DOTA2

[Johny Cee]

I haven't seen them all, but every ESL game I've seen so far has been entertaining. New patch has done wonders for making the game exciting again, instead of one sided and static.

http://www.twitch.tv/esltv_dota/profile/past_broadcasts

Out of my last dozen or so games only a small handful have felt like one sided stomps.  Many more comebacks and close games where it felt like "next team to get wiped loses" since the patch.

From a sample size of 30ish games:

I've definitely seen a fair amount of stomps.  It seems like if games were remotely close before the patch, they have become even more swingy and much more drawn out.  I'd say games are longer by a good 15 minutes a piece, and I've had two(!!) that have gone passed the 70 minute mark because both teams were afraid a team wipe meant loss.

[Fordel]

Hahaha holy shit this first game: http://www.twitch.tv/dreamleague/b/580100388

Draft Starts at 54 mins, Game Starts at 1 hour and 4 mins.

[Thrawn]

Starting to hate the new patch changes and mechanics.  The amount of games I've lost in the last week or two because people can't seem to figure out you can't screw around with a small lead anymore is frustrating.  I think I need to just set some macros for "We need to push, we need to group up, etc. etc.  We're throwing the game if we keep messing around.  It's not funny when you dive in 1v5 and say "Ooops, I'm not as big as I thought I was I guess, LOLOL"  I would say about half of my losses show an XP graph that tells a story of us getting a huge early lead, someone starts diving, playing stupid, or just afk farming and then over the next half an hour the other team comes back and wins.

[Johny Cee]

On the backs of Jakiro and Tide, managed to get myself up to +45 wins.  Fucking Jakiro can be massively broken by maxing Liquid Fire first.  He shits on opposing melees, and pushes down towers soooo quickly.  Tide in a semi-farming role is just a team-fight monster.  Arcanes, Blink, into Hood.  You can initiate and tank up the damage/ults for a while, then Ravage when your team goes on them...  or just Blink-Ravage.  Lots of dual lane combos are weak to you just running at them and anchor smashing.

[Johny Cee]

Starting to hate the new patch changes and mechanics.  The amount of games I've lost in the last week or two because people can't seem to figure out you can't screw around with a small lead anymore is frustrating.  I think I need to just set some macros for "We need to push, we need to group up, etc. etc.  We're throwing the game if we keep messing around.  It's not funny when you dive in 1v5 and say "Ooops, I'm not as big as I thought I was I guess, LOLOL"  I would say about half of my losses show an XP graph that tells a story of us getting a huge early lead, someone starts diving, playing stupid, or just afk farming and then over the next half an hour the other team comes back and wins.

They're rebalancing the comeback mechanic again with the latest patch, along with nerfing the shit out of a few of the popular picks (DP, Void, etc.)  Not sure if its live yet or what.

http://store.steampowered.com/news/14675/

[Fordel]

Holeee sheeet, BG vs C9 in DAC on BTS.


I'll put up a VOD link once it's available.


Jaysus!

[Trippy]

The first part is on Twitch:

http://www.twitch.tv/beyondthesummit/b/620665871

First part of the first game that is, it cuts off the good part

The second game is streaming right now ahead of what's available in DOTA 2 itself on the Beyond the Summit channel:

http://www.twitch.tv/beyondthesummit

[Trippy]

Steam and DOTA 2 are down

[Fordel]

I think it's all up now, that first game was great! Game starts at 1 hour 05 minutes in Trippy's link.

[Trippy]

Yeah it came back up about 5 minutes after I posted that.

[Trippy]

*Sigh* they still haven't fixed the BTS caster mics.

[Trippy]

Okay now the casters are getting silly too in the Secret vs VG game.

[Fordel]

Ok this Secret vs. VG game. Holeeee sheeeeet.

[Fordel]

No really, what in the fuck!

Double post for effect.

[Johny Cee]

Holeee sheeet, BG vs C9 in DAC on BTS.


I'll put up a VOD link once it's available.


Jaysus!

Everything shows up on the Beyond the Summit youtube channel pretty soon after.


BG vs C9 Game 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm8WA7oWO-I

This game? Where...

[Margalis]

These games are taking way too long now.

I guess there are more rubberband / comeback mechanics so things tend to stretch out, and a side effect of that is that teams are scared to push advantage because they are afraid of those rubberband mechanics. It seems like in a lot of these games one team has a huge advantage 15 minutes in then spends the next half hour doing nothing.

Last night there was a game that was like 80 minutes long and for most of that time basically nothing was happening. The 15 minute death-ball push was kind of silly but this is equally silly.

[Fordel]

Nah, I'm all for it. Being able to finish is part of the game and I'm glad teams are forcing the issue instead of GGing out.

[Johny Cee]

So yeah, Rick and Morty announcer pack is coming.  The creator is working with PyrionFlax.  Link to twitch stream of "messing around" audio session: http://www.twitch.tv/pyrionflax/v/3844854

This is probably a must buy.  And if you haven't watched Rick and Morty, you really really need to.  Best Adult Swim cartoon in years, and it is just outright hilarious.

[Thrawn]

http://www.dota2.com/684/

Tons of changes, new items, new Aghs upgrades.

[Trippy]

TI 5 qualifiers are in a month. That's not a lot of time to adjust to all the changes.

[K9]

I'm just hoping for a different meta from TI4. The playstyle (I think it was mostly deathball?) just didn't make for compelling viewing. Although the changes to the comeback mechanics have helped reduce the momentum teams can leverage from early kills, so maybe that'll be enough.

[Bann]

Deathball pretty much ended with introduction of 6.83. Rubberband plays into it slightly, but I think the lessening of tier1 tower gold and most importantly the refreshing of glyph everytime a tier 1 falls were the end of that meta. I thought 6.83 had an overall really fun meta to both watch and play. I'm excited to see the new stuff in 6.84, specifically the introduction of CDR and Spell Vamp to the game, and making thrawn farm agh's for me on his alchemist.

 

[Fordel]

Slot-less items are going to make super late game really weird.

That reflecting spell shield is going to break the game. Literally, it's super buggy and edge case centric.

The Spell Vamp isn't going to do half of what people think it will.

Mangos 




The other bit not tied to the patch notes, is Valve is going to set up it's own WCS/LCS style thing to a degree. Along side The International, Valve is going to grant 3 other independent tournaments 'Major' status, and have the international's rules of team rosters and trading apply to those as well. They seem to be trying to reduce the endless team shuffle and try to create a proper season.

[Johny Cee]

I'm just hoping for a different meta from TI4. The playstyle (I think it was mostly deathball?) just didn't make for compelling viewing. Although the changes to the comeback mechanics have helped reduce the momentum teams can leverage from early kills, so maybe that'll be enough.

Umm.

People remember TI4 poorly.  Deathball dominated the Semis and Finals.  Before that, the meta was all over the place and I though superfun.  You had 4 protect 1, greedy lineups of 4 cores (especially EG) which used things like offlane Void, you had split push, you had early game aggression, you had shit all over the map.

The last two matches (Third Place, Finals) were ass with fast deathball crushing to early wins.  Everything before, especially group stages, was great.

[Fordel]

http://www.dota2.com/international/compendium/

It Begins!

[Trippy]

[Johny Cee]

The prize pool is almost at $5 million, weeeeee!  Looks like another wild ride this year....  some folks are running numbers and, if it follows last year's trends, are estimated a final pool over $15 million.

In my games, lots of folks with compendiums.  Lots of folks with the lvl 50 compendium.  Usually have a couple per game with a +250 level compendium.

[K9]

I'm just hoping for a different meta from TI4. The playstyle (I think it was mostly deathball?) just didn't make for compelling viewing. Although the changes to the comeback mechanics have helped reduce the momentum teams can leverage from early kills, so maybe that'll be enough.

Umm.

People remember TI4 poorly.  Deathball dominated the Semis and Finals.  Before that, the meta was all over the place and I though superfun.  You had 4 protect 1, greedy lineups of 4 cores (especially EG) which used things like offlane Void, you had split push, you had early game aggression, you had shit all over the map.

The last two matches (Third Place, Finals) were ass with fast deathball crushing to early wins.  Everything before, especially group stages, was great.

Ah, I guess my memory was just skewed by the final couple of rounds then. The finals were such a let down in contrast to TI3

[Johny Cee]

I'm just hoping for a different meta from TI4. The playstyle (I think it was mostly deathball?) just didn't make for compelling viewing. Although the changes to the comeback mechanics have helped reduce the momentum teams can leverage from early kills, so maybe that'll be enough.

Umm.

People remember TI4 poorly.  Deathball dominated the Semis and Finals.  Before that, the meta was all over the place and I though superfun.  You had 4 protect 1, greedy lineups of 4 cores (especially EG) which used things like offlane Void, you had split push, you had early game aggression, you had shit all over the map.

The last two matches (Third Place, Finals) were ass with fast deathball crushing to early wins.  Everything before, especially group stages, was great.

Ah, I guess my memory was just skewed by the final couple of rounds then. The finals were such a let down in contrast to TI3

People pointed out in this thread that the tourney structure for the last few brackets was really terrible too.  Rather than play out the semis and finals on the last day, you went into it knowing one of the finals teams and playing a couple loser brackets matches into a match for the last spot/third place.

Basically, it allowed two shitty matches on the last day to taint what was otherwise a really interesting tourney.  I mean, group stages alone I think that nearly every hero saw play, and some things that sounded terrible on paper according to conventional wisdom became game breakers...  void off, greedy pub-style line-ups, heavy roaming, etc.


It's over $5 million at a faster pace than last year's prize pool.  We'll  see if this has legs, which will probably come down to stretch goals and what the next batch of immortal items are.

[Johny Cee]

Prize pool is nearly $8 million, despite the fact that the second set of Immortal items aren't in game yet.  Should be a pretty good uptick when the tier 2 Immortals come out!

The direct invites have gone out as well:

Americas:
EG (Probably one of the favorites.  Arteezy left but Sumail is the new Dota prodigy and the rest of the team is solid)

China:
Invictus Gaming
LGD
VG
Newbee (there was some debate on whether they would get invited, as they were stinking up the joint for most of the year)

SEA:
Team Malaysia

EU:
Team Secret
Cloud 9
Empire
Virtus Pro


The qualifiers for the last six slots should be pretty interesting.  MVP and Rave are supposed to be pretty good in SEA, the EU qualifiers will have teams like Navi and Alliance trying to get back on track. 

[tazelbain]

Prize pool is nearly $8 million, despite the fact that the second set of Immortal items aren't in game yet.  Should be a pretty good uptick when the tier 2 Immortals come out!

What does this mean? Are people buying in?

[Trippy]

Newbee (there was some debate on whether they would get invited, as they were stinking up the joint for most of the year)

Yeah they sucked at the DOTA 2 Asia Championships. They are the defending champs, though, so it sort of makes sense to bring them back.

[Fordel]

Prize pool is nearly $8 million, despite the fact that the second set of Immortal items aren't in game yet.  Should be a pretty good uptick when the tier 2 Immortals come out!

What does this mean? Are people buying in?

You buy this thing http://www.dota2.com/international/compendium/ and it gives you hats. The more money you dump into it, the more hats you get.

A chunk of the money is used for the internationals prize pool. Another chunk is used for Valve's swimming pool full of money. 

[Johny Cee]

Prize pool is nearly $8 million, despite the fact that the second set of Immortal items aren't in game yet.  Should be a pretty good uptick when the tier 2 Immortals come out!

What does this mean? Are people buying in?

You buy this thing http://www.dota2.com/international/compendium/ and it gives you hats. The more money you dump into it, the more hats you get.

A chunk of the money is used for the internationals prize pool. Another chunk is used for Valve's swimming pool full of money. 

Considering everything about actually playing Dota is free, you can just think about it as buying DLC/annual expansion/whatever.

Newbee (there was some debate on whether they would get invited, as they were stinking up the joint for most of the year)

Yeah they sucked at the DOTA 2 Asia Championships. They are the defending champs, though, so it sort of makes sense to bring them back.

From what I understand, they sucked most of the year, barely practiced, and were busy steaming some other game.

The Virtus Pro invite was kind of odd.  Alot of people had Rave as a direct invite over them. 

I have no clue what the NA scene is supposed to be, as besides EG the old names dissolved and the players have been shuffling around between all of these new teams I have no idea about...  I think Team Tinker had some hype early in the year, but no results?


Also, still no word on announcers/casters.  Fingers crossed they bring on the two Newbie Stream teams again because I really enjoyed those, though its pretty much guaranteed you will see Purge/Blitz/Pyrion/Shane in some role.

[Trippy]

EG did not look good against Secret at The Summit 3.