General Discussion - Page 252

On March 06 2012 11:15 Kupon3ss wrote:


I disagree entirely, the list of players like Loda, Dendi, Yaphets, Yamateh, Dai/X are definitely not the key to top teams, and Vigoss actually fits very well with that list of players, they are the "star" players who pull off the sick plays, but 90% depend on a solid team to make them shine. Of course, much of this is due to this list of players, on the whole, tend to play micro intensive heroes who solo mid and bring up the "rhythm" of a team with ganks and map presence/pressure. These players aren't overrated per say, but what they do is become that spark that bring out a team's inner radiance.

Honestly, the only player I've ever seen "carry" an entire team the way you're describing was Burning/AAA for the first part of 2011, he was literally safely farming and ending up trying to 1.5 (with PIS) v 5 ing due to the overall lack of structure and organization of DK's play, but that's another story.

On the issue of the China/West split, China was far ahead of the west almost as soon as the core pro scene developed, by 2009 its standard game was clearly on a different level to the west, the greatest advantage that the Chinese have is the desire for victory above all else and the team organization and coordination to do so. Typical games between top Chinese teams will feature a degree of team execution that we've really only consistently seen from Navi, though several western teams are clearly capable of such brilliance on occasion.

They picked heroes precisely because they are solid and lead to victory in a consistent, gradual manner. This is both a great strength and weakness, on one hand you have a crushing standard metagame with set guidelines whose execution will probably completely overpower those trying to play against it head on. The downside is that this allows for various "cheesy" strategies to be employed that have a good chance of beating that standard meta once you study it and catch the Chinese team, used to only play in their "standard meta", off guard, as was the case with DTS in 2010 and Mineski at SMM. However, this invariably leads to a period of growth and strengthening of the scene, it was DTS that showed China that you can run Syllabear, but it was the Chinese teams who turn it into the near-unstoppable juggernaunt that it was played as during 6.7-present. Similarly, Mineski showed China how bottle crowing and heroes like Slardar and QoP can work, all of which are being integrated into the Chinese Meta.

What does this mean in terms of the overall split? Honestly not very much, instead of a West/East split, we have a Dota/Dota2 split, I believe that the primary reason Navi won the international is that it was indeed Dota2 and trained as though it was a different game, and Ehome only came in second because it was perhaps the only Chinese team to have realized that it was a different game and attempted to develop a different way of playing. Navi was by far the BEST DOTA2 TEAM that day and has been since then. Besides the obvious "oh the hero list is different" arguments, Dota2, no matter how faithfully it tries to replicate its predecessor, uses an entirely different engine with extremely many small and subtle ways that the game has changed.

At the end of the day, it will be up to China to recognized that they cannot play Dota2 the same way they played Dota, pick up on the subtleties and nuances of the new engine and new meta while the West try to capture that professional desire for victory and team coordination so lacking in most of the western teams today.

On March 19 2012 22:54 Steveling wrote:
Weird fact.
In all the chinese scrims I've watched and I'm even watching right now one, bat is almost always either picked or banned in the first phase. And whenever it's picked it has much success.