I've been playing DotA for the last 9 years and, don't get me wrong here, I think it's fair to say I only actually really started to properly play DotA 6 years ago, so perhaps it's fair to say that I've only played for the last 6 years. Due to certain circumstances at home, I played Dota 2 on and off since 2012, and, I think that, thanks to the exposure to the competitive scene and various streamers, I improved drastically. However, having started off Dota 2 playing it on and off, a few games every few months, I naturally couldn't fully reflect my skill as I had a very slow and painful transition into Dota 2. Referring to the previous circumstances again, I have, to this day, maintained my ability and skill in playing DotA and, as such, I am one of those players that some may call noob for keeping auto-attack on the 'Always' setting, except for when I play Bristleback. I do not use quickcast neither do I think it severely impacts my gameplay since I have always played without quickcast.
I am currently, at the time of writing, in SEA, and I was originally here, until I moved to the UK last July and played in EU, albeit with less frequency than before. Subsequently, after a full year away, I have returned to my home in SEA for the summer, seeing friends and family. With my parents currently away on a vacation themselves, the circumstances mentioned above became non-existent and recently, my game activity has had a massive spike with me accumulating over 200 hours in the last 3 weeks alone. I recently acquired a new computer which, for the first time since Dota 2 came out, has allowed me to maintain a consistent play of Dota 2, rather than only playing, at best, once a week at an internet cafe. Nevertheless, I am very confident in my abilities as I picked up things from watching the scene, reading guides, discussions with better players, and watching various players' streams really quickly, often allowing me to improve my gameplay a lot at once. However, I've reached a point of stagnation as I don't feel that I can learn anything much more from all these things as it now comes down to experience or, what I would prefer to specify as muscle memory (i.e. when you know just the precise timing for an X+Torrent+Boat combo for Kunkka).
While I've improved a lot over time, I have found myself stuck in the 3k trench for the last 2 1/2 years since RMM was introduce and, naturally, I calibrated in SEA. While I try to avoid demonising the SEA Dota Community and scene, I couldn't help but notice the glaring differences between both SEA and EU when I moved to EU. I came to understand that ultimately, the amount of toxicity that a certain country's players have is relative to the number of players from that country, thus explaining the EU dislike of Russians and the SEA dislike of Filipinos. Back to the differences, arguably the most important and obvious one that stared me in the face as I played out my games in EU, was the fact that EU players communicated. SEA players rarely did. And miraculously, I even had a game where I was stuck with 4 Russians who only spoke once or twice in the team chat, but our execution was all perfect. The chain-stunning was impeccable, usage of skills, farm distribution, warding, everything was impeccable or at least it seemed so, and all without real communication other than pings across the map. In SEA, at least since I've come back for holidays (that's about 140 games), very rarely have I met a team that communicates anything other than "bobo", "putangina", "kontol", "goblok", "cb", "sohai", "anjing", "babi", "noob", "kids", "ez", "fuck you", "no gank", "noob mid", "noob carry", "noob support" etc, you can imagine all sorts of insults that the Dota community comes up with excluding non-SEA terms (i.e. cyka, blyat, idi nahuy), they all come up. There are times where I have muted my entire team and managed to win after playing intensely with slight tilt and a lot of concentration, and there are times where I have worked to communicate and just failed.
I lost the positive mental attitude that I had obtained in EU. I stopped playing ranked as I got sick of the constant Legion Commander jungle picks, the 5 carry strats, the solo support games. I have worked very hard to make myself versatile and capable of playing any of the 5 generic roles in Dota 2 and often, when I don't pay attention while picking and pick quickly, I become the unique position 6 solo support + target for enemy Shadow Blade Slarks. I learned my lesson, I picked quickly, I marked what hero and what lane I wanted to play and don't get me wrong, I was a very willing support player when I first returned to SEA only to find my early-mid game efforts of supporting the team completely wasted as my carries failed to carry my increasingly heavy ass through the late game with badly calculated dives, buybacks, and initiations. Consequently, I am now very adamant against playing support due to lack of faith in the abilities of my teammates.
I am, I suppose, what many would call an arrogant, cocky player. I become obsessed with stats sometimes as I try to prove my point that I am a significantly better player, posting better KDAs, higher GPM and XPM, higher LH/D in majority of games where I play core. I have been told as well as admitted that I am rather farm-obsessed, which, I think, fair to say, works a lot better in the EU scene than in SEA. Having read the various theories about how MMR is calibrated etc, I was delighted at the possibility of recalibration with the new TI6 Battle Pass, hoping that I could finally recalibrate to what I believe reflected my skill level much better, just around 4k-4.5k based on how my friends did vs how I did. Alas, it was then when I was dealt a very huge blow yet again, reminded in the worst way possible that Dota 2 is ultimately a team game, not a game about individual effort, something that I had kept in mind a lot while I was in EU and for the former part of my current stay in SEA. While I struggled to produce results I knew I was capable of producing, I also had to realise that sometimes my teammates just couldn't keep up with either me or our enemies as they made the most ridiculous mistakes and questionable decisions. There was some comfort in knowing that as the game progressed later, the enemy team made similarly ridiculous mistakes and decisions. However, there was no longer much of a chance for a comeback by that point as we had been stomped into oblivion, having taken no objectives, having lost all map control, and realising the all too obvious truth, we had already lost several minutes ago as our enemies proceeded to be careful not to make the same mistakes against us, stomping us and securing their victory as they carefully picked us off in our own base while hitting our ancient as we made a desperate defense. When my 10 games of calibration came to an end, needless to say, I was devastated to see that I had calibrated my seasonal MMR even lower than my current MMR in spite of all my efforts. As a result, I decided to stop playing ranked as I sincerely felt it was getting too stressful and that I was probably never going to raise my MMR here in SEA again.
Subsequently, I've mostly been playing unranked for the past 2 weeks or so and I have been disappointed to discover that, while my unranked games have begun showing Very High Skill on Dotabuff, I have met teammates with even more ridiculous mistakes and questionable decisions as well as opponents with even more overpowering strats. Over the past few days alone, I've been faced with lineups that just 5-man dive towers with 2 tanky heroes (i.e. Axe and Bara) and 3 heroes with plenty of magical and physical damage, wrecking our entire early and early-mid game with pretty much a deathball strat. I have also been subject to Dagon abusers with me getting focused and having multiple dagons to the face during teamfights just because I've got a pretty decent KDA in spite of all the enemies' efforts.
Having said all that arguably incoherent wall of text, I hope not to drag this out any longer but I am sincerely frustrated with players in SEA and frustrated with being stuck in this trench where I often meet uncooperative players who flame and blame, wishing that I could rise much higher above to where my friends, who learned to play the game from me, who became my proteges, who came to me for tips and advice on improving their overall gameplay, had already reached. I have a currently untouched smurf account which I did not want to play until I had secured a stable computer for gaming and which I have also decided not to play until I return to EU. At the moment, my hopes of achieving higher MMR rests on that smurf account. To add salt to my wounds, one of my good DotA friends which I met and played with a lot in SEA, with very similar skill level to that of mine, often having our own mini competitions with each other, recalibrated at 5k on his smurf (his main now I suppose) despite having calibrated the same 3k that I did on his original account. As for further injuries to my pride relative to what seems to be differences in EU and SEA, I had an enjoyable winning streak on Tinker in EU and since coming back to SEA, I've had very hard-won games on Tinker, or just outright losses.
As I try to end this wall of text and finish venting my frustrations here, I just want to firstly give a shoutout to all those streamers out there that take the time to answer some questions and offer suggestions, the players out there that have kindly offered me tips on improving, and the small Twitch chat community (not the ones that meme on AdmiralBulldog's stream or tournament streams etc but those small ones often with no more than 300 viewers) that I have slowly become a part of, allowing me to become not just a better player but also, in some aspects, a better person. I can at least say that through my experiences in EU and through their help, my winrate has finally gone above 50% for the first time in the last 2 1/2 years. And lastly, I want to make a plea to those players who are evidently very much better than myself, but who are also players that I haven't really met out there in the LD community to offer me tips as I sincerely do not know what else I can improve on without further experience. I also welcome suggestions from players that may believe themselves to be worse than myself simply because they have lower MMR or whatever because I clearly find it hard to believe that MMR is a true reflection of a player's skill. I leave my Dotabuff and Yasp here for people to get an idea of what I've been trying to improve on and my overall gameplay in the hopes that you will all kindly leave me suggestions and tips on further improvement.
Note:I'm not fond of hero spamming because the game gets really boring, playing the same builds despite winning multiple games in a row.
http://www.dotabuff.com/players/111130600
https://yasp.co/players/111130600