General DiscussionWhat is skill level?

google skill
google level

thank me later

and dat 45%

Most likely they are referring to the Normal, High, and Very High skill brackets. Normal is the bottom 75% of players. High is roughly 75 to 98%. Very High is the top 2% of players.

Any given public game will be assigned to one of these depending on the hidden (MMR) match making rating of the players. If a lot of them are in Very High, then that will be the category. If the average MMR was in Normal, then it will go to Normal bracket. You can check which bracket your games were assigned with the in-game client by going to WATCH, then RECENT GAMES, then searching for your name by skill bracket to find which games were in which category.

You have probably played all your games in Normal. This is a very large range of skills from total nubs to experienced players who are not particularly talented and don't stack up an organized team.

Don't be a jerk. stop playing pudge.

i just want to play pudge for practicing it doesn't mean that my other heroes are not good

than play those heroes. pudge isn't that valuable hero to practice him 50 games in a row.

Wait, Normal is 75% of Dota players? I thought the brackets were just split into 33%/33%/33%.

Nope its 75%/23%/2%

Now the people in High and Very High play a ton more games than most Normal players. So the actual number of games played in each bracket is more even. But the vast majority of people are in Normal.

The reason you want to divide the games like this is so there is at least some separation of skill levels. If you put people in Very High against even the best players in Normal they will win almost every game and get huge kill scores...its just not as much fun for everyone. Unfortunately this separation of skill levels is not working that well, a lot of mixing of skill levels is still happening.

Matchmaking attempts to make the game so each team has about a 50/50 chance of winning by balancing the skill of players on each team. So if you look on dotabuff and find someone who has won significantly more than lost (say even 51% win or more) they probably play a lot of games in Very High. Some players are so much better its just not possible to get a fair team against them because whenever you que, no one in the que is good enough to beat them. For instance this guy...
http://dotabuff.com/players/115086812
is one of the best players in the world. Lots of times even if he is against a team with 3 or 4 pro players he still wins. So usually its not possible to place a team against him that can beat him.

But almost everyone will get fairly close to 50% win no matter their skill level because it will usually be possible to que them into a fair game.