EPT
Fellowship in the Low Priority Queue
At the start of a game down in LPQ, a pub (for we are always alone in lpq) picks roflcopter. I mention that he should just carry using rapier and we can come back from anything, and a couple of the lpq dudes on my team mention the game that Liquid (?) made a comeback in with a rapier gyro. It seems to be well-known, even down here.
In a way, the LPQ is entirely distinct from the regular queue in terms of community. Whereas Blizzard's Sc2 and bnet 2.0 suffered from an overabundance of coldness, Dota 2 has the opposite problem. In Sc2, as you move from one match to another, there's little player interaction, and no need for player interaction, so people BM, or are silent. Dota 2, however, is a team game, and unlike say CS, how you do can negatively impact your allies. I remember in CS there would be noobs, and sure they might not help but unless they were using grenades it really wasn't a huge issue they were bad. My ability to kill anyone on the enemy team would not be negatively impacted by the foolishness of my allies. Dota 2, with its gold and leveling systems, is quite a different game: a player can easily feed kills to the enemy, making them unbeatable. The rage this inspires in allies is legendary.
So it goes: We are losing, and badly. Their carries are fed and their initiators have blink, and we say to the gyro: "farm a rapier, we'll turtle" and he actually gets agrees. Furiously, we ward and make fighting retreats, slowing down the inevitable push as long as we can, bleeding each tower only grudgingly, never letting gyro get ganked, never letting them simply push into a team fight. We play 4 man dota and stall as hard as we can. It's brutal and there's no way we can win any team fights, but we hold together. At last, he has it-- Gyro holds the rapier, and with it our hope of winning the game, crushing their carries, and making their supports cry tiny dire tears.
Just as he completes it, they arrive at our mid rax. We can stall them no longer. Gyro pops a tp to get back from the secret shop, but it's coming in out in front of our rax tower. I move out too far and everything falls apart. Voice chat is a mixture of giving orders and muffled screaming as we dive in that our rapier not be so unexposed (and yes, it is "our" rapier). I almost get close enough to chuck gyro back towards our dazzle, but instead I fling an enemy creep. Gyro gets off a couple brief attacks before Zeus nukes him down-- he has like rapier, phase boots, and a bracer and that's it. Despite that, he drops 2 of them. The battle rages on and it's clear that we're losing this team fight, just like every other team fight. In the twilight of the combat, our last living hero, a pub dazzle with the handle "Butt" and an icon that is literally a butt, realizes there's only one thing that matters: the rapier on the ground. He dives in, grabs the rapier, shallow-graves himself, running back into our base. As long as we keep the rapier, we can make it. As long as we keep it away from their sniper and their naga. Sniper burns an ult on him, and naga strikes him, but the shallow-grave holds.
He nearly reaches our throne towers before the naga nets him. He has 1 hp. The naga strikes him, and he falls, dropping the rapier, our hope, at her feet. My heart drops into my stomach. Will she destroy it? I hope with all the power of hope that I have, that the naga's hubris drives her to pick it up. Between me and invoker we might be able to nuke her down and reclaim it, especially if she's already low. A smart player would simply destroy the rapier-- but this is lpq and no-one is smart. And so, hope lives on, however weakly, however feebly.
The naga takes a halting step (or slither, even) forwards, then turns back. She swings top to hit our rax there where they have creeps. Divinity lies at her feet, but she retreats, not realizing the item on the ground is a dropped rapier. We have a second chance, a second shot we don't deserve to win a game we ought to lose.
When Gyro is back up, he grabs the rapier off the ground and we go to defend our top rax. At some point, we lose the rax, but Gyro roflcopters the entire enemy team. In allchat, they wonder how it happened, and between our silencer's laughing and gyro's crushing the mid lane creep waves, one of them figures out that Gyro has the rapier. We own up to it, and are alive with excitement.
Still, even down a rax, we have hope-- we push mid. With Gyro rofling the creep waves and all of us nervously twitchy with the same adrenaline I remember from countless games spent cheesing, I feel like we can win. I feel that we are destined to come back. Excitement is a dangerous ally, but without hope we are lost, and they are brothers, those emotions. We come to them below their mid rax-- but this time they are ready. As we pull back, Gyro makes a mistake and is caught. battle is joined, and all their CC is on Gyro. He lacks even a bkb, and Zeus nukes him down. We are thoroughly routed, dazzle going down before he can even ult. I check for money, furiously considering the possibility of selling everything, purchasing travel boots, and trying to tp in and grab the rapier-- but I have no money for it. Our moment of hope is gone, euphoria crushed beneath the grinding feeling of "sniper is op" and "pubs are bullshit teammates". More than anything else, there's nothing so hateful as that moment when you go from feeling victorious to feeling destitute. You stop being a friend, you lose that sense of camaraderie, and you become a dark troll, putting forth a shield of hatred to protect your mind from frustration inadequacy. And I am frustrated, for the rapier is in their hands now-- all our warding and turtling was for nothing. You cannot trust a pub with a rapier, you cannot trust anyone but yourself. The world is a dark, cold place.
Fuck rapiers.
Then, on the minimap I see our Invoker is still in the fight. What's going on? I move the screen over.
In a moment of split-second reaction, our Exort Invoker brought up the spell that turns him invisible and certainly doesn't use Exort, and grabbed the rapier as our Gyro fell. He carries it now, walking ever-so-slowly towards our base, as the enemy team swarms around him, furious for their lack of AoE, furious for their lack of true sight. With maddeningly slow steps, our pub Invoker who lost mid to a Zeus so thoroughly we lost both our other lanes, our pub invoker who flubbed his spells every team-fight carries gently home our hope, and our third chance at victory. Whatever BM I might have held in my mind for him and his shittily slow invocation melted instantly.
We've lost rax, now, having only 2 rax and the accompanying tower. Gyro grabs our rapier, and together we push mid again, winning a team fight with startling speed. We push down their mid rax, and back off. Finally, things are coming together. Third time is the charm, as they say.
Then I make the worst suggestion I made all game: "roshan is up soon... maybe we should kill him so gyro has the aegis and stops dropping the rapier?"
It goes predictably, of course-- by the time we actually convince everyone and get over to roshan, the other team is ready. My smoke is dispelled by a nearby hero. As we go in, they descend upon us, and we die. There is no dazzle or invoker to carry the rapier this time. Their Lion picks it up, and try as we might, we cannot wrest it from him in the final team fight, at our throne.
In the final moments of the game, there are ggs all around. All 10 players in the game thought it was excellent. For probably the first time I can remember, people legitimately commend each other and compliment each other's play. Who would have expected to find this in the dark realms on the low priority queue?
My team and I (for they are now my team, no longer simply pubs) party up and queue for another game, another LPQ AP on USW. We may lost, but it was glorious, and though we are all bad, we at least have a friendship forged by as nerd-chill-ey a dota 2 match there ever was.
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