General DiscussionBest way to determine if you're improving?

just buy smokes all the time, you can practically call yourself pro if you do that.

I think you are doing it good. The best way to improve is to recognize your mistakes. Just learn from your mistakes and try to do things better next time. Watch professionals and try to understand why they do things.

If you want to know whether you improve or not you should check your older (1-2-3 months) replays if they are still available. If you can see mistakes that you would not make now then you are getting better. Checking the last 10-20 games of yours can be misleading because getting better takes a lot of time (months at least).

In my opinion, u are picking heroes u want to play, but not those that are necessery in ur game. Most of players in pub like to play carry or ganger to dominate and kill opponents, but not beeing a usefull support to ward and help. So I suggest u to take heroes which are usefull in all periods of game, or appropriate in the specific game

Here is my advice. Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE-UnkR5qQQ
By understanding that idea you should try to set a particular approach in yourself.
I will repeat what Spencer said but i will add something into that.
Get piece of paper and always when you die, lose game or just make a mistake - write down a problem into that piece of paper. (After watching a movie you will understand what the problems are). (e.g I harrass and lose too much of HP, When u support i forget to pull/doublestack and my carry isnt farming well or I made mistake when drafting heroes and we lost a game because of outpick).

Play and keep writing your mistakes/problems. Try to write mistake you made after every death or every game ended. You can even add dots or lines to describe that mistake was made again and again (if it was).

When you wait for next game to start or you are dead - try to figure out how to solve that problems.

Im recent powergamer of MMORPG games but im kinda new to Dota. I am using that method since i learned the basics of Dota and started undestanding the whole concept. It helps a lot.
Results:
1. You can clearly see your progress when you dont write so many mistakes after the whole day played.
2. You can think how to solve your problems because they are always in front of you.
3. They are reminding you that you shouldnt try them again.

PS.
You have to realise that every game can make a bad habits in you. For example im sure, that you had a game in your history in which you totally raped all enemies with rampage godlike streaks. Thats good. I can asure you, that you will find you game noobish as fuck when you will watch it half year later :)

This is absolutely good to think and analyse every aspect of your playing. You can win a game in which you did plenty things wrong, but a winning fact will accept thise things in your mind as a good. You dont want that to happen. Just try to remember that the result is not a priority. If you end up game with a support with twice more frags than your hardest carry it actually sucks, even if you won.

Hope it helped.
Good luck.

In last few days for me is exactly viceversa: I feel that my team could win these games even if I was guarding the fountain during the whole game. Yes, I play support, I ward, let carry farm, etc, but the opponents seem to be really bad. Check this game by example: http://dotabuff.com/matches/147544166 (opponents picks in specially)

Edit: btw it's a high bracket game :P

@din soooooo many carries in one game :)

Here is how i see that. Even if i have ~600 games that theme still works for me.

When I win and got like 5-7 winning streak i found next 3-4 games really hard to win. Its because of enemies are far better or allies are from the hell of noobs. No matter.

It works in the opposite way too. When i keep losing 4-5 games, some of next games are really easy to win.

Thats why i find Dota matchmaking sucking ballz. I could accept losing a fair game with exual points disposition or fair lose because of gang mistakes. No! After long winning/losing streak the games are just smoooth in one direction.

Unless you want to pay for a personal dota coach you have to be able to judge for yourself.

It is difficult in anything to judge yourself. To get a degree of separation is critical. You were smart to think of watching your replays, during the game your perception of what happened is often wrong. But when you watch you want to look for specific things. Also you need to define what you want to improve and think about how that can be measured.

The typical numbers on dotabuff are not going to help much because you face a wide variety of situations (team feeding, other team feeding etc...) So unless you get a massive amount of games on a certain hero it will be hard to draw conclusions from these stats. I think any hero you have less than 20 games on is too few to really count for anything. And you have to compare games of the same hero, overall stuff is really meaningless.

So you want to look at specific critical things like...

For laning: 6 min is usually the critical "early game" period

How many lasthits and denies do you have at 6 min?
If harrasing...how much harrase dmg did you do to the enemy heros by 6 min? How much dmg did you take to do that dmg? (think about who is using up regen first)
How many creep stacks did you get? How many creeps denied by pulling neutrals to kill them?

For ganking, the first 20 minutes are the most important. If you ganked well for 20 min the game is already won.

What is your KDA at 20 min?
Did you have wards set up for ganking during the first 20 min?
(If you don't know what this means find out!!)
Did you smoke past enemy wards to gank or deward?
Did you use fog of war effectively?
Did you wait patiently for the enemy to be out of position?
Did you communicate each gank to your team?
Did you move to gank quickly or did you hesitate and wander giving the enemy team time to wonder why you are mia?

For teamfights:
Did you fight where and when you had the advantage? If you did not have the advantage did you back off?
Did you get the support items you needed to teamfight in time? (ie mech,pipe) What? They have NA, SA, and BH? Are you trying to teamfight without a gem? Can you afford to wait for them to attack and then dust? If not what needed to change to get those items in time?
Did you chain stuns or stack them?
How good was your target selection? [Are you focusing heroes that already cast or are about to cast? Are you hitting multiple heroes with aoe skills? Are you finishing off low heroes or letting them escape? Do you know which enemy hero does the most teamfight dmg and were they killed first?]
How well did you use your activatable items? If you don't have the skill to click all your stuff and cast in a teamfight, maybe an easier build with more passive items is a better plan. Are you positioning correctly so you make it difficult for enemy heroes to hit aoe skills? Did you get caught out of position? (also think, were you close enough to counter stun if the enemy initiated) Did you kill their disablers before your carry's bkb ended?

Lategame: Carry
Did you have the dps you needed soon enough? If not why not? Could you have asked for supports to stack camps? Asked for wards? Asked for baby sitting? Did you fail at lasthitting when you had free farm? Did you push too soon instead of holding the creep equilibrium to farm in safety? Did you kill towers and rax or dive the base and waste that precious 20 seconds until they respawned? Did you have money for buyback? Did you have a tp and notice backdoor attempts? Did you make the right decision on who would win a base race?

Lategame: Support
Did you make yourself hard to kill? (ie ghost,force,bkb,blink) Did you make certain your carry stayed alive? Did you kill towers and rax or dive the base and waste that precious 20 seconds until they respawned? Did you have money for buyback? Did you have a tp and notice backdoor attempts? Did you make the right decision on who would win a base race?

If you want to improve on a specific hero or role the best thing is to watch someone better then you. Pros games would be nice if you were a pro...but what you want is someone playing at a slightly higher level of pub match who is excellent at the hero/role you have identified. Find someone who has a high winrate and lots of games on the hero. The best pub in the world off the dotabuff rankings is not the right choice. You can't do what they do, just mechanically, you (meaning almost everyone) don't have the talent. Trying is silly. Instead find someone significantly better but reasonable. Copy their build and play style. Do what wins games.

GLHF improving

just use hero performance bars

Thanks folks. I appreciate the tips and advice. One small thing, should I be focused on a singular role/hero for a duration of games? IE; I play Lich 12 games in a row before downloading and analyzing the replays? Or should I be more adaptable in my picks, and just assess 12 games in which I attempted to pick a good fit/counter for my team?

Don't bother with counters, just pick whatever your lane needs.

I've got similar problems that are stated here and obviously there are problems with the matchmaking system. Getting back to the core question: "How do I know if I'm getting better?" YOU SIMPLY CAN'T! Dota 2 needs a rating to get an OBJECTIVE way of telling wether you got better or not. Telling yourself "I got better" or "I got worse" always has a SUBJECTIVE part implemented. Nevertheless Dota 2 is still in beta (believe it or not) time and hard work by Valve will fix this!

I think picking 1 hero over and over again is not really good. For example Lich is usually really strong but if the enemy has illusions/summons you cannot stop their push and your ulti will be absorbed.
So you can pick Lich maybe every second time, but don't go into a game with a "pre-decided" pick.

But you can play one specific role over and over again. I almost always play support because it is almost always needed. In the above example KotL could be a good pick against illusion/summon/pusher line up.

It is true that if you pick the same hero every game for a while some games it will be a very bad pick. This is actually good for you if you are trying to improve on the hero. You need to understand exactly what it can and cannot do, try to adjust your item choices and play to the game. You need those tough games to improve. Pub games are almost always decided by play and very rarely by picks alone because no one will play the heroes anywhere near their max potential.

If you don't play a hero many times in a row you will really struggle to improve lasthitting, you will have a lot harder time getting the range of the skills in your head, and you will not easily develop a good "feel" for how to play it. Playing many games in a row develops confidence, that is what you should be doing if you want to improve.