New player trying to understand the game, and skill levels

I am not the right person to give advice on this matter, but I just want to wish you good luck.

Dota is a complex game. Best thing I can recommend is watching pros or their coaching sessions and understanding why they do what they do. But my two cents at that mmr, id imagine theres room for improvment in these areas:

having map awareness, knowing what all the items do, knowing what all the heros cam do, mechanical skill, knowing when to rotate, when to pull creeps to maintain a prefferable lane position, how to find farm outside of your lane as a support, stacking camps, denying creeps, checking enemies items

Is it even possible to judge a players skill correctly in dota?

It's incredibly hard, because there are just so many different important skills in Dota. Like you say, players might be casting their spells/items with perfect timing in fights. But that's only one thing! That player may be good at that, but maybe they're a terrible teamplayer and don't combo their spells correctly with their teammates. Or they're off farming jungle a lot when they should be pushing a lane. Or they tilt easily and stop caring if things don't go their way.

These are all different skills in Dota that everyone is a varying degree of "good at". To judge someone's skill level, you need to know all the skills there are and how good a player is at each of them. Since you're new yourself and don't even know which skills are important, and many of these skills also don't have an immediate externally visible sign that tells you how good someone is, it's very hard to accurately judge someone's skill. It gets better the higher your skill gets, but never perfect.

However, it's pretty easy to judge someone's skill level in your own games: they're all just as good as you, since their rank is close to yours (of course, sometimes there's party queue or late nights where the match finder puts a larger spread of people together, but one you can disable and the other is not too common). So while you don't know their exact distribution of how good they are at each skill, you know that their total average of all their skills is equal to your average.

There are some skills you'd want to find out about your teammates when playing. There are some that are more important to you, for example how aware they are of their surroundings and how inclined they are to help you.

Those are pretty easy to figure out, for example, if you do something a little off screen from them and need their help, if they come, you know they're probably not terrible at it. If they leave you hanging you know they're probably bad at it. You can then adjust your gameplay with that information, if you know they're bad at helping you, you should play more careful since you know you can't rely on their help, and maybe be more explicit in requesting their help.

An incredible resource for support players starting out is BSJ's series of coaching sessions with Eri Neeman. It has the same problem as a lot of other BSJ coaching sessions in that they're not very information-dense, so the videos are longer than they "need" to be. But he (eventually) goes through all the important stuff you need to do as a support and how to do it, and he's actually correct in his assessments more often than not, compared to a lot of other educational content creators.

You are certainly very bad. Don't feel bad about it, though, being bad at something is completely normal, especially when you start out. The ranking algorithm is very accurate. So since you're ranked in guardian 2, that means that roughly 90% of players are better than you.

Dota is probably one of the most complex games around right now, which is why it is so attractive to many. I've also played Starcraft 2, which indeed is also pretty complex, but compared to Dota infinitely less so. Just simply the amount of options you have to do different things is incredibly more vast in dota. Simply just to learn all the features of the game is basically a neverending journey, while you know pretty fast which units/buildings do what in Starcraft and are aware of all options of the game. Compared to learning all heroes, their spells, all items, all map features, all creeps around the map, all special interactions between items/abilities, it's basically negligible. Everyone, even pros, are learning the game all the time, so you could basically say one of the main gameplay elements of Dota is learning.

And even if you were done learning all features, you'd still have to actually learn to use all these features, i.e. playing itself, to worry about.

What I'm saying is, essentially every player in Dota is "bad". The game feels more punishing because you just sometimes feel absolutely stupid, even though of course you aren't. You regularly have moments that feel like forgetting that you need to build a Cybernetics Core before you can build Stalkers, which sounds bad in a Starcraft context, but in Dota that's just normal.

Also since you played Starcraft, you know very well that small advantages quickly spiral into larger advantages, i.e. snowballing. Theoretically, in a perfect Starcraft game, if one player falls behind early and both play well from that point onward, the one that fell behind will keep falling more behind and eventually lose. But of course, there's also defender's advantage, which allows to extend the game and allow the other player to make a mistake themselves, thus evening out the game again, which means that not every game where one player gets an advantage is always won by that player. It's exactly the same in Dota, but it works completely differently, since defender's advantage is not about rush distances, and in general, the gameplay is just completely different.

So what I'm saying with all of this is, what you're experiencing is completely normal. Dota is very different from most other games and has very special knowledge required. It's completely normal to feel completely lost and not even have an idea of where to start.

So, with that out of the way, let's get a bit more practical: how you actually get better in Dota.

So first of all, what you're doing here is the best thing you can do. Ask other people what to do better. You lack a lot of knowledge and experience, and in a game so complex that is incredibly valuable. Luckily, we humans have learned how to transfer experience, by talking about things.

The second most important thing is to just learn what all the things do in Dota. Whenever you come across something that you forgot, look into it again and make sure that you understand what's happening.

The next thing is to actually play the game, of course. If you don't play enough, you won't be getting comfortable with how the game controls. This is the thing most people do the most of and which comes naturally.

As you probably know from Starcraft, watching your own replays is also incredibly important. In tandem with this, watching pro player replays and seeing what they do (and figuring out why) and thus learning new things to incorporate into your own game is also very useful.

And now finally, as the very last part, let's get into actual advice for you on what you're doing wrong and what you can do better.

I have no idea, and there's just too much in dota to just give you general advice. The single best thing you can do is to post a match ID of yours and let me (+ others) look at it. I'm very knowledgeable about all stages of the game, but I'm pretty bad at playing currently since I've just not been playing the game lately, but I've been involved in the game since Dota 1. When I played more, I've been ranked ~top 10%. If you want, we can chat a bit about the game.

One thing I can tell you with 100% certainty is that, while it may feel like you have no impact on the game, you definitely have. In fact, at your level, if you were playing at pro level, you would literally win 99% of your current games.

The only reason why it feels like you have no impact is because you're used to 1v1 games, where you're 100% responsible for the outcome of the game. Of course, in a 5v5 game, you're only, in a completely even game, 20% responsible for the outcome of the game. So your feeling is absolutely correct, you are essentially only 1/5th as responsible as you're used to, which is a very large drop and may feel like "nothing" comparatively, but it's not nothing. That also means that it's effectively impossible to win every game, and that some games can be won with you under-performing.

But of course, if you'd be playing 4v5, i.e. you would do absolutely nothing in the game, "having no impact", so your team was missing 20% of its power, the win chance wouldn't be 50%*0.8=40%, it'd actually be pretty close to 0%. Also, just "playing better than your opponent" is enough in a 1v1 game, but not in a 5v5 game. You also need to balance out your teammates' average or bad performances. So instead of you "winning a game yourself", what you're doing is basically raising and lowering your chance of a win with your gameplay.

What's your favorite role or heroes? How many hours you played?

I only want to play fun and close games where the team works as a team

You are directly responsible for this! How often have you been talking with your teammates? How often have you been telling them what you want to do, and that you want their help? How often have you told someone: "I'm with you, when you go in, I'll be there"?

My guess is roughly never. That's also normal though since you have no idea what you're doing and are completely focused on your own gameplay, which is understandable.

But if you want a game like that, you can have it by communicating your plan. Of course, that requires some sort of plan. And it requires that your teammates play along. So it won't work every time. But you communicating and trying to bring the team together raises the chance a lot. Most people want to have someone in thejr team coordinating the action, and that role is very valuable.

However, as you noticed already, it's incredibly hard to just focus on your own gameplay already, so until you get to the higher levels, where people got their own gameplay down a bit more, that kind of communication is indeed rare. So communication and teamplay does indeed increase a bit in higher levels.

But you still need someone doing what I just described. If you're not doing it, then you're relying on someone else to do it. And in that case, there's only a relatively small chance that one of your teammates will be that kind of person. So if you care about teamplay and playing together a lot, it's best to learn to make plans and coordinate with your team yourself.