EPTRemember the patch when Broodmother spammers were so prevalent it seemed like she was in every single pub game? The marvelous times when she could live beyond the pathable terrain and still make a tremendous impact, an unstoppable force that drains half of your team's resources by herself. And by "your team" I mean the support.
“Oh, you’ve strayed from the lane? It’s a nice small camp you’re farming here, unfortunately your miserable audacity to place down these expensive sentry wards you barely managed to afford only springs an additional opportunity to feed my babies. And to create more of my babies. But for now, just let me relax on my cliff: I’ll be so far out of your reach even my own allies going to have troubles figuring out where I currently am. Minimap doesn’t even cover these areas.”
The only way you could ever catch this hero was him being completely and utterly retarded.
“I’m a decent player,” of course my sentiments were like that, “Above average to say the least. I can do better.” Don’t lie to yourself - everybody gets this sort of a feeling once in awhile. Generally followed by a huge disappointment, but you’ll never know before you try.
I got seriously annoyed by playing position 25 every single game, because honestly, getting to the brown boots tech at 17 minute mark is rather off putting, even if this leads to victory. The pride and confidence of my inner voice pushed me to change.
And from there I became one of them. I decided to become a disgusting Brood picker. The vile filth that gets your blood boil from witnessing this sickening magnitude of bullshit everyone has to deal with. And by "everyone" I mean the support. You want them to start questioning this game, IceFrog and their own existence. It’s a psychological warfare: an attempt to skew the entire sanity of your foes to make them crumble beneath the weight of their egos. It’s “an outside job”. Which is, you know, a job.
The game loads up and I check the scoreboard: no one is muted so we are already onto a good start. My teammates might not be familiar with the style we are about to play, but I’m confident in my computer video games abilities. I mean, if Brood works against my team when we face it, it should work against any team.
All doubts aside, I put a marker on the minimap indicating my lane choice and desired hero. Based on the experience in this wild and volatile environment I type “offlane guys”, “I’m going to play offlane”, “offlane solo”, “solo offlane”, “please offlane”, just to make sure people mute me right there and won’t ever interfere with my game. All I need is some babies and a poor soul in front of me. Leave the Broodmother alone.
Everything goes according to plan. They have a jungle hero, and I have an easy time grieving their double lane. No troubles in sight and judging by the activity of their Enigma he’s most likely rushing midas.
An avalanche begins with a snowflake, or in my case, as our mid gets a rune. Perchance he just bought the account and does not really comprehend his purpose in this role, but in any case he decides to gank a sidelane. My lane.
Not to humblebrag, but I’m having the game of my life. At this rate my farm is going to require a much more spacious field, so I type in chat, paraphrasing: “Hey man, I don’t need your help there. Keep farming mid, try to catch their offlaner, go farm some jungle camps, suicide into Roshan, leave your desk and open up a hardware store, but I don’t need you in my lane.”
Apparently this guy muted me to play his own “1v9 game”. A common attitude for a mid player that I already got used to so didn’t expect any miracles. Only hopes for the best.
Unfortunately for him he is not a sneaky omnipresent Broodmother. Because I am. During the daytime as he passes underneath the vision of the first rune wards he is as surprising as your carry being shit. This also was the case, which, to say the least, was rather unsurprising.
Craving for an opportunity to have a chance in this game, the opponents couldn’t believe the food just walks towards them. Hesitating a bit, they expected some sort of a trap. Not for too long. Without any mobility or even money for basic boots they began running in circles around the trees hunting for this guy. It’s not like he had his own boots either so the hunger games starring turtles was quite an amusing sight.
My support guy finally has a thing to do. He decides to stop soaking experience staying behind my carry, buys a tp scroll and soon enough he joins the fray. Low movement speed and completely empty mana pool make things slightly more awkward than he would prefer, but the essence of the game is to fight, no? He is a support and thus he should support his team.
With slightly upraised brows and a blank, completely helpless stare I type into chat a single word - “guys”, before I realize how pointless my endeavor actually is.
“Nice, let’s push this tower,” I heard the voice of our Nature Prophet while a familiar tree sprung near the side shop. He buys gloves of haste and summons treants utilizing his last mana.
What do you do when your team is being pressured by 5 man? Rhetorical question. Since it’s a public game, of course you participate in a fight - your typical pub brawl. And just like so, one by one, every single person in the match appeared on top of my webs at some 7-ish minute mark and suddenly the whole area became an arena. I don’t know how intelligent gladiators were back then, but I can safely assume they were definitely smarter since what I’m seeing right now is the dumbest shit ever.
I understand the importance of towers. Yes, you have to destroy them and yes, you have to protect them for the same exact reasons plus the part where you don’t lose your throne. However this shouldn’t lead to literally Russian Dota low-priority 1k MMR gameplay.
It did. I watch people die only to return back again. We know that we fight not for the goal and not for the tower, but for the person on the left and for the person on the right. It was a continuous, everlasting battle where I couldn’t really participate: my babies get killed in seconds by collateral aoe damage and all I can do is to vomit some acid, but that’s about it. Teleportation scrolls ran out of stock.
Staring at my screen I slowly came to realization that I am not even mad. My numb facial expression hasn’t changed throughout the game, but solidified instead. At this point I just lost all faith in humanity as a race. Maybe dinosaurs would’ve been better at video games. My mind couldn’t keep focus anymore and started to wander thinking about all the other planets, galaxies and distant stars and worlds, because after what I have witnessed - we probably won’t go there.
I never played Brood ever since.
by etofok
p.s. just trying to get good at English by writing some fiction, it's a good learning experience. If you are a writer I'd appreciate your input and corrections. Maybe I'll make illustrations + voice-over later on, because I really like this one, but for now I just want to share the story. Leave feedback about what you liked, how fun is it, how it reads, has it "the flow" etc etc
