Why am I stuck at 1K MMR? {1150 mmr}

If you are reading this it means that you really care about Dota 2, your MMR and you really want to do something about it. But why are you still stuck in low MMR?

MMR is really only related to your win rate and the number of games you play - period! Let's say you earn or lose 25 points of MMR per game and you have a win rate of 65%. If you play 1.000 games you will win 650 of them and lose 350. The difference is 300 games where you'd earn 25 points per each one of them and that makes 7.500 MMR. Quite astonishing!

I wrote before that I've played 1700 games until today. If I had 55% win rate my MMR would be 4.250, but it is 1K! Out of those 1700, I only won 868 games. These numbers give me a win rate of 51,05% and that is really disappointing. But this win rate is the only reason why we are stuck. So how to raise win rate, right? By winning games! :)

Ok, don't get mad. But doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is insanity. So you must know that something is broken with your play.

Most of my games I used to try to pick later to fill a position that my team lacks. People tend to mark a carry and pick safelane or midlane on minimap from the start. That almost never changes. So if you try to be a nice guy and a good team player you are left with these options: Pick a Support, an Offlaner or a Jungler. Doing so completely hands the fate of your game to the guys who pick the carries, and in a low MMR game the chance to come across with a decent carry player is scarse.

Here are my win rates with main support heroes:
Winter Wyvern 10/14 = 71%
Vengeful Spirit 11/16 = 68%
Tidehunter 12/19 = 63%
Omniknight 11/18 = 61%
Oracle 8/13 = 61%
Lich 16/27 = 59%
Jakiro 4/7 = 57%
Crystal Maiden 31/55 = 56%
Witch Doctor 28/57 = 50%
Dazzle 28/57 = 50%

You see that I have lower win rates with hard support heroes and the more I play the win rate goes down to 50%! I'm a good support player, I know that. Good carry players almost always thank me and I got commends. But being a good support player in a bad team doesn't win you games. As the percentages above show that's a cold hard fact. You can't lead your team much to take objectives as a support player at low levels, where there isn't much communication and where egos are in charge.

Of course, there were games where I was THE bad carry player. When things start to flip over I think I panic and I fight battles to halt enemies tower pushes even there is very little chance we can win. For that reason I can't have enough farm and I can't keep up with the enemy carries. That WAS my problem as a carry player. At the end of the day, I know when I fail as a carry and I always apologise from my team.

(i) I shared my top rated heroes below:

(i) ...and here are my worst rated heroes :)

If you look at my stats, my top rated heroes are core heroes. There's almost no support hero. Considering that I never went over 2K MMR and all of my games were played between 1K and 2K MMR, playing support hero isn't viable here. I can say I'll never pick a support hero again for a long time and I won't feel sorry about it if nobody buys the courier.

Well then, what to pick? My top hero might be Wraith King. Sniper looks first but I played less than half games with him compared to WK. However by my experience I know that in a bad team I also suck with WK.

Maybe I should return back to my days before the 2017 International: use picker tool and pick what suits best from my top ten. But, pro players say that picking below 4K MMR is useless. I'll take their advise into account this time.

I believe what I must do is to spam the best hero that suits my play style. It must be a carry. I like playing aggressive. I like to go in and out of fights. Sometimes I fail to watch what my teammates are doing and I go too deep. Hell, whether you watch or not! They flee away a lot while there's a good chance to win a team fight. So, to survive I need an escape hero. It needs to be a pusher to push lanes when nobody else cares about taking objectives. It must have ganking potential, because in 1K nobody cares about ganking. I've seen 1 smoke per 100 games, really.

While these ideas were floating in my mind I picked Juggernaut in a ranked game. Well, I picked him again in another game. And another ... I started spamming Jug and things started to change slowly. I'll share my progress with him in the following posts.

(i) Juggernaut's Information Page in Game

Let's Start! {1000 mmr}

Well, Hello!

Welcome to the Veteran Noob's MMR Challange Blog!

I called myself a noob but between you and me, I have been playing Dota 2 since Februrary 2015. It has been almost 3 years now. I deliberately stayed away from it for sometime because I knew I was going to get drawn in it completely. My friends who had insisted me to play Dota left the game quite sometime ago. The tension of winning games was too much for them, we had many arguments. Because of their MMR progression stalled, they left.

Despite my friends, I'm stunned by the deepness of the game and my curiosity of "what goes on a pro player's mind  while playing" still keeps me playing.

I know that MMR doesn't solely show how good a player is but mine is really low and this started to hinder my gaming pleasure a lot. I was kind of a "broad knowledge" player from the start instead of being an "MMR guy". I completed the All-Hero Challenge at my first year to get better with all the heroes. I was trying to get better at picking. I even was trying to develope my own picking tool before I started this blog.


(i) The trophy awarded for completing the All-Hero Challenge in the game.

I almost hit 2K MMR by the time of 2017 International. Until then I was using picker tool and picking my top 10 rating heroes according to the line up (See your top rating heroes at the STATS page of your profile). Then the battle pass quests began. I like to play big. I played ranked games, used double rank when I had any, picked heroes to do the quests. Well, it was not too long before I dropped below 1,5K. After the Dueling Fates (7.07) update, honestly, I didn't do much to raise my MMR. I just played. That brought me back to 1K MMR.

After playing 1700 matches and being at 1K MMR looks really hopeless, right? Well, I don't think so. I believe my skill and knowledge of the game is beyond 1K MMR. So, what to do? Follow me here, we are going to find out together.

(i)You can see my current STATS below. Also our good old MMR is still there! See it at the top right corner of your STATS.