I’m really struggling with this one. This is something like attempt 4 at writing the review. Thinking about it, there’s a couple reasons why nothing seems to want to stick.
- We finished last. There’s nothing much of value to say, really. We sucked ass. Well, maybe “we” isn’t exactly right.
- There’s a couple angles I can approach it from. The first iteration started in the early weeks and got occasional updates. The second one wanted to be something more than a season review. The third was just very angry.
- I feel a pressure, purely of my own creation, to be grandiose in the writing of these. To be contemplative, and introspective, and say something that might be just a hint more interesting to read than the average season review. This stems, in large part, from doing exactly this with the last review I wrote, one in which I went out of my way to be dramatic, to talk about my feelings, to — in some measure — denigrate the value of the average season review. This wasn’t my intent, mind. It’s simply what it ended up doing to my own brain.
What, then, is this supposed to be, if none of the above?
All of it, I suppose. Sorry Steggo, I’ll handwrite the next one.
Why’d we suck? We weren’t outright supposed to. The roster had issues, sure, there’s no contesting that. They were plainly apparent to just about every and anyone, from day one. Drafting was always going to be a…process.
You have two good players, and in a setting where they have to be exactly that, game in and game out, you need them on their small pool of high comfort heroes, so they can flex the exact muscles that got them where they are. That’s a challenge. You’re pigeonholed into picking their heroes early, core heroes at that, early in drafts, and using valuable later picks, laden with significant amounts of information, to pick supports and carries for players who are not good enough to abuse that. Worse yet, it’s a carry-centric patch, wherein early core picks ought to comprise metagame relevant carries to contest them. But are you really going to trust the worst carry in the division with the first pick, when you could instead be picking what might be your mid or offlane players’ last remaining comfort hero? A challenge.
Surely, though, a challenge that doesn’t lead you straight to tied last place, right? Well, yeah, right. We just had other issues on top of that.
These, too, were wholly apparent to a day 1 spectator. Who the fuck is going to talk on this team? This is the point where I’ll pivot to talking about the draft. Well, more than I already have.
To keep it short, I came out of the draft knowing it wasn’t perfect, but being thoroughly convinced that it was about the best I could do, given what I had. What I had, admittedly, was the most coins, but I was also saddled with a bad carry for the division, which meant heavy emphasis on bringing in a good midlaner and offlaner, since competing with 2 bad cores just seems like you’re destined for failure. Hence, Bunny and Drunken.
I’m unsure whether I retain that exact conviction. In hindsight, perhaps I could’ve made some minor sacrifices in the tricore to pick up a higher impact support; someone who’s more comfortable talking, and making things happen.
That, really, is much of why our gameplay was outright bad, in a team sense. Even when we did manage to come out of the lanes with a lead or good position, we were consistently unable to convert, because we made very little actually happen on the map. Vocal players and experienced supports tend to be the catalyst to that.
Instead, much of what we did — or tried to do — was unnatural. It was forced, and it stemmed from, frankly, frustration that we were doing nothing. Doing nothing felt wrong, so someone would decide to do something, and we’d collectively (I assume) think or feel that it’s bad, but didn’t really have a better idea or call.
Ultimately, this is my bad. Not necessarily because I wasn’t vocal, because I wasn’t the one to make natural things happen. I mean, I wasn’t, but that’s not why it’s my bad. It’s my bad because the draft I put together had little hope of working in that regard, even if it looked okay on paper. Teams are more than the sum of its parts, so on, so forth.
Bunny is a good Dota player. I have no qualms with him. He is immensely talented, and has none of the baggage you’d associate normally with a mechanically talented young player. He doesn’t give up, neither on an individual game, nor on a season/team. He’ll see the writing on the wall, and nevertheless keep trying his best. And his best is, well, among the best. The only possible area you could expect better from bunny is being more vocal, being a leader and figurehead. But if bunny gets there, it won’t be us talking about him, it’ll be some awful panelist covering pro Dota for pocket change.
Drunken I simply had the wrong expectations for. I cast him in a role that isn’t ideal for him, so it’s immensely difficult to throw shade his way. He was unwittingly sat at the helm here, given the obligation of being effectively the main voice on the team. I think someone who’d played more inhouse would’ve probably realized that a better fit for him is that of a secondary or tertiary voice, one that has the leeway to sit on his little island, do what he’s specialized in, and then take over games when he gets to where he needs to be. This team asked him to do that much earlier.
Deniz is cute and funny. He’s always giggly, and jovial, and a bit aloof, in his own charming way. Being honest, though, I feel like I’ve listened to this aloofness spiral occasionally into a lot of pent up stress and pressure that I’m unconvinced Deniz is able to really untangle for himself in the moment. I think this pressure instead takes the shape of being very vocal, chirping up in response to things we say as a nerve-laden way of confirming that, hey, yeah, I’m alive, yeah what you said there is good (without having really taken a moment to process what it is that was said).
It’s sometimes not great for decision making, where Deniz becoming a +1 to an idea sort of leads the rest down a path of just shrugging and going along with whatever it is that’s supposedly about to happen, rather than taking a second to think about it. Remember our collective forcing of random shit?
On the other hand, his presence exclusively breaks up stretches of what would otherwise be uneasy silence from…well, everyone else, so it’s to his credit that the vibes weren’t always in the utter dumpster they probably belonged in.
Eisi…there’s a point in this season where I realized this was my third straight Clarity team with Eisi. Fifth, total. And my stomach kinda sunk. Because excepting that first season, an Ekken season, we’d never done great.
Eisi is tired of me. Our communication in lane is poor. He nigh snaps at me for inane comments or requests. He is quietly frustrated by my mistakes. He is unwilling to get into arguments. He gets me killed in lane.
I am tired of eisi. I lash out for next to no reason. I refuse to listen to his perspective, and don’t play around what he does, despite five seasons worth of information and experience. I go mute and set off on a trip to the hot tub at any suggestion of my game not being prioritized. I feed while he pulls, in spite of warning.
Eisi and me should see other people. Probably in a lower division. Great human though — which I do mean, lest this seem like the bottom slice of a shit sandwich.
This just leaves yours truly. I am left simultaneously with quite a lot to say, yet with also not very much.
The not very much is straightforward: I played bad. Turns out a couple dozen games of Dawnbreaker doesn’t exactly help you improve at carry against much better players. I am the exact same 5k carry player I was a year ago. To expect more is silly. The issue is I’m a silly fella.
In what is for me a shocking subversion of the norm, the “quite a lot” is also fairly simple: various drafts of this season review featured endless paragraphs about how long I’ve been playing these leagues, and what I’d learned and experienced, and what I’m still yet to learn and experience, and boundless cope about how this season was still fine a third of the way through. I’d talked about the current state of MMR and how representative it is or isn’t for our use case in Clarity, and what can be done about that. About why I feel the need to say and write certain things a certain way, and this and that and the third.
None of it really mattering much. That, at least, is the excuse I’m giving myself to stop thinking about this season review, and simply put something out, because I feel compelled to do so.
At the end of the day, all that remains is that draft #1 stopped at an adjusted, new goal for the season: finish above Snufshit, so I could win our bet, and, quote, “use his money to buy my dogshit team milkshakes”.
And I wasn’t even good enough for that.
Imagine?
