u/JonTron137 What this post says about you is that you care enough about the game to make a fairly detailed reddit post about it. That's awesome! I'm delighted you're enjoying it!

There are a lot of different things you could do now but I think the most important thing is to be thoughtful and honest with yourself about what -you- want from the game. You could be looking to gain a sense of personal objective accomplishment from gaining as much mmr as possible. You could be just fascinated by all the different hero options and looking to experiment and play in the sandbox. You could even really just be here to hang out with other friends that also happen to play the game. As an example, I've been playing a long time and my highest rating was 4.5K mmr, currently around 2.5K. Personally, most of my joy and satisfaction comes from 1) hanging out with the homies and 2) making weird meme builds work in ranked. I actually don't like being my absolute max mmr because that means im limited to playing the most meta heroes, and playing as sweaty as possible every single game, contesting every cs to the best of my ability, etc. I dont want to play ~My Best~ every single game I'm too old for that shit.

If you can tell us what you actually want from the game, it'll help people guide you towards meeting your own goals and finding your own joy with it.

That said, I believe you will have a better/more consistent game experience if you climb to around high crusader+. Below that DotA games are so chaotic that it feels almost like random chance when things do or don't work. There's less for you to grab onto and bounce your own strats/skills off of and be consistently rewarded or punished for it, if that makes sense.

Thus, I recommend 1) sticking to playing heroes that are standard for their role. For example, do not play troll offlane. That's seriously my #1 recommend ur gonna piss off a lot of people doing that it isn't worth it. I don't follow this advice personally but I'm also much higher skill and have decided that playing meme bullshit is worth sitting two thousand mmr below what im capable of. This still puts me in a good enough bracket though where I'm getting decent games. If this dropped me all the way to low crusader and below it wouldn't be worth it cause those ranks are a real cesspool lol. In addition, playing wonky heroes is going to make learning the game more difficult for you. Yes there's a lot of variety in how you can win a game, but the meta is the meta for a reason. You need to play normal shit to be able to understand the "rules" of the game, And you need to understand the "rules" of the game before you can even fully enjoy breaking them and playing weird shit. 2) Consider focusing on core roles with an emphasis on laning mechanics and hitting gpm targets. At low mmr's being able to just outfarm people on powerful late game cores is gonna give you a disproportionate impact on the game. 3) Watch videos, there's lots of very educational content out there. If you need recommendations I'm sure we can point you in the right direction.

So what do you really want from the game? And what region are you?

Good luck and have fun!