188 Posts
I agree that ~4k -> 4.3k has the worst flamers
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I was 5k or something, not rly sure since that was before mmr but I was regularly playing with pros and always top3-4 pages. Then I kinda stopped caring and dropped all the way to 3.7k, lol. Atm 4.4k and I'm finding it hard to do what's right to win because I'm an ass. Like, if we have 4 cores, I'll say "do you lot expect me to support you now?" and pick am or something, xD. Flaming is everywhere tho, rank don't matter imo.
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Today didn't go so well, Only positive two games as I took two losses in six games. Both were extremely difficult, I fear for the road to come :S.
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I'm going to take your advice and play DP! I'll see if i can break into 4k.
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mason is 4.7k MMR because he allegedly goes mid drops all his items and feeds
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That's a lot of DP I hope your butt don't hurt.
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Really interesting blog. So you think going for a pushing mid is the best way to raise your mmr like this. What's your opinion about junglers and split pushers like NP or Lycan instead? I mean you can almost forget you have a team like that, and NP seems especially useful to help your team whatever stupid thing they might be doing god knows where and for what reason :D
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To clarify I think pushing mids are the best for going up QUICKLY. As In I believe the speed of the wins to be a huge benefit, since you're winning anyway if you're smurfing -1500 mmr or whatever.
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after the 4k mark is where you get people who know their heroes and mechanics well but make plenty of really really stupid plays which leads to a lot of flame. As someone who is used to be 600mmr higher for a while until a month ago I can tell you my level of enjoyment has gone down substantially. Thanks for this thread, this will hopefully speed up the rate at which I climb.
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GRAND OLD AMERICA16375 Posts
I wonder if you can do this with grinding SF as well since he can push towers fast and have teamfight potential. The builds are going to be boring if I were to do this (bottle midas treads bkb manta) erry game
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I'm pretty sure you can use any hero as long as you play that hero at a 5k level you will get there.
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You underestimate the amount of people ruining games. I don't believe you can have enough impact with any hero.
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I mean some heroes are entirely situational, but it wouldn't be out of the question of someone playing meepo from 3k all the way to 5k
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agreed about lower 4k bracket, i have no idea why they flame everybody in the game
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On May 27 2014 20:01 bleepbloop wrote: I mean some heroes are entirely situational, but it wouldn't be out of the question of someone playing meepo from 3k all the way to 5k A 5K playing Meepo well would mop the floor with everyone below his skill level alone. Now the same player playing Dazzle would have a lot of trouble getting the same consistency in the results though in the long term, he will get back where he belongs as such is the predicting law of ratings.
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On May 27 2014 12:17 amazingxkcd wrote: I wonder if you can do this with grinding SF as well since he can push towers fast and have teamfight potential. The builds are going to be boring if I were to do this (bottle midas treads bkb manta) erry game
Sf is one of my best heroes and we're even rocking a 84% winrate on him on this account over 40 games. He's just a bit of a sitting duck in some of these no wards no courier games. I'm definitely going to switch into harder carry mids as the rating on this account goes up though. My dream is to be able to pick sniper and jakiro without getting trolled :D.
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On May 28 2014 00:06 GoofyDota wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2014 12:17 amazingxkcd wrote: I wonder if you can do this with grinding SF as well since he can push towers fast and have teamfight potential. The builds are going to be boring if I were to do this (bottle midas treads bkb manta) erry game Sf is one of my best heroes and we're even rocking a 84% winrate on him on this account over 40 games. He's just a bit of a sitting duck in some of these no wards no courier games. I'm definitely going to switch into harder carry mids as the rating on this account goes up though. My dream is to be able to pick sniper and jakiro without getting trolled :D.
I feel you. It feels like its impossible to play Naga in this mmr without getting flamed/trolled even though she's one of my best mid heroes. My winrate with her is an abysmal 34% in solo queue but 75% in captain's mode and tmm. I don't think SF is that bad however. I have 62.75% winrate across 60 games with SF and this includes a LOT of teammates trolling me because I get midas often in games, because SF can make up for this sort of bullshit by stacking camps (even though often teammates steal them) or getting BoTs and split pushing. Just yesterday I had a spectre who insisted on stealing my courier with an empty bottle because his magic stick + wand recipe was the most important thing in the world to him, had to lose mid after zoning out the enemy ember who ended up getting a 14 min battlefury, oh well. Still won though.
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Just stopping in to share an interesting screenshot of my friend and future teammates 5k support climb.
He's sitting at 4960 atm. Nerf ES. Crap hope screenshots are allowed in reply posts. I should really read the rules.
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can you link me to his dotabuff? I'd like to check out a few of those games.
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all the match ids are visible...
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Hey guys, this is the earth spirit guy. Just letting you know I just reached 5k.
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Do you play the ES as a lane support or offlane?
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On May 27 2014 02:45 Excalibur_Z wrote: Very interesting to hear that the 4000-4300 range is extra trolly/flamey because I've always thought that was the case, but I didn't have anything to compare it to.
Fun blog, thanks for sharing.
I've heard multiple people say this who have done similar experiments, although I personally haven't really noticed much of a difference. Only thing that I really noticed I guess is in the 4k - 4.3k there seems to be more actually typed out rage of people screaming at each other where up higher it is just more of the ragey/sarcastic/joking "Well Played" which makes it more tolerable and harder to gauge people's actual attitude.
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what rating are you up to?
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Yeah I'll be making a follow up post soon, I've actually been doing REALLY bad compared to my expectations.
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gogo goofy make the update :D
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Nice blog, man! Being through the lower 4k brackets I think you've very much hit the nail on the head; Casual veterans / casual and skilled players play along frustrated tryhards who want to break into the truly good brackets, and every game is probably a torment for those guys
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