This article was posted a year ago by Viktor "JamesDickens" Laskov. After all this time, its advice is still sound and we hope it can continue to steer new Heroes of the Storm players in the right direction.
The wrong hero draft approach
When in draft, many low MMR players lose their mind debating “overpowered” or “thrash” picks. Then, they go into some ridiculous behavior of afk-ing, when the thing they want to be picked isn’t picked. As much as team compositions matter, at low MMR they really don’t hold the same weight as higher competitive play. Even if the enemy team has the best team composition you can imagine, they likely are not competent enough to pull it off. Both teams start on even terms: your chances to win with your 5 assassin composition can be hindered only by you being too busy flaming and ultimately going AFK.
When approaching Hero Draft, it is essential to pick heroes you can play well, not what is considered overpowered. The overpowered heroes are only strong if a competent player plays them. Your picks should only be heroes that you are competent with. If the hero doesn’t feel like a natural continuation of your mind, you are not ready to play them in Hero League.
Inexperienced players should stay away from heroes with high skill cap. There is no point in struggling to learn a hard hero when you haven’t even learned the game. Think of it like Hearthstone - at your current level, you just don’t have enough mana crystals to put this on the board. Give yourself time, analyze the game, learn the basics with a basic hero and then you will climb and reach the competence needed to play this “overpowered” hero.
Bad mechanics and positioning
A low MMR player doesn’t stutter step, uses only Q-W-E-R, doesn’t know combos, or if he does, hits one combo out of 10 and doesn’t know how to use the surroundings or the fog of war to his advantage. In addition to that, he usually likes to play assassins, but due to his incompetence, doesn’t know how to position himself and so gives up easy and unnecessary kills that sometimes transition to his team losing the game.
The overpowered heroes are only strong if a competent player plays them.
A good way to reflect on those mistakes is watching a lot of your replays. It is a bit tedious, but ultimately this is where you can find your mistakes. At any given death, you should analyze why you died and what is it that you could have done to not die. You can even do this in game when death timers get high. 30 seconds to reflect and figure out what you did wrong and how to avoid it next time can be the difference to throwing a game and recuperating your losses.
Wrong talent approach
I am not saying you can’t spam the same talent build and climb. But it is silly to do so and takes high competency in a lot of other areas to pull off. A lot of low MMR players see a guide and don’t read anything inside of it. They just copy the talents and think they are good to go, ignoring the ideas around which this talent build was created. In the same way, they reject good talent builds, just because of the talents, without knowing why those talents were picked. When you don’t understand your own talent build, it won’t serve you in any way. It is just talents you pick up without knowing why and thus without taking full advantage or any advantage at all of what you just built.
Each game is different with different allies and different enemies. In some cases you have to build your talents around them. Heroes of the Storm has an amazing diversity in viable talent builds and it is a pity to just spam the same ones like a robot.
In order to understand how to build against different heroes, you just need to try all of them. So hop on Try mode and go crazy so you get a grasp of the cooldowns and limitations of all heroes. In a best case scenario, you can level all heroes to level 5, but I acknowledge this is time consuming so Try mode is definitely the second best option.
Wrong objectives approach
Most low MMR players like to go ham on the watch tower. On maps like Blackheart’s Bay, they ignore everything else and cement themselves at the tower for the first 0:50 seconds trying to overpower each other while giving up experience and the bottom chest. Low MMR players can't resist the fun of diving straight into a 5v5 deathmatch. Unfortunately, this doesn’t bring them any closer to victory.
Another thing low MMR players keep doing is taking the mercenary camps non-stop without a pattern. The mercenary camp being up doesn’t oblige you to take it. It will be up a bit later, too. Maybe then it will be more useful to capture it. It is a lot more effective to take a camp when you know it will create pressure and the enemy team has to give up the primary objective or let the camp push their structures. This is something essential that low MMR players just don’t do. They don’t know how to create tradeoffs for the enemy team.
Low MMR players tend to ignore the primary objectives on certain maps, because they just require a bit more work. There are countless games on Blackheart’s Bay and Tomb of the Spider Queen where both teams just don’t collect coins or gems. In the case of gems, thousands of gems disappear into oblivion, because the low MMR player is too lazy to pick them up.
Another extreme is having a lot of coins or gems and refusing to pay them. It is true that there are more optimal situations of payment and you shouldn’t just mindlessly rush to pay, but this isn’t the reason a low MMR player doesn’t pay. They don't pay because they are unaware. Even though 28 +32 = 60, they won't make this calculation, preferring to collect more gems to reach a number that looks good to them. Considering their fragile positioning skills, they usually just end up losing them altogether.
This is something essential that low MMR players just don’t do. They don’t know how to create tradeoffs for the enemy team.
Not only do low MMR players ignore the primary objective, they don’t even know when, or on some maps, where will it spawn. Instead of playing around the spawn time, maybe even taking mercenaries according to this, low MMR players just wait for the announcer to tell them, because they are confident the announcer won’t let them down and they can eventually head towards the spot on time.
The way low MMR players perceive bosses is also disastrous. They tend to go boss when they are ahead, drunk with power off this amazing game they are having. The fact that whole enemy team is alive and could come and wipe them doesn’t seem to bother them. As a result, they usually get wiped and throw the game. This has its other extreme: the enemy obviously has two heroes on the other side of the map. The team is behind. You can take the boss because it is free. But the low MMR player wouldn’t do that, because he lets anxiety take over his rationality. He has nothing to lose by doing this. It has a high probability of success. But he just wouldn’t do it.
Refusing to end games
Low MMR players don’t end games. The game ends itself. As you gain MMR your games get shorter and shorter, because they have people who end games at any given opportunity. Most low MMR players won’t end after a team wipe at level 20. What they will do is they will try to take each keep, so they can assert their dominance over the enemy. By doing so, you give the enemy another shot. If the next team fight doesn’t go your way you just let the enemy back in the game; a game you could have finished.
Wrong approach to their own gameplay
The Dunning-Kruger effect has become notorious with the rise of MOBAs and online gaming in general. By definition, it is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate.
We all hear about the low MMR player who is destined for greatness but gets matched with terrible monkey teammates against Jesus on five computers. Of course, it has been proven in practice, that you cannot blame your team for your losses. And the justification is simple.
In MOBAs, ELO/MMR boosting is an amazing industry gathering a lot of money. If you can pay a guy to boost your account to high MMR, it means that a person of certain skill and knowledge, capable of winning the game, does exist and it isn’t the team that sucks, it is you.
In order to get the grasp of your mistakes, you can watch your replays. Contrary to your belief, you are not flawless and you have a lot to improve on. As you do, the team will suddenly become better. But bottom line it is you, not the teams, that got better.
Not having fun
A lot of low MMR players are constantly angry. They enter the game and start picking fights and spend the game typing out a dissertation on why the guy they are picking on is bad. The point of the game is to have fun. The exactly number pertaining to your MMR doesn’t really matter unless you are in the 2% of the community that plays the game as a job. And even those guys have fun while they are at it. Relax and just have a nice experience for yourself. The world out there isn’t the nicest place. You can at least recharge your batteries in this hobby of yours. If you aren’t having fun with the game, there is no reason to keep playing it.
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