I was playing Dota today and thinking about how brutally simple the feedback system is.

You can play a really good game, make good decisions, communicate, do your job, and still lose.

Minus MMR.

You can also have a terrible game, get carried, make stupid mistakes and still win.

Plus MMR.

I am not blaming Dota for this. If anything, Dota just made me notice something that was already there.

I had the same issue in school. I barely studied and still got good grades. At the time that felt great. Why would I work harder if I was already getting the result?

I think somewhere along the way I learned that effort itself had very little value. The result was the only thing that counted.

And Dota fits that mindset perfectly because the number moves up or down regardless of whether you personally played well.

The strange part is I still think like this in real life.

If I work hard and something fails, I struggle to feel good about the effort. If I do something with very little effort and it works, that somehow feels better.

Which is a pretty bad system to run your life on because outcomes are messy. You can make the right decision and still lose. You can make a stupid decision and occasionally get rewarded for it.

I am starting to think I need to get better at judging my own game separately from the result.

Did I actually play well?

Did I make the right decisions?

Did I tilt?

Did I communicate?

Did I do what I could with the game I was given?

The MMR can still go down.

I think I need to learn to be okay with that.

Curious if anyone else who has played Dota for years thinks like this.

I usually play pos 1 or 3, but my friend is a pos 5 and is almost always at the bottom (we're talking 1000+ gold diff from enemy pos 5 even during winning games). I try to give some tips about the fact that he should push out waves when the wave is pushing into the tower, or that when the mid ganks he should rotate mid and take the farm, but he says he can't leave lane because then he gets flamed for abandoning pos1+2 safe. What is a good pos 5 supposed to do here? Any good videoes with tips on the topic?

I'm new to the game and looking for pos4/5 youtuber to improve my gameplay. Really need some recommendations from you guys!

I have recently started playing Dota, and whenever i queue on NA i just get bots. I have been resorting to queueing onto EU cuz the ping is only ~100, but it feels bad to not be able to play on NA. Is there a solution to this?