Level of Match Making ???

It is a simple one really - I read a lot of people saying "I play mostly low / medium / high level match making" - how do you know what level you are playing ?

Game wise I am level 12 with W95, L86 (accurate as of yesterday) - now this is a low(ish) level game wise I believe so does that mean I play only low level games ?

I ask because lately I have noticed a ramp up in competency from both team and opponents (still with the occasional wtf player) and it does not feel low level, which is great because it starts to put pressure on me as a gamer to step up.

In the Dota2 client, you can filter the level of games you've played.

Go to the watch tab, click on [Recent Games] and there should be a filter called "SKILL LEVEL". You can filter out the games this way, it's easy to see how many number of games you've played if you haven't played a lot of games.

Here's a screenshot to make it easier



Another alternative is to go on a site called Dotabuff, basically a stat tracker and you'll need to let dotabuff track on account by enabling statistics. Here's a FAQ page if you needed to know any often asked questions.

Once you've got your matches tracked and updated, you can see what's the level of that game was played at.

Thats great thanks Nubtrain.

Now my next question is, what determines the skill level of each game?

Here's a neat little post from the official dota site

playdota

"1. There are no brackets or skill-tiers. You are rated on a cotinuous scale, so you can think of it as a percentile rank from 1-100.

2. The tiers you know from the Replay-Filters are not used in MM.

3. Battle Points and Battle Level are not used in matchmaking.

4. Performance Bars are not used in matchmaking.

5. We don't enforce a 50-50 win rate.
(And you are certainly not getting matched with bad players on purpose when you have a win-streak. There's no conspiracy just because your winstreak ended)"

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Quote from EricTams found here

Some snippet quotes for the lazy:

"From April 11th: EricTams advised that changes have been made to the matchmaking algorithms to utilize the number of games played amongst other things. Please base your views on matchmaking after this point."

"As far as Matchmaking is concerned none of those buckets [low, medium, high] exist - We match on a continuous scale."

Again thanks - very interesting information - and also thanks for pointing out that forum - Dotafire is the first and only one I look at.

So basically all the things within DOTA 2 that point to be the type of information used for matchmaking are not, and what they do use is unclear, not visible, unknown ? So even though i am level 12/200hrs i could have a higher rating and thus face higher skilled gamers based on performance ?

I would love to know what level of detail their calculations are run at to enable a percentile ranking to do all of this. It also points to playing with friends/guilds is a better way to ensure consistency of performance in a teaam.