Forced 50 would mean fighting better and better players till I suck compared to them and lose the games.
I'm talking about a huge gulf in player skill (on the entire team combined,on both teams) from game to game.
Games where both the enemy players and everyone on our team seems new to the game.
There's a difference between people throwing or having a bad game or not being good at a certain hero and a game where people seem to have <100 hours played.
That is often a function of matchups and experience.
1.) Decent players are
experienced on a given hero,
but inexperienced at a matchup and feed or otherwise struggle.
2.) Decent players are inexperienced on a given hero. 200 matches played on Slark, 3 matches played on Lone Druid...but they selected Lone Druid in your match.
3.) Decent players are having an off day or off match. Maybe fatigue, maybe tilting. Maybe caused by the game itself; or maybe life outside of the game.
4.) Imbalanced lanes caused by poor lane combinations or an ineffective jungler, giving way to a snowball.
Honestly, all 4 are extremely common. I've come to realize over the years that I'm rarely "better" than anyone I get matched with; rather matches tend to be decided by 1-3 above. Looking at dotabuffs after matches tend to confirm as much. Sometimes people sucked in a game and I check their buff and sure enough they haven't played the hero they played in a year. Or maybe they've only played them a few times lifetime and they were up against someone who picked their most played hero. Or maybe they got yelled at by their teammate and or are being distracted by infighting teammates.
I can use myself as an example: In one recent IHL match, I got stuck with an uncomfortable and unfamiliar matchup: mid as Linda vs a Viper receiving constant harassment support from a Skywrath who was free to launch his Q ability from range without sapping Viper's XP. Forced to burn through bottle charges faster than normal (and with Viper having the better autoattack animation), I was more or less shut down in terms of farming and was unable to contribute meaningfully later because of a lack of item progression. By the time I did get a few items online, sidelane struggles meant enemy heroes were tanky enough to survive my bursts and their movement speeds were fast enough to make landing Linda's Light Strike Array difficult without setup. It was also like 3am where I am and we had waited 10 minutes in a lobby just to get enough people to run one so I was half asleep when the match even started. And I was getting yelled at by teammates who didn't realize the situation and couldn't/wouldn't provide constructive direction on what to do about it created additional distraction and lost focus.
In another recent IHL match, we decided to play a draft of heroes that we randomed (because our captain was AFK) and I ended up playing Naga (melee hero) with a Tree support (melee hero) vs an Axe. That's like, one of the things you should never put yourself in a position to have to do because a melee hero can't help zone out an Axe at all. So the support was relegated to XP leaching from behind. Farming was a near impossibility because of the Call, putting ol' Naga well behind. There is no scenario in which we would have drafted a melee support for a Naga..but afk captain = randomed picks = problems. So we grit and bared it and others carried the game.
Point is, there are some very real reasons why any individual person may have struggled in a game. The only time I get disappointed in players is if I realize they've given up or if people are being incessantly negative.
Never give up. Never rip on your teammates, as you'll need them to be sharp at some point in the game. Don't assume that just because you played better than them in a given game that you actually *are* better than them. While it may be the case, it's just as likely that you simply played a hero you're much better at than they are at their hero, or a hero that is much more effective against an enemy comp, or got a more favorable lane matchup allowing you to flow more freely into midgame than they could. If they had selected one of their most played heroes in said match, maybe that loss becomes a win.
$0.02
