How to improve in Dota with Matrim

posted by Mantis., 49 days ago

Dota 2 is a game with a steep learning curve with lots of things to learn. Some may love it, some may not as it is a difficult game to analyze and understand. Some may even face unpleasant ordeals in the process.

Newcomers often have a hard time learning the game as there are many heroes accustomed with different roles along with different way of play style. This is made even harder with the harsh and unforgiving Dota community mainly due to how the game is designed, one bad player may be able to throw the game out the window.

Matrim playing with mTw in Dreamhack Winter 2011

In addition, Dota is made even harder for players to breakthrough into the competitive scene with warding and more meticulous details coming into play. Players playing at high level often need hours of practice per day and also adaptability to the game as patches rolls on every few weeks which may entirely change the metagame.

GosuGamers sat down with

Sebastian 'Matrim' Sundström from highly successful mTw for a sophisticated interview on how to improve in Dota and better yet, to get into the competitive scene.

How many games you need to play in order to keep your reflexes sharp and to maintain your current skill level?

-"I think you need to play a lot of games to improve and maintain your level.. Like we just got back from Christmas/New Year's break and we definately noticed that we dropped a bit in skill level because we haven't played a lot. It took like maybe 10+ games to find our previous level again. But it's still annoying to know that you can do so much better when you are losing games you're not supposed to. I usually play like 10+ games every day including pubs. This was actually a huge problem for us in Dota 1, when we played in DIPS. We never played on a regular basis. We maybe played like 5-6 scrims a week and the rest was just Dota Pride/EEDL/pubs and still we could pull upsets in games versus the really good teams. We were so up and down due to not playing, but now we are really motivated and everyone is on the same level of what we want out of this."

What about the psychological aspect of the game? How do you improve your control over your mentality?

-"I think it's really important that people don't go on huge ragesprees and just scream and shit. We have a really laidback team and no one loses their temper except for me sometimes. But I've been working on it a lot and I don't allchat as much as I did in Dota 1 nor do I rage at my teammates anymore. Now it's more that I easily get frustrated when we lose or someone does something stupid that could be easily avoided (*smiles*). Usually it's directed at grunt because he does some really random stuff sometimes that no one understands, but other than that he's a great player."