i think couple of months are not enough time :/ especially if this is your first online MOBA game. there is a reason why a more experienced player often has the advantage.

practice practice practice

I've always had a theory that you need to play people better than yourself, or you will continue to plateau.

Find a challenge and overcome it!

Deliberate, constant practice.

For lolers in particular, probuilds and solomid.net, then master one competitive character in at least one position (top and mid are most impressive right now). As you get better (and play more) matchmaking will make you face better players, therefore improving.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGDBR2L5kzI

same way you want to get stronger. lift some heavy arse weights!

pickups, clans, tournaments. when it matters you will exceed your own expectations.

Really? I started dota 2 a week ago, already doing pretty well playing with my friends who have been playing for years.

Of course, I've stuck to one hero, and I don't know the other heroes for shit yet. Also, we play with each other over teamspeak, so I get a lot of advice from them. Learning the mechanics has been pretty easy (I played a lot of sc and war3) the hardest thing is knowing whether to run or engage and awareness for where the other players are.

repetition

practice practice practice!

i lol in the face of fegets who write "practice practice practice"

Knowledge is power in mobas I find. Being able to understand every hero ability and item build is one part. Being able to understand your role in the game is another.

Playing carry roles, you essentially need to be able to make all your decisions as quickly and efficiently as possible to maximise your gpm & xpm (gold per minute and experience per minute). Whilst simultaneously being very aware of what is going on around the map.

Although you'll of course find that your gamestyle will change dramatically depending on the position you play. First thing to do is to make sure you are last hitting every creep you go for (especially as a carry). Secondly, don't forget to analyse your own game - not just games you see on streams where often the streamers do the analysis for you. This helps develop that game sense. You might be laning and notice that you can only see 1 enemy on the map, could this be the team trying to set up a kill? if so, then on who are they going for? Could it be you as you are currently pushing their tower? Oh, all 5 enemies appear to be missing - maybe they are doing Rosh/Baron/Dragon? Or they're smoked up (dota-only here)?

Also remember that there are typical warding spots, but where you should ward will change as the game goes on. If you are currently losing and you need hold enough map control to farm your lanes and your own jungle (or just to know where the hell the enemy may be coming from), then place defensive wards. If you guys are winning and want to maximise your advantage to farm more or less the enitre map while keeping the enemy in base (or forcing them to make a risky play), do some aggressive warding.

Sometimes the difference between winning and losing a game (i dunno about lol, but definitely in dota) can be getting the wrong item. Make sure you aren't thinking about what item you want to buy for your character before the game starts (unless it is obvious based on the team compositions (some heros have standardised builds which you also really shouldn't deviate from)). You might need to re-assess your item build mid-game, so don't feel rushed to buy something till you know you are going for the right item.

Also, get good at doing real-time analysis (analyse your plays mid-game). Don't forget to remind yourself about it all after the match/round/map/etc is over (this applies to learning any game). Talk with your team mates as well, maybe they can provide useful feedback. Although at the same time, don't believe everything you hear - a lot of people (particularly in mobas I find) talk complete garbage sometimes. When I make errors in mobas, i try to tell my team what i should have done instead, this shows the willingness to learn and often sparks some interesting replies you can learn from.


tl;dr

Watching streams is a fantastic way to gain knowledge, but don't use it as a substitute to analysing your own performances. Also, be as efficient as possible in your plays.

Develop dat game sense.

In lolers the opponent's champions are very intuitive to face. I agree that in dota playing all characters and knowing all items is necessary but in LoL not really; plus everyone uses the same items, same champions, same spots for everything and so on. It truly comes down to deliberate practice and copypasting what other players do and pick, until game sense is achieved.

What I want to add here however is that in mobas being a one champion wonder really pays off. Personally I got to top150 NA with one character :P. Anyway, for trying out new champions the best way right now is to play ARAM with friends as they are short games and there's a general idea of the strong and weak points of each champion, better with a borrowed account that has all champions and rune pages for every role.

The only unintuitive parts of LoL are masteries and runes, as there aren't defaults for some reason, but then again everyone uses the same. The advice here is to only buy tier3 runes, available from level20. I'd say the most important are reds (magic pen, attack damage, armor pen, hybrid pen).

As for competitive play, I'd say it's not that great to try solo queue because it leaves nasty habits, is quite frustrating and a major waste of time especially now that it takes ages to go up in ranks. Scrims and weekly tournaments are better for that.

BTW when I say dota it's dota1, played the shit out of it. Haven't played much 2.

just curious, doenst i feel tad hypocritical to "CA is not quake." when playing lol over dota??? heheheheehh

I started and continue to play it because it's not dota. At the time the mobas were dota1 (bot bored), hon (dota clone) and lol, so lol it was. Nowadays dota2 is too similar to dota1, so meh.

And ca is fun. Like playing table soccer knowing it's not soccer.

and lol is the equivelant of foosball of dota!!

play quake.

A couple of months isn't much, and zoots advice is great. When I was playing in CGS, our manager made us fill out these weekly practice sheets which ended up to be such a good way for me to learn and improve in DoA in like 6 months. Basically, they forced me to focus on very specific things each week, eg:
What was done well?
What did you aim to improve this week?
How did you improve from the last week?
Who did you play against?
What do you need to work on/what will you work on next week?

(Something along these lines anyway)

So basically each week I'd work on one specific aspect of gameplay. it forced me to really analyze my performance and nitpick specific details. By picking it apart week by week, it soon became 2nd nature to quickly see where I was going wrong and what my strengths were, then simply work on the bad.

Im not saying you should keep records or anything, but if you keep these questions in mind and set learning goals, you can improve bit by bit and you won't lose motivation if you also recognize what you're doing right.

I think this is a really helpful learning strategy and could easily be applied to Quake or any other game :)

Tell your friends to play dota or hon and your on the same level

1) Think about what you want to do.
2) Think about what your opponent wants to do.
3) base decisions on increasing point 1 and decreasing point 2.
Find some optimum in that.

Works in any game.

Practice to increase the quality of the executions of your actions.
Practice and play with better players to undestand the game in detail.
Practice a lot to understand how to play in different each environment depending of X gametype.
Keep in mind that if you play at a high level, if you stop to improve... then it's because you keep repeating an old pattern (psychological).

And when you feel that you reached your definitive plateau as a human being, well... you can still go beyond that be calming the brain and once you did that successfully you'll start tapping into the sub-conscious parts of the mind. You'll develop greater multi-threading capabilities, faster thought process overall, faster analysis, better reflex (since it also affects the quality of your nervous system), etc. That will allow you to play at a whole new level that very few people will have the chance to experience even once in their life. Have fun... to after a month, you'll realize that to be the best in the world is freaking boring.

And change your mindset. It's everything.

The purpose of the game isn't to aim better, move faster, etc. The purpose of the game is to manipulate the mind of your opponents to control their actions in order to defeat them effortlessly. The more skills a game requires, the easier it is to do this. The more casual a game is, the less it matters to be smart...