Was listening to ITN and Jeff Cannata was talking about his own personal theory of HOTS (and MOBA) players having circles of awareness that they progress through as they get better at the game and I couldn't have agreed more. It's not always a 1 for 1 comparison, but it's often a good gauge or starting point of determining of where a player is overall in the actual game progression.
Like starting out, this is what I'd consider a rough sketch of the steps of learning about the game and what's going on around you:
1st circle of awareness: yourself and what's immediately around you
2nd circle of awareness: your teammates and what they do/their heroes do
3rd circle of awareness: the maps themselves and what each objective does and when it spawns
4th circle of awareness: the enemy and what they do/their heroes do
5th circle of awareness: the map and where your teammates are on the map and what that means for your team
6th circle of awareness: the map and where your enemies are OR might be and what that means for your team
and so on and so forth.
His complaint was that he feels like he has progressed beyond awareness of himself, made account of his teammates, and can even take into account his enemies, but he is continually trapped in Silver (hero league wise) because of the rampant don't-give-a-fuck-edness that occurs. Like he says he commonly has people in draft say "it doesn't matter what we do we're in silver, bro". We've had a million discussions on here about MMR hell and whether it exists with many different opinions, but outside of that specific label one thing I've championed for a long, long time is that the lower down the totem pole you go, the more likely you are to run into simple general mischief or apathy that costs you a game instead of just a bad draft or bad play. So in essence you have more variables that can negatively impact you in any given game than a player in Platinum or Diamond or Master.
I often wonder how people in those levels continue to play regularly and don't absolutely hate the mode. Orochinagis pipes in every now and then with some of the stuff he sees in Bronze and I'm just like, "fuck, man." Like you legit deserve an award for putting up with some of that shit just to get a good game every 4th or 5th game where the bar for good game is "no one d/c'd, threw, or quit in the first 10 minutes".
I find the whole circle of awareness thing fascinating. It's not foilproof; god knows when we all played together we had some people who were Masters level MMR but played the game like a bull in a china shop, and played with others who were booty tier MMR but were able to synergize with our level of play. For the most part, you can look at most players in a certain range and find them only so far up the pyramid in awareness. In some ways it sort of ties back into closer's concerns about the lack of game knowledge in the community, only this aspect of it is something I feel is more fundamental to success.
