General DiscussionWhy I think Hero Rankings should be removed

Hey everyone,

So recently dotabuff released the hero rankings to the public and it seems like a lot of people are taking these rankings seriously. I think most 6k+ players will agree with me that these rankings are completely flawed and that they are almost arbitrary because dotabuff cannot factor in how hard the games were. For example, it would be extremely easy to play unranked party with 3k's and go like 50-0 while extremely hard to do that in solo ranked 6k+ bracket.

Take Dragonfist for example - the highest MMR in the world. He is 41st on his best hero because he plays this hero exclusively in solo ranked 7k+ bracket to try climb MMR. As the games become super hard, he becomes stuck at 7.3-7.5k and therefore, his TA winrate begins to turn to 50% and his kda also suffers from the hard games. Before w33 was upgraded to 'Professional 5' he was like 20th+ on the hero rankings when it's undeniable that he's the best Meepo player. Keemerah and !Attacker, the best players of Espirit and kunkka without a doubt, are also nowhere to be found near #1.

I suffer the same fate, as I solely rely on Meepo to climb solo ranked MMR games. Even at 6.3k+ MMR, I'm placed at Diamond 8/10 because of relatively low winrate low kda (due to spamming solo 6k+ ranked games).

Think of it this way - the actual best players of particular 'main' heroes (TA,slark,ESpirit,Meepo, kunkka) will inevitably have low scores because they will have spammed the heroes in solo ranked and will have lost quite a lot of games as their MMR has reached their potential.

Why is this a problem? Dotabuff is presenting this Hero Rankings like it's a fact and plastering it to each hero's page. Dotabuff is the best page for raw statistics no doubt, so people rely on dotabuff for facts a lot; when you present your guesstimate rankings as facts then your website reliability goes down.

Sorry for the long post - a lot of people have asked me why I'm diamond 8, why I'm not top 10 on Meepo and whatnot so I felt like I had to make a post. Hope I will get some people's thoughts other than "LOL this guy is butthurt".

p.s. I knew since long time ago that hero rankings were heavily flawed but I didn't say anything because it was exclusive to DB+ users, a very small minority of the community. Even when I was ranked one on Meepo, I would tell anyone who asked me personally about it that it didn't mean shit.