I — Player draft and initial thoughts
Coming into the draft I was looking to get a team with decently high mmr players in every position. I managed to do that minus the pos5, who I planned to be shuffi, but instead had a happy little accident with Nibbles, who turned out to be a good fit in the end (also picked him because he said he can do the team organization in his signup — big lie).
All the players I’ve got weren’t really my go-to, but I had to be realistic, the players I wanted were going for 50–60+ coins, not something I could’ve afforded while sticking to my plan.
Other than 30 coins on Barg, which I assume I could’ve gotten for 10–20, I think the draft went reasonably ok. I didn’t really play with any of those guys before other than an occasional inhouse, but I am always down for a bit of a gamble.
II — The team
No matter how you look at this team, this is just a pool of washed up gamers. Putting Lokie 1 was seen as a bad idea by some of the team and just in general nobody really played that much dota here, we just ended up in one team cause their ranked numbers were high enough and I didn’t have a problem with picking any of them.
So the avg mmr is pretty good and all, how did it look like in practice? Pretty interesting I would say, we didn’t really have a very vocal player, more of a chill vibe with people doing their thing and occasionally throwing some thoughts/ideas. This was a pleasant environment for the most part. Sidelanes would switch pretty seamlessly if there were issues, ganks would happen sometimes even unannounced, teamfights were pretty much walkovers because everyone quickly understood who to target, without any calls really. This would often result in a bunch of heroes dying at once, with us not suffering any casualties.
As we played more games (so progressed through the season, we played just one scrim), our understanding of the map and how to play was getting up there, resulting in pretty technical plays that would split our opponents attention and ended up with us getting favorable trades.
In your typical 5v5 teamfights, our focus was split very nicely, where just enough heroes would chase off the enemy carry while the rest is taking some other kills. We were surprised ourselves sometimes at how we won a teamfight so strongly. I believe some of this comes to additional steps we took before the fights — positioning ourselves properly, putting tanky heroes in front, removing enemy vision/placing our own.
Last team note, at the start of the season those guys kept being late CONSTANTLY, like wtf just show up on time you lazy prawn.
III — Players
Nibbbles (5)
Nibbles ended up in the team in the team as we didn’t really have much other choice for a pos5 (although he was more of a 4 and his hero pool is Sniper, so not ideal, but hey, nothing like forcing a lower mmr player to safelane support, even as Sniper). And we did pick him Sniper 5, and he did fine.
The problems I had with Nibbles was his poor warding early on and disregard for his own exp (good ol’ lvl 5 undying at 17 minutes). As the season moved on, he was able to work on those and especially the warding part, which he later started to complement with an early gem pickup.
Another thing that changed a lot throughout the season was how Nibbles play and what items he purchased. Early on, it was your middle of the road SUPPORT_PLAYER_POS5 placeholder with stuff like glimmer cape and running at a sight of a lost teamfight.
As we continued though, Nibbles started to change. He would talk in his hero’s voice, mimicking their accent and voice lines. We didn’t think much of it, let the man have some fun. But then, he started to do something else. Whenever a teamfight broke out, he would not run back no matter what. His item build, boots into blademail. He had one mission. To die. And that’s what he did, even when he could just walk away, he would chose to ensure that the enemy is properly handled, even if he had to do it all by himself.
This would also manifest in the biggest chad moves you’ll see, like blinking in and throwing in a refresher double tombstone when we had big trouble to push uphill, securing the last remaining barracks.
Or casually throwing a scouting tombstone into the trees with 0 vision, scan, or any other kind of information that the enemy monkey is there.
Overall a bit disconnected from the team but he is your typical nice casual lad and with a pretty good impact for his rank.
Barg (4)
I’ve needed a pos4 and Barg was one of my only higher mmr options. I did hear about him being on the more toxic side of the spectrum and he wasn’t very active when it comes to playing dota so it wasn’t the ideal pick, but I figured that I’ll stick to my original drafting plan.
Starting the league and seeing his hero pool, I was a bit upset. Puck, Mirana, Willow, Shaker, Lina, WR. Where were the high impact heroes such as Earth Spirit, Tusk? Granted, this is a decent hero pool, which we did not utilize until literally last two series for unknown reasons. We chose to stick mostly to Mirana/Shaker/Tiny, which did not feel the best and often had laning issues with haraway’s hero pool. I would say this would come down to us not experimenting enough with the drafts and playing like one scrim only all season… Definitely throwing in Lina and WR would’ve made drafting early on much easier for me (and I had a bunch of issues drafting for this team, which we will get to in more details in the SMMN section later on).
When it comes to Barg’s attitude, it was true, he is the kind of person to get toxic after a loss (not so much in the game itself). We only had four losses during the league, but whether it was announcing his hope that we 0–2 so he can go do other things or leaving the voice channel, losing was way more unpleasant than it needed to be.
When it comes to dota itself, Barg is a greedy and smart player. He will look for opportunities beyond what’s going on and take initiative to execute the play. One of many examples is noticing that we need a bit of space to destroy the barracks while getting out, and the enemy carry being low on hp. This gave the rest of the team a couple additional seconds to finish the job and leave, and on top of that a good trade for his own life.
Sometimes though Barg would overestimate his ability and try a high risk low reward play, ending up with his death or sometimes baiting more teammates into their doom as well. For example, while the below play ended up being a bit unlucky with the creep blocking the arrow, the idea itself was a bit too overboard to say the least and was quickly punished.
Have I mentioned yet that Barg farms a lot? He does. This is the secret power of our team. We actually have four farmers. How does this work out? No idea and I am sure it was a contributing factor towards some of the harder matches that we have had, especially earlier on. The more games we played though, the more fluid were our movements though and we have learned to play around each other, which made us push our advantage extremely hard in the matches we were ahead in. This also put immense pressure on the enemies, as two if not even three lanes were very often in our favor.
It also meant that Barg got rich quickly. Often times he possessed high value items such as euls, blink and hex at 25–35 minutes into the game, which allowed us to setup kills like the below one, where nobody was close really, but Barg disabled the Anti Mage for so long that everybody had a chance to get there and follow up.
To summarize, Barg is a decent player with a slight farming problem and not so slight toxicity problem. If you think you can equalize some of his negative attitude with a vocal PMA type of player and you have more of a playmaking mid and pos3, Barg will fit right into your team and contribute heavily to your wins.
Haraway (3)
Haraway is an interesting case. I really only remembered him from the Sand King offlane memes and maybe some inhouse games and that’s about that. He turned out to be one of the keys to our success. Being one of the more vocal people, and stuff he said in general made sense (although his offlane hero pool was not the easiest to work with for me while drafting).
Plus, a decent lad and a memer, has tendency for slight toxicity unfortunately, but in my experience he was more of a “own up and move on” kind of guys after the fact, so not the worst type. Haraway was also one of the main people moving the team forward in conversations and ideas, we definitely needed it.
When it comes to the game, haraway is a mixed bag between a high IQ dota savant and a handful of goobers. On one hand, he can figure out that the enemy is doing a smoke, exactly where they would be coming from, tank it protecting our carry and get out without dying (no scans or any info).
But this same player can come to the most bizarre conclusions you will see in your dota career.
Haraway can make beast plays based on his own judgement, like knowing he can solo kill the enemy carry at 15 minutes, right after his blink is delivered.
Or just right clicking your units on the enemy hero and forgetting about it (killing them of course).
To summarize, while he isn’t without problems, I think that haraway is an excellent offlane pickup and good addition to any team.
SMMN (2)
I will start by saying, this team was interesting. It has unique strengths that we figured out and played around, which allowed us to take the W in the end. This was a long journey though and lack of scrimming or just dota play in general from the squad really made me unsure of what drafts and lanes will work for this team. Sniper 5? Puck 4? Lokie only wanting to play Ursa? Myself only being comfortable on DP? Rough one. That’s how some of our early drafts looked like though and we did fine. As we continued, it was clear that I can’t do things like pos4 that can’t farm easily, as that’s what Barg would do a lot of the time, or a heavy farming mid, as we had 3 other players farming a ton (commonly referred to “I was split pushing”).
My own performance was pretty up and down, depending on my hero really. I made some pretty big mistakes but also some pretty decent plays, so I am in general happy with how I did.
There was a dark period after I got totally flamed by pretty much the whole team during the upper bracket finals which really did a number on my confidence, as I thought that maybe I am not getting something major about the game (and at this point I was almost certain that this team is done if anything goes wrong). This is where, the one and only Glete GOD Chad beast that he is, on suggestion of Lokie, stepped in and walked me through the replays, pointing out a few minor technical errors in my play, but more so a team problem and helped my wider game understanding a ton, which I believe was a big factor to our last two series performances.
Lokie (1)
The interesting part of the review. Is Lokie actually good? Does he just hit creeps? Will he write a season review?
Well, those questions can’t be answered easily. He is definitely not your typical carry virgin player. His first thought when he is ganked is to try to kill an enemy hero before running away. Maybe that’s where his stubbornness to play Ursa only comes from.
The thing I really liked about him is his teamfight IQ, he would look for the highest impact enemy he can quickly knock out, which usually meant jumping the back line and not just sticking in the front and hitting the enemy “tank” for no reason (which is way too common and very game losing).
Lokie is not without flaws though, the major ones I’ve noticed was his hero pool, even though not the smallest, he would rather just play Ursa every game. The second, more discreet one, was his map movements. There were times where Lokie would farm incorrect parts of the map, not fully utilizing his hero or our advantage, leaving the rest of the team to farm in less optimal or more dangerous places (this got much better as the season went on). From time to time, Lokie would end up paying for it though.
Also while his team fight decision making was pretty much always excellent, on his own he could end up overestimating himself… a lot.
I did not have high expectations from Lokie as he was described as a pos4 player by multiple sources, but I was more than happy to give him a chance on pos1 since he wanted to play it, and he did a stellar job. Pretty quiet and calm dude in general, usually communication limited to “I hit creep” and “go {objectiveX}” but it is easy to communicate with him just by looking at his hero and what he does, he automatically adjusts to what others are doing as well, which is pretty cool.
IV— Final thoughts
I’ve came up with the team name not without a reason, bunch of people not even playing dota and with the stupidest hero pools. I was happy that we managed to win in the end and play some decent dota, but sad at the same time as some of the highlights we have had were only in the last two series. We’ve came very far and started to play pretty clean dota, incorporating higher level strategies and ideas, but not enough matches left to really take it a notch up. Definitely my favorite game was g1 vs Thunderdyne, it felt like throughout the whole game we were playing very well, not really giving any ground and increasing our advantage till the win was closed out.
And finally, big thanks to the league admins, casters, organizers and memers. Nice idea and pretty pleasant games, really made me appreciate it more when I was standing in for a RD2L team and yeah, wasn’t the greatest experience to put it lightly even though it was 1–1, chore not game.
Also, we lost 14 out of 16 coin flips that were performed in the lobby to choose side/pick(the only coin flip that we won and mattered was in the grand finals game 1)! It just meant to be :)
Thanks for reading and see you in Season 1!
