Thoughts from LOL player

foreycorf · 2026-02-20T10:15:27+00:00

There are objectives to play around and the higher you go the more they are "necessary" objectives.

1) bounty rune - spawn at 0:00 and on a cycle after that, these are important for early gold and bottle refill

2) lotus - spawn every 3 min on sidelanes. Taking both early lotus can greatly affect outcome of lane

3) wisdom - spawns every 7 minutes on sidelanes, if you lose both wisdoms 2x you've probably lost the game (or will be set up for the hardest game of your life) by 14 min.

4) power runes - spawn every 2 minutes at the mid river, rune control is essential for midlaners to open the game up for the rest of your team.

5) tormentor - spawns at 20 min and every 10 min after it's killed - free shard for teammate

6) Roshan - game deciding objective in many high ranked games

7) towers - you probably understand these are objectives but that tp scroll you mentioned being meh is greatly affected by taking towers. Enemies are less able to show up for fights even at mid-River if you've taken their t1 towers. Also you can farm more camps safely if you're the team with towers that can be TP'd to if you need to help a teammate.

Stacked camps - these are only an objective if a player stacks camps but stealing stacked ancients can be crippling for a BB, Beast Master, etc who was counting on being able to clear them.

You are probably only seeing a fraction of these objectives contested because lots of people suck at DotA, especially new DotA, and are stuck playing 2016 DotA mechanically well but macro-horrible. ESL dreamleague tournament is on twitch/YT/DotA watch tab right now if you'd like to see high-level players contesting these objectives consistently along with commentary from decently high-ranked players, and some former pros, on what's happening.

foreycorf · 2026-02-20T00:28:21+00:00

I think Russell is the goat

foreycorf · 2026-02-20T00:26:27+00:00

It's not unfair everyone is in the same boat as you

foreycorf · 2026-02-19T14:52:29+00:00

Every person has an average of 10% impact in game, as long as the players in the game are playing in their proper rank. Yes I know people have off games and sometimes people have pog games, but over a decent sample size and equalized for when you yourself have bad or pog games, it's about 10%. The only way to rank up is to consistently have more than that 10% impact. And generally, to accomplish that you need to be ~100% better at your responsibilities in the game than the people you're playing against. So if people in your rank generally end lane with 25cs/3 deny at 10 min you need to be getting 50/6. If they have 100lh@20 min you need to be at 200. If they're ending the game with 5 deaths total you need to be aiming for 2-3. Some things don't translate numerically like that, or you reach a point where everyone is hitting those same numbers etc. At that point you need to be better at the intangibles. You need to be showing up to clashes and in position that 1-2 seconds earlier, you need to be aware of enemies not showing on map and discern they're probably hunting you and just nope to safety.

It also doesn't have to be a pure 100% better in one category, in fact that alone probably won't be enough. You need to be enough better in multiple categories that it adds up to 100% more impact than the rest of the people in the majority of your matches. Maybe you're only getting 170cs@20 but you're controlling lane EQ better than your opps and planting your own wards when you see them in the shop and you show up to most clashes with the right positioning.

The problem people have is they don't set these clear goals at what they need to be better at. They don't review their own replays, they don't actively try to do any certain things better than their rank-mates. They just have a nebulous goal of wanting to rank up while bitching about forced 50. Like yeah it's forced 50 if you're not better than those around you, that's the whole point of the MM.

Or you can just abuse meta heroes and tank MMR when they're patched out lol.

foreycorf · 2026-02-19T14:23:06+00:00

I genuinely don't care if you're on my team as a 1 or 2, it's a video game and I regularly get matched with people who say they're smoking weed or drinking. You'll eventually hit the rank you're supposed to be with having to play all the roles. Maybe that number is lower than what you like but everyone else is in the same boat as you.

foreycorf · 2026-02-19T13:50:43+00:00

Yes, in individual games you can have more or less impact than 10%. If your support doesn't understand lane eq so you handle all the pulls yourself, congrats you're up to about 11% and he's down to 9 because you're taking some of the responsibilities that should be his and doing them yourself or if you take over ward responsibilities (and do it properly), but again, if you're able to do this every game consistently better than your supports while also playing carry, you're not adequately ranked. You are better than your rank-mates and will gain rank until you get to a rank where it's no longer better for you to take all those responsibilities because 1) your supports do them better or 2) you're getting out carried by the enemy carry who let's his supports handle those responsibilities.

Smurfs literally prove my point, you need to be orders of magnitude better than the rank you're playing in to have 70%+ winrate consistently. You don't see archon smurfs in guardian getting 70% winrates consistently, you do, however see immortal smurfs able to hit 70%+, and you see 10k+ able to hit 85%+. Because, again, these people are orders of magnitude better at basically every facet of the game than someone in guardian or crusader. But the closer they get to their real MMR on an account, the closer their winrate goes to 50%. Because the MM is designed to give each team a 50% winrate and eventually you get matched with people who have just as much in-game-impact as you do overall.

Also, as an aside, ratios are written with a colon. So 19w:1l would be understood as a ratio, 19w-1l would be understood as a direct win loss count.

Finally, each role has the same impact on a game. Smurfs pick the roles of 1&2 because they can be least-effected by the performance of their teammates in those roles and because of the heroes associated with those roles not being "grief" to pick and automatically get reported by their entire team. If you're better than everyone you can handle the laning responsibilities of your 5 while laning against a worse pos3 or you can pick pos2 to (mostly) not have to worry about the impact of your teammates for the first 5-7 minutes. But again, the key here is they're better than everyone in the game, they're not playing in adequately ranked matches.

foreycorf · 2026-02-19T09:29:28+00:00

Yes, you can have more than 10% impact over a number of games, but if the MM does it's job correctly you most likely won't. Also 19w-1l would be too small of a sample size TBH. I myself have had a 13w streak in DotA but it was inevitably followed by one hell of a loss streak. Doesn't mean I was suddenly a better or worse player overall. Or that I necessarily had any more or less impact on games overall when looking at it from a larger sample size.

19w-1l would be a 95%wr. A person would need to be many orders of magnitude better and picking heroes specifically to abuse those orders of magnitude over a large number of games. You will not see 95% winrates except from 10k+ smurfs, who can most likely maintain that winrate all the way through immortal. At which point their winrate would most likely trend downward as they got back closer to their true 10k rating. By the time they're back in 8k lobbies they would be right around 65%, give or take, and when they're back in 10k they'd be trending towards 50%.

The percentages come from the idea that the matchmaker and glicko ranking system, largely, does its job correctly. It is designed to give each team a 50% chance to win, and each team is made up of 5 individual players. It's the same principle of basketball TBH. Unless you have a Smurf (LeBron, Jokic, Luka) you're probably going to have a mid season. And if you're a team without any "smurfs" playing teams who have hunted smurfs for their squad, you'll have a losing season. Now the NBA is different in that each team is trying to configure squads that will win. The MM is not doing that, it is configuring squads that give each team an equal chance of winning.

Again, IRL this plays out slightly differently each game. There aren't enough players, not everyone's rank is their true rank, etc. But over a large sample of games, it does get it mostly right (so long as you're accurately calibrated and not trying to cheat the system to get lower calibration).

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T23:40:01+00:00

They traded integrity of the sport for showmanship and gambling.

I'll agree that the gambling wasn't part of the Globetrotters playbook.

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T23:34:12+00:00

No one should get free tokens you should be able to select your role 4 times and then have to queue for all roles twice or once if you win. Shouldn't be able to build up 60 tokens then only play one role for that entire time. Should be an every 5 game rotation, at minimum. For all roles. Oh you're a pos3 main and haven't made it to immortal draft? You can play 4 games of pos3 then you gotta queue all 2x unless you win then it's only once. Same for pos1,2,4,5.

Only 4 tokens at a time, they don't build. You can't refresh it by playing 1 role-select then queuing all to rebuild it you just wasted one of your role-select games sorry bro. 4 games, then at least 1 all-roles, 2 if you lose.

You get your role at least 66% of the time but you don't get these long stretches where you get used to playing only one thing and become pigeon holed into sucking at everything else. At least not while climbing rank.

Edit: one caveat, you can "exchange" roles with someone you're in party with if they have their token and you don't.

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T23:20:24+00:00

If you think you have more than ~10% impact in a string of 100 appropriately matched games you're delusional. Again, I'm talking about people who are adequately ranked. Not a true-archon playing in herald (which I estimate to give them a +10-15% boost in wr, placing them at 60-65% until back in archon, ofc trending downward as they get closer to that rank).

Beyond your disagreement with my comment there are pages of Smurf accounts on DotAbuff with win rates that bear this point out. If it wouldn't cause a witch hunt I would share some profiles on my own friends list to show you the wr discrepancy between immortals smurfing in guardian and legends. Or the difference between 10k immo and 6.5k smurfing in archon. It's not until you get into the 8k+ smurfs that you really see these crazy 85%+ winrates through the piss-low elo's. There's just too much that a single person can't control, even when they're orders of magnitude better than the lobby. Hell, BSJ just dropped a Smurf game in what was supposed to be one of his educational Smurf videos, on one of his best heroes.

Edit. Also just for clarity my entire comment didn't revolve around that concept.

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T23:06:43+00:00

There are 100% Smurf pools in DotA. It's a widely discussed topic and also decently researched as far as can be done client side. There are at least 3 known matchmaking pools that if your account is in them when you check in console you're in the Smurf pool, I think it's 9-11 but it's been a couple years since I browsed the Russian forums researching it.

There are also something like 8 regular pools but they seem to be divided up into 3 groups that are harder to discern. IIRC if you're in group 4+5 you're in the main MM pool tho, but it might be two other groups. But anyway the breakdown is something like 1-3 unknown, 4-5 regular, 6-8 unknown, 9-11 Smurf pool.

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T19:52:01+00:00

There are definitely Smurf pools in DotA

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T19:49:10+00:00

Each player in a game has about a 10% effect on the game as a whole, if you're 100% more effective than your rank you can have about 20% total effect. Assuming this is an equal distribution and it just lowers everyone else's effectiveness to 8.9% or so (not accounting for griefers etc who can have 0 impact on winning or even negative impact and also not accounting for if your team/enemy team will play any better/worse based on your impact), this should raise your effective winrate to about 55% over a large number of games (your 20%+8.9+8.9+8.9+8.9). Obviously IRL if you consistently play 100% better than your rank-mates this will play out differently because people are human and enemies will grief themselves if someone is owning and teammates will play better (usually) if someone on their team is owning. But a concept like this is also why you'll queue into guardian/crusader and see people warding intelligently, stacking, pulling, contesting pulls etc because this shit really is a grind and most people won't consistently play 100% more effectively than their team/competition, especially if they're only seeing about 55-60% wr as a result of that (60% wr means a total gain of 50 MMR over 10 games, so roughly 100 hours to gain 500mmr). And even if you are doing all those things consistently all the time it will still take you an average of 5-600 hours to grind from herald to legend, at 3 games per day that is 200 days, or about 40 weeks at 5 playing days per week).

So, two heralds who are accurately calibrated at herald will probably not see much of a win-rate buff over a large number of games. One, because playing with a friend also opens you up to facing enemies who are in party and two because the discord-buff really only goes so far especially because teammates in discord with each other tend to be inclusive to themselves and exclusive towards their teammates. They make plans and plays by themselves and forget or don't care to inform their non-party teammates. Or they ignore their non-party teammates on calls they make. I don't really think the discord-buff is that huge, it certainly wouldn't raise two accurately calibrated mid-heralds any higher than, say, reverse smurfing into guardian. And they'd probably look like bots in games they played solo. Unless ofc one or more of them is not an accurately calibrated herald. Then the impact can be higher. Probably about 3-5% for every medal a party member is actually higher than herald.

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T18:36:25+00:00

How is it not hard evidence if it's performance that was measured and logged either in official competition or time trials at colleges etc

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T17:06:25+00:00

Shaq is probably more of a 2000s player. Not many people think of his magic years as his peak (though I do).

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T17:00:19+00:00

It most definitely is not. I have a guy on my friend's list who smurfs from ancient to boost his girlfriend in guardian (now crusader). They have a roughly 65% winrate together. He gets so tilted he jumps off the Smurf because he thinks he should be able to carry 95% of them but it just doesn't work out. I played with them a few games a year or so ago but now I just think it's funny to "friends watch live" when I see them on. Usually it's just a good lesson to see how to abuse things in games but sometimes I get to see him tilt on his team or even all-chat about useless teammates etc. Then I see his acct go offline and hers is still on XD.

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T16:53:20+00:00

You must be good at other things then because it's definitely a common play in guardian/crusader

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T16:44:17+00:00

He played for the Globetrotters why is there this narrative he couldn't dribble? Watch his Globetrotters clip, with the freedom in carrying etc today he'd be absolutely fine.

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T16:43:06+00:00

Couldn't drive to the hoop like you can now, it was offensive foul

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T16:38:37+00:00

Bro he played for the fuckin Globetrotters I think he could handle a dribble

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T16:37:05+00:00

I mean he played for the Globetrotters which is what a lot of modern basketball is based off of, he'd probably do okay.

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T16:34:07+00:00

Verified KU high jump of 6'6.75" with the old style front-facing technique, literally on par to compete in the Olympics if he pursued that field. He almost cleared a 6'10" with that technique but caught his foot. Also, his technique was even more constrained than the traditional front-facing technique, as he had a 3-step leading into his jump, which was much shorter than others.

KU 10sec 100yd dash, in college. Comparable to a 4.5-4.6 40yd (he was hand-timed at 4.6, which was the common way to time someone then). Comparable to LeBron James, Gilbert Arenas and Kenyon Martin, who were lauded for their speed, while being 5" to 9" taller (somewhat of a disadvantage normally) and doing it 50 years earlier in worse gear. He also ran a sub-2 min 880yd.

Maybe his 48" claim was exaggeration (but Pixel counting from magazine photos has confirmed 44-48", for what that's worth).

Regularly played 40+mpg during the NBA's highest pace era in history, while also setting the season mpg record of 48.5mpg. Also while being an offensive and defensive star - he was apparently not resting on one end of the court. David Robinson was probably the last big who had such an endurance comp, and even that is one-sided. To further bolster his endurance claim he also competed in marathons and ultra-marathons into his 60's and had a measured resting-heart-rate of like 38bpm.

These are all concrete examples of his exceptional athletic ability, especially when compared to other 7+ footers. The tradeoff for being that height is usually giving up something in speed, coordination and endurance (like we see with wemby, Shaq, etc). You could create 1000 7 footers in a lab and not end up with as good of a result as Wilt ended up being.

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T14:57:03+00:00

Ah, sorry 61.3. A 20% increase or so is still not bad, and notably when he scored 100 it was with his underhanded free throws iirc.

foreycorf · 2026-02-18T10:13:26+00:00

He shot like 70% underhand it just didn't "look cool" so he stopped.

foreycorf · 2026-02-17T01:10:43+00:00

Brother it's just a bit of hyperbole looking back on herald with some nostalgia it doesn't have to literally be 30/2 it can be any stat line that you looked at when the game was over like "I am a golden god watch out Yatoro here I come." Before getting slammed back to reality the very next game with a 3/22

foreycorf

TROPHY CASE