DOTA 2

I'm actually amazed how volatile this TI has been, and not just because I'm Puppey fanboy. China always shows up at TI, which is what most of the west underestimates, but having pretty much all of the western contenders out or in the losers bracket is pretty crazy. Individual skill has obviously caught up everywhere, but the tactics as well, might be the early fighting/push meta, where the usual response is to have even earlier timing and you will find your heroes somehow. Or just cheese it with drow/huskar. While everybody is gushing over how many heroes got picked, I'd love to see a breakdown of how many heroes get picked by individual teams.

Guess this is the environment where PPD shines - you get to develop your strat on the fly.

Zaphid said:

I'm actually amazed how volatile this TI has been, and not just because I'm Puppey fanboy. China always shows up at TI, which is what most of the west underestimates, but having pretty much all of the western contenders out or in the losers bracket is pretty crazy. Individual skill has obviously caught up everywhere, but the tactics as well, might be the early fighting/push meta, where the usual response is to have even earlier timing and you will find your heroes somehow. Or just cheese it with drow/huskar. While everybody is gushing over how many heroes got picked, I'd love to see a breakdown of how many heroes get picked by individual teams.

Guess this is the environment where PPD shines - you get to develop your strat on the fly.

Click to expand...

If you have the compendium, this is actually visible under the predictions for TI6. There is a section for team who picks the most heroes. Wings was winning last I checked.

On a personal note, I never fly Delta, ever. Except this year when I want to go to TI and Delta is the only one doing a direct flight from Orlando to Seattle. Except Delta had a major fucking outage at their headquarters in Atlanta on Monday and have been cancelling flights for 3 days. My flight to Seattle this morning at 7 AM EST got cancelled. They say they have rescheduled it to one at 2PM EST, but my entire reservation is gone from their website, and their phoneline is bananas because of how many people they are fucking over right now.

Oh god... my life.

I think the meta has come around so far that comfort picks are best picks often. Obviously synergy is still king and counters are needed but "smart" and "clever" seem to be getting trumped by solid and familiar. Parity is high and what you've practiced most probably is better than a superior strategy that you can't execute as well. For sure there's been more coach-level analysis ahead of time and probably some serious simulation and mathematics done.

I think that's good and bad, although the games so far have been spectacular. I love pocket strats though and seeing a Puppy or similar drafter come up with something *new* for a big game just makes me hard. So far most attempts at innovation have failed horribly in the main event at least. Not entirely true of course though, the winning teams seem to be able to do so with almost anything.

All that are/have gone, lend me your experiences.

I'm old and have always *kinda* wanted to take a geek vacation. I mean, when I was young (as in before most of even you were alive...) I did GenCon but that was when it was in Racine, WI and yes, that's how old I actually am. Oh, and it was a DnD and 'other stuff' convention and my folks let me and my sister go alone living in Toronto at the time. I was 14-ish? and she was 17 at max. Crazy by modern standards. We literally lived in a tent village and played games in the university or whatever. It was a geek burning man for children and geeks and I'm still a bit shocked that my sister never got raped (as far as I know) and more so that even my progressive folks let us go. Still, I taught a bunch of GMs that a precocious canadian kid could rule-lawyer better than the expected geeks. Plus, pretty sure looking back on it that they wanted to bang my sister.

She turned out well, me I wonder about.

An update to my TI 6 saga. I am now in Chicago. I booked a one way United flight that cost as much as my round trip. I will be here a couple hours until I leave for Seattle, arriving there at 1240. Not quite the 1030 I originally had chested but at least I don't lose the whole day like Delta was trying to get me to do. I just have to get my money back from them for fucking shit up. Definitely still going though.

To Intrinsic, I am now probably just going to wait at the airport for my brothers who get in at 2 and 3, so I will get to Key Arena eventually this afternoon. Fortunately EG play late as that is my most anticipated series today.

EE out of Secret per Puppey fb post. No surprise really, someone was definitely getting booted and he was the logical choice.

Yeah, that's definitely not a surprise.

I'm happy for DC, as w33 is probably my favorite player.

That Puppey fb post is prolly a hacker. Doubt he would be posting that at 5 am

Yup, the following posts after that pretty much confirmed it was fake.

Although: Convo from last summer, the other guy is apaprently 1437, and this gives some theories why TL just crumbled at TI ...

Also, I'm not sure if it should even be here, might be worth deleting

Idk how they managed to keep those egos intact to even make it to last years TI. Also, Theeban would lick the jizz off of Puppey's junk.

Someone needs to give Capitalist a dictionary, the guy can't say anything without incorrectly using words. Inexcusable as a native speaker who talks for a living.

That puppey convo is kinda surprising. If it was really that bad, how did Kuro ever go from Na'vi to Secret?

I just don't have faith in A getting anything right. This is twice in two days they've had a totally reasonable start with Mirana + Drow and haven't been able to pressure in the early game.

That game lasted WAY too long for how bad Alliance was losing.

Fnatic was taking no chances...

Yeah, that was great no risk dota, even if a bit boring to watch. G2 seems to be a bit closer so far