As a celebration for 50 000 followers on twitter, Ben "Merlini" Wu shares his personal experience about the different kinds of mindsets he has encountered while playing Dota. In his blog post, he also shared some tips on how to have a positive mindset.

In a recent blog post by Ben "Merilini" Wu, he shares how his current DotA mindset developed and his different experiences with the mindsets of different players in a DotA 1 in-house league he used to play in. Here is a summery of Merlini's blog post:

Merlini on...

...his mindset when he first started Dota:

When Merlini started playing Dota, he felt that he was not the most pleasant person to play with, as he was pretty judgemental towards other players. He only started to realize his bad habit when he entered the competitive scene.

...the in-house league he used to play in:

Merlini played in one of the first few in-house leagues ever set up with a MMR system in place. He mentioned that : "The games were more “tryhard” than your average high difficulty pub. Tempers ran hot, many insults were traded, and most importantly, good DotA was played."

...being first in the in-house MMR system:

Merlini talks about how he did not feel that he deserved to be first as he felt there was much to be learnt. After a while, being the first lost its meaning because it felt nothing to him, he did not improve as much as he wanted to and the only purpose of his rank was unwanted attention.

...people and their mindsets:

In this section of the blog post, Merlini talks about how the different and often ridiculous reasons people attribute to their self-perceived "low MMR". He states that the "Top 50 players thought they were top 5 players, and bottom 50 players refused to believe they were the worst in the league". He realized that people will always make excuses regardless of mode, regardless of players. "People can’t seem to come to terms with the fact that they might, just might, not be as good as they perceive themselves to be."