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Ah the arbitrary breakpoints of MMR, where dreams are laid down to be smashed upon the wheel of hope.
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May 14, 2024 22:20
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| # ? Jun 5, 2024 19:49 |
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congrats on 3k!
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May 16, 2024 01:39
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 I thought about trying to hide this and build drama and excitement, I thought about streaming all the games that could potentially be the game that came to this moment but honestly that isn't what this LP was meant to be. If you just want the satisfaction of seeing that I said I'd do something and I did it, here it is.   In the last two games I got mid and I did my job, I mostly got carried, it's entirely possible I'll lose this mmr in a few months and it'll all be the same but I'm in my feelings about this arbitrary ranking system. I don't think I've been trying paticularly hard to win. I'm obviously putting in effort, not throwing or raging but I think there's more to it. This next part might get embarassing but I think I'll drop my usual manner of irony poisoining and be genuine for at least a little while. When I first started playing dota I was 15 years old. I'm alot younger than the usual demographics of this forum and my life at fifteen wasn't ideal. I recently spoke to a friend I used to play dota with at that time and he talked about how he realised that when he used to play dota it was usually when he was most depressed. Dota is the kind of game you can really escape into, you can queue up and ignore every single problem in your life, you have 9 punching bags and a million little things to practice and learn. I remember watching a BSJ stream recently where he said that he felt that 90% of dota players were some form of mentally ill. Not in a memey way but in a genuine way that the reason dota is so toxic and people are so defeatist or self sabotaging is because they are genuinely ill and depressed. It made me think back to the person I was back when I played this game the most, during the beta in 2012. At the time I had been expelled from school for trying to punch a teacher. I'm not trying to come off as a hard man or anything here. It was incedibly stupid, he hadn't even done much wrong to me really. A few weeks before that the school had me talking to a psych guy who determined that I couldn't be depressed due to my lack of interest in studies, school, eating regular meals and so and so forth because I didn't self harm. So the only thing I really had back then was Dota and some sense that something was very very wrong. These days I know that I'm bipolar, someone told me a couple of years ago that the way I acted reminded me of their sibling with a similar thing and it helped put alot of things into perspective. We'll get back to that later, you might be all wondering what this all relates to this let's play and to dota and all that but I'm getting there. At that time in my life, my only focus was playing dota and getting good at dota. I consumed every single detail I could about the game, I practised things, I trained, I played all day and night. I watched every pro game I could and asked streamers for advice. I tried to copy my friends who were better at the game and I was terrible. It wasn't from lack of experience in the genre. I'd been playing HoN for a few years before that. I was a young man so it wasn't like I had old man reactions. I just wasn't a grown enough person at the time to have the kind of reflection required to improve. We don't have MMR figures from back then but in 2014 I stopped playing dota for a bit and came back when they added ranked. I calibrated at like 2000 mmr and quickly fell to 1100 or so and I sat there for years. My life during these years was in a tailspin, I didn't have prospects or any kind of future to speak of. When people asked me what I was going to do I genuinely didn't have a awnser. I alienated the few friends I had in dota and the rest of my life and hit rock bottom. Anyone with a job might think that being a NEET (Not in education, employment or training) might be kind of free feeling or satisfying. For year or so it can be fun but after that I find you gain a sort of weight on yourself and the more time that passes the more it weighs. It was around 2015 when I enrolled in community college to just try and get something going, I tried a few different courses for a few years just to try and figure things out. It pulled me out of the pit I was in. It helped me make some friends and start to feel like a person again. I played dota on and off until about 2017 when I met my immortal friend that I have mentioned in passing a few times in this LP. He wasn't immortal when I met him though, he was ancient. I always appreciated the way he was clearly improving from week to week. I envied it too but I had alot of respect for him. He loved the game more than most people who ever touch dota, he was always trying to be better and I lived vicariously through him at times. He helped me alot in terms of dota but he was also someone who I learned alot about how to live my life from. He hasn't played dota for a year but I showed him the 3k screenshot and he was happy for me. He's doing very well in life and I'm happy for him. During that period where he was mentoring me I learned alot about dota and I went from 1200 to about 1900-2000 by playing a very selfish carry style that usually worked but fundamentally had a completely nihilist mindset. I refused to put the game into the hands of my teammates under any circumstances. Even when I was playing with friends, I didn't turn this style off and I was flamed for it, maybe correctly or incorrectly. That was where I was at. Did I carry these games I played to get 3k? Maybe I contributed alot as a support, maybe I won some team fights and made some big plays but mostly I supported my teammates, I didn't flame them, I helped ward and deward. I played my role and I was satified with just doing my best and helping out. My life steadily improved, things got easier. I went to university and then dropped out. I wasn't cut out to be a journalist (too many morals) but I set out to do something and I did it. After that I had some lovely jobs but I worked them because I needed to do something. During those periods of my life my dota career was stagnant, it was just something that happened. This boring story I'm telling about my largely average life is me trying to figure out why it feels so much easier this time and I genuinely think it's something as stupid as. I don't need it anymore. If you had asked 15 year old me what I'd do to be even above average at dota, I shudder to think. I warped my entire existence around something that I wanted. But now, I don't need it and so it's easy. There's no pressure on me, if I lose it's nothing and if I win it's everything. I've finally found the part of dota that is only highs and no lows. I'm not kidding when I say I expected and wanted this to be much much longer, I wanted it to be a grand story of struggle and progress. I wanted it to be week to week for years on end until I finally climbed the mountain with a thousand cuts that had healed. Maybe that's too many words but that's what I'm thinking right now.
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May 17, 2024 14:13
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a legend is among us! congratulations. a pretty baller 7 win streak, too!
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May 17, 2024 14:20
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Congrats dude. Good lesson in that not playing tilted will actually win you the majority of your games as long as you're trying to improve.
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May 17, 2024 17:01
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Nice! Congrats on the milestone. The number can go higher if you want it to. I was enjoying the updates, but I understand if you're done.
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May 18, 2024 22:02
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Glory to Italia!
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ILL Machina posted:Nice! Congrats on the milestone. i'm mulling it over myself right now for sure, I have been enjoying making the LP.
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May 18, 2024 22:54
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alright, I am going to continue the LP as a road to ancient and ongoing thing but probably on a much less strict schedule for myself still waiting for the patch tomorrow to play any more though.
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May 22, 2024 11:49
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The Road To Ancient The long awaited patch has come. Patches in dota are a whole new world, in other games patches are important, they bring significant changes and excitement but let me be very clear. There is no patch like a big dota patch. Dota itself is a beautiful swiss engineered watch, every piece of the metagame is analyzed and considered. Every item, every hero matchup, specific lineups. All from thousands of hours of experience and expectation. A patch is when they smash the watch with a hammer and start from scratch. The last time they had a patch like this they changed the map in ways it had never been changed before, it changed the way lanes worked, it changed the way that people itemized to lane, it changed the pace. The latest patch though? It's all about heroes. Every patch changes heroes but this one added something incredibly signficiant. Let's get into the weeds for a second, what's the most boring hero in dota? Me, I'd say Dragon Knight. Not that I don't like Dragon Knight but he's pretty simple, his q is a nuke, his w is a stun, his e makes him hard to kill and his ulti helps him kill towers, basically. If you played dragon knight in 2012, he would be different to dragon knight in 2020 but if you played him now?  Now Dragon Knight is a pokemon that changes type every game, you either choose your green tower slaying dragon, your red aoe dragon or your blue skadi dragon. I could go over a dozen of these things but there's essentially an entirely new layer to this already incredibly deep game. A new patch also means that essentially, that every match is going to be pure chaos for the first couple of weeks, tons of people return to the game rusty and with bad assumptions, people's usual builds don't work in the same way and everyone is too busy trying to find that one advantage that pushes them over the edge. It's wonderful, I've been having a great time. So, how have I been doing?  Not a huge gain but it's solid growth, I've been experimenting with different stuff rather than just slam picking zeus and hitting sick lightning bolts.   I don't plan on going into alot of detail in any of these games right now, just because in the simplest case I don't entirely understand everything that's going on in these games yet but. I am glad to announce that Zeus still works fine, just don't take Livewire as a support zeus. Also, if people want to suggest a hero+facet combo they'd like to see my try, I'm happy to open up suggestions for stuff I need to see/feel. Here's to the start of a new era and road to Ancient. 
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May 28, 2024 13:22
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What’s your favorite of the new added facets?
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May 28, 2024 18:02
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| # ? Jun 5, 2024 19:49 |
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IAmThatIs posted:What’s your favorite of the new added facets? Ogre Magi's learning curve facet is insane conceptually, basically being useless for a level for a huge powerspike has so many implications. runner up has to be Alchemist getting random gold lol.
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May 28, 2024 18:26
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